Interaction Mirrors for Face-to-Face Meetings

Flaviu Roman
EPFL, 2013
EPFL thesis

Abstract

To be successful, a group requires an appropriate quality of coordination among its members. Even with the advent of remote communication, face-to-face meetings remain the context that offers the best interaction support to an effective collaboration. However, face-to-face meetings seem to suffer from recurring shortcomings which are yet to be alleviated. One of them is the omniscience and persistence of undetected gaps between the actual and the desired (or intended) state of the meeting. The evolution of technology has spawned the creation and availability of large sets of data, giving birth to what we call today analytics, the science of discovery and communication of meaningful patterns in this data. This thesis aims to explore the potential of technology to process meeting-related data and help reveal these gaps to the participants. We also conduct an analysis of the actions that the participants perform, as an effect of becoming aware of such gaps, and we reflect on their possible role in increasing the effectiveness of the meeting. Our technologies collect interaction data in real-time during face-to-face meetings, perform analytics to transform this raw data into explicit representations, and then use visualizations to communicate knowledge about the interaction back to the participants. This thesis expands the concept of Group Mirrors, to define the concept of Interaction Mirrors, which are tools that perform this instant transformation of meeting data into explicit repre- sentations, and return this knowledge back to the group during the meeting. We present the implementation of three types of Interaction Mirrors that tackle aspects of interaction related to Participation, Time management, and Mutual Knowledge. They vary with respect to data collection, being either implicit (continuous) or explicit (discrete), and to their presentation to the group (continuous or discrete). We perform a total of 7 experiments, ranging from basic usability observations, to year-long, longitudinal studies. Conducted in real-world situations, most of these studies are set up in the field, in various organizations, corporations and institutions. We show that each type of interaction mirror has an influence on the group, and discuss the capacity of this influence to improve the outcomes of the collaboration.

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https://infoscience.epfl.ch/record/190703?ln=en

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Flaviu Roman
EPFL, 2013
EPFL thesis

Abstract

Official source

https://infoscience.epfl.ch/record/190703?ln=en

About this result

Related concepts (15)

Related concepts

Related publications (7)

Related publications

Latent Social Information in Group Interactions with a Shared Workspace

Himanshu Verma

Shared artifacts, such as drawings and schemas on whiteboards, sticky-notes with ideas on walls, are often created and interacted with during meetings. These shared artifacts a) facilitate the expression of complex fleeting ideas, b) enable collaborators to establish a common ground and validate each othersâ understanding about the context, and c) extend the validity of shared information by making it permanent. By the end of a collaboration session, the shared content denotes the shared knowledge amongst collaborators, which emerged as a result of a recursive process of storage, transformation, and retrieval from an external memory such as a whiteboard. Although these interactions with the artifacts symbolize the important episodes in a group discussion, still the information contained within them has not been much leveraged in collaboration research. Being well assimilated in the established work culture, collaborators do not heed the interactions with the shared artifacts, and therefore the nature of the social information contained within them is latent. However, from a research perspective this information is valuable and can offer insights into a few facets of ongoing group dynamics and processes. This thesis in particular a) identifies and examines the characteristics of the latent social information, b) studies the relationship of this information with different aspects of collaboration, and c) explores the practical utility of this information in collaboration assessment. We start by designing a meeting technology - MeetHub that enables collaborators to share and interact with artifacts in an unconstrained manner over a shared workspace, and allow us to collect fine-grained interactional information. Then we present user studies, where we extract and comprehend the relevant social information from interactions with the artifacts, and analyze its relationship with collaborative processes. Our findings demonstrate that latent social information is significantly correlated with the task outcome, division-of-labor, and the quality of mutual understanding between collaborators. Finally, we present a prediction system based on this social information, capable of alerting the group members about the poorly grounded episodes in real-time, and thus enabling them to regulate their collaborative behavior. The final contribution of this work presents itself as implications towards the dual nature of shared workspace, supporting the creation and sharing of artifacts as well as an assessment tool.

