Smart Meeting Manager Proposal

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Modified: Tue, 13 May 2008 07:15 by admin - Categorized as: COMP8100

» Smart Meeting Manager Proposal

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Introduction

Arranging meetings for several busy people to attend is often made difficult by a general lack of knowledge of time availability and location whereabouts. To setup meetings without having first ascertained a good deal of detail of what each individual is doing over any given time period within which a meeting needs to occur, is time consuming and at times very frustrating. when people, who have already agreed to a meeting time and place, have to answer to some other priority, the effort to re-arrange another meeting time and place can be very difficult.

The Smart Meeting Manager concept is intended to be the answer to most current problems with arranging meetings for busy people. Other intents include, the saving of time and human resources through effective communication of meeting and other related information

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Background

Basics: Intelligent application in limited universe of information and real world entities (people, meeting rooms, multiple users, identity, user preferences, privacy an location)

Meeting manager applications have been done many times before, but the character of this meeting manager is deliberately conceived to integrate smart user interfaces, human interaction through dialogues, and awareness of the physical and activity context.

Concept in Brief: A large number of people each of whom has a personal, mobile computing device (such as PDA) through which they can maintain and access a personal schedule of activities and meetings. Meetings involve several people, at particular times and places. The combined set of personal meetings managers can negotiate times and places for meetings of a target list of participants.

Negotiating the times and locations for future meetings is done behind the scenes (from the users' viewpoint) by the meeting managers, using known personal preferences of the participants and minimal work by the people themselves. Individual meeting manager provide their user with a reminder service that is aware of the user's current location, current and scheduled activities, and normal (learned) travel times to meeting room locations.

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Natural Language Interface and Dialogue Control

We have (say) a PDA used as a mobile device, with multi-modal interface (voice input and output, keyboard, stylus, graphic and character display, audio and visual attention signals). Dialogue examples with the meeting manager include:

"What's my next meeting today?" (At the locomotive Workshop with Alan, in one and a half hours)

"Where am I first thing on Thursday?"(Sydney; Science Theatre 3; Madsen G92; CSIRO Marsfield; flying Melbourne to Adelaide... are different levels of precision in the answer)

"Make me a meeting with Alice Black and Joe Blurfle early next week, it's very high priority, on financing the Werblefleet project" (OK, but that will clash with your CEO's breakfast and meditation ceremony at Pinchgut].

"Cancel my 4 o'clock lecture" (Do you mean your 3 o'clock today or your 4.30 tomorrow?)

"Show me my schedule for next week" (Show graphic display)

Stylus/Select Tuesday/(Show Tuesday in detail)

"Make that meeting with Annette half an hour longer" (OK - (Adds time to the Tuesday meeting, from the immediate dialogue context)

Graphical controls are also necessary for visual thinkers and planning of days and weeks at a glance.

The domain of discourse is meetings and other scheduled activities, places, their locations; the context is within the dialogue between the meeting manager and the user.

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Management of the Actual Meetings - The Elementary Things

The mode of interaction with the device changes because a meeting is in progress, according to default and personalised preferences (voice input and output are not used, primary context for retrieving and manipulating documents is the document set of the meeting); the physical context is the physical location of the user, compared to the meeting location, and the activity context; whether a meeting is in progress or not (much more difficult would be to detect phases of the meeting, such as in getting started phase or winding up into a set of smaller group conversation).

Overview of Required Capabilities The Smart Meeting Manager (SMM) is to be created as a software application that enable users to:

Request meetings, including the provision of -meeting deadline, topic, priority and meeting extent (how long), who should attend (optional), and suggested locations;
Set preferences for meeting times or times when meetings should not be set;
Set conditions for meeting times over and above that of mere availability (e.g. a meeting should not be set at short notice if out of office, or should give at least 2 weeks notice for all meetings etc.)
Set meeting reminder preferences (e.g. frequency of reminder (daily, hourly etc.), mode(s) used for reminder (e-mail, voice telephone, SMS message, fax), conditions of activating reminder (within 24 hours), acknowledgement of reminders (automatic, manual)
Associate documents with a meeting both before and after the meeting has occurred (e.g. agenda, special reports, minutes of meeting etc.)
(Automatically) inform SMM of potential absence from meeting appointment through knowledge of other meetings and activities

The SMM software must be able to automatically and intelligently:

Determine potential meeting times and locations based on users' policies, availability, meeting deadline and extent, priority and other potential conditions or contexts (e.g. will be away from office, will be close to suggested meeting location on particular time when no meetings are yet booked, etc.)
Make appointments based on optimal and learned criteria about individuals and groups
Inform users of appointment times via contextually determined connections appropriate for ensuring information is received
Maintain a history of all meetings (start and end time, location, who attended, absentees, apologies, priority, documents etc.)
Set and link regular meetings
Reschedule meeting (e.g. when key invitees change their plans, or when a quorum is not possible etc.)
The SMM software is to be used in context with available communications technologies such as the internet, (mobile) # telephone etc. to achieve meeting participation in "virtual" and "roaming" locations and be able to switch between physical and virtual, virtual and virtual, and virtual and roaming location contexts seamlessly;
Use capabilities of current communications technologies to help identify meeting presence of any/all attendees.
The interface of any device to be used for SMM must be intelligent and as simple as possible. Deep menu selections or the inability to quickly identify options have to minimised in order to gain good market appeal. The SMM ultimately must be the meeting system of choice, which means it has to be effective, reliable and of value to those who use it. Incorporation of voice commands should be considered.

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Some Expectations

The SMM software should be able to run on all popular computer platforms/devices including PDAs. It is acceptable for functionality to be limited by the characteristics of the platform, but some core features must be available on all platforms used. The lowest level functionality will allow a user to simply read their meeting schedules in textual format, for the current day. The highest level of functionality will allow users to:

Set preferred meeting times in general (there may be a default of NO times available for meeting or ALL times available for meetings)
Set preferences for meeting times when meetings should not be set
Set conditions for meeting times over and above that of mere availability (e.g. a meeting should not be set at short notice if out of office, or should give at least 2 weeks notice for all meetings etc.)
Set meeting reminder preferences, mode(s) used for reminder, conditions of activating reminders, acknowledgement of reminders (automatic, manual)
Insert rules for automatic notification to other meeting attendees when running late to meetings
Input suggested meeting times, durations, locations, topic, meeting deadlines and (optionally) who should perhaps attend. # # The SMM will automatically determine the possibility of suggested meetings being able to occur based on the knowledge it possesses about all attendees' preferences and current meeting schedule. The SMM must generate feasible alternatives when necessary.
Directly input a brief agenda or associate document an other documents to a suggested or confirmed meeting.
Indicate agreement to attend meetings confirmed as feasible by SMM.
Acknowledge notifications of meetings once all attendees agree on time, place etc.
Select daily, weekly, monthly or yearly view of all meetings (both suggested and confirmed).
Turn on/off SMM