EPFL2015

Economic growth is increasingly explained and driven by knowledge acquisition and firmsâ capabilities to adapt to new evolving situations to fit economic, societal and environmental frames. Strategic behavior of private companies in differentiating and promoting their products and services is crucial for their competitiveness. In parallel, public research performed at different territorial levels and by a high diversity of actors is a strategic source of key assets adding value to the firms. External actors operate in a non-linear structure allowing frequent feedback and interactive loops in order to optimise the replies to substantial problems and constantly valorise their resources. These features are explored in the thesis through different projects. This dissertation is motivated by international negotiations in the frame of the GATT agreements and bilaterally between the European Union and Switzerland that are going towards the breakdown of borders, threatening the competitiveness of the Swiss agriculture. Negative externalities will affect small firms composing this agricultural network. Thus, the dissertation is focusing on innovation as a strategic asset to maintain the competitiveness and differentiate the domestic agricultural products. The first research project concentrates on interactions occurring in the Swiss apricot network. We investigate the types of interactions producing innovations that come from different sources that are internal or external to the agricultural production supply chain. We use network theory to model the structure of the domain and understand what is inherent to innovation production thanks to collaborations through an empirical work. In the second research project, we examine whether there is a connection between the issues faced by small companies producing food and the innovative solutions and knowledge generated by research institutions. The importance of solutions to daily activities conducted by companies depends on the nature of the sector. Thus, research projects providing outputs like publications might not specifically target these issues. Moreover, access, awareness and affordability of innovations can be hindering factors for small firms composing a low-technology intensive sector. Gaps of knowledge transfer, innovation and implementation are identified in this setting. In the last research project, we address market failures hampering economic and strategic management decisions encountered in the agricultural sector. We empirically construct two case studies highlighting the necessity of intellectual appropriation mechanisms. We explore the use of patents and regional trademark to add value to the emblematic product of a small region. Organisational and marketing innovations have to be supported and diffused by key stakeholders, aiming a good communication based on criteria that take into account diverse interests of those stakeholders; consumers have to be involved in the innovation process. Furthermore, knowledge transfer, innovation generation, diffusion and implementation rely upon the will of stakeholders to take part in an efficient process of interactions and communication in order to produce and perform useful products and services. Practical implications are levered in the projects presented. Finally, digital technologies are efficient for information exchange and can decrease time and transaction costs. These technologies are explored as part of the solution to small firmsâ

EPFL2019

Learning handwriting is one of the main occupations for children in primary education. It is a complex skill that has been associated with children’s learning and development. Poor handwriting skills affect children negatively concerning their academic performance and motivation. In schools, children with handwriting problems need extra support and one-to-one interventions from teachers. Personalised one-to-one support requires additional resources that most schools generally cannot afford. Therefore, there is a need to explore different methods of learning and contemporary technologies to develop new educational tools to foster children’s learning process of handwriting. The research presented in this thesis addresses the question of - “How to create a social robot that can help children to acquire handwriting skills?". Thus, we looked into three different research domains: education; pedagogic sciences; and social human-robot interaction (HRI). On the one hand, we investigated the types of errors commonly present in children’s handwriting. On the other hand, we needed to explore different educational theories to find alternate learning methods that would maximise children’s learning gains. In addition, we investigated various possibilities for integrating a social robot into educational scenarios and measured its impact on the children’s learning process. This thesis presents five studies that follow an incremental evolution of the research. The first three studies were based on the interaction between two children, in the presence of either a human or a robotic facilitator, with the children performing a collaborative writing activity. We explored the ‘peer-learning’ and ‘peer-tutoring’ methods and compared the differences in terms of interaction behaviour and learning gains. Further, we analysed children’s interpersonal distance and feelings of responsibility towards their peers, both in the presence of a robot and human facilitator. Finally, we examined children’s assessment behaviour towards their peers and self-disclosure towards the robotic facilitator. The outcomes of these first studies provided enough data to generate a taxonomy of children handwriting errors to be used in the subsequent studies. They hinted that the ‘peer-tutoring’ method had a positive influence on children’s learning and corrective feedback to their peers in the presence of the social robot, providing positive support to the applicability of social robots as ‘facilitators’ in handwriting learning. The next step was to study the effects of the robot in the peer-tutoring scenario when assuming the role of a peer, directly interacting and performing a collaborative writing activity with the children. Thus, we developed an educational system with an autonomous social behaviour of a robot exhibiting various levels of learning competencies. The tutor-child provides corrective feedback on the writing of the learner-robot and in turn, enhances his writing skills. The robot’s writing was generated by an algorithm incorporating human-inspired movements and could reproduce a set of writing errors from the error taxonomy. We tested the system by conducting two longitudinal studies, each of them composed of four sessions. In the fourth study, we assigned the robot two contrasting competencies: ‘learning’ and ‘non-learning’. We measured the differences in children’s learning gains and changes in their perceptions towards the learner-robot. The fifth study followed a similar interaction scenario and research questions, but this time the robot performed three learning competencies: ‘continuous-learning’;’non-learning’ and ‘personalised-learning’. The findings of these studies show that the children improved more with the robot exhibiting learning, continuous-learning and personalised-learning competencies compared to the robot showing non-learning competency. The way children’s learning and perception of the robot evolved over time confirmed the need for multiple sessions for the last two studies. This thesis presents some evidence that social robots can be successfully used as tools for enhancing children’s handwriting skills in peer-learning scenarios.

EPFL2019

Latent Social Information in Group Interactions with a Shared Workspace

Himanshu Verma

EPFL2015

EPFL2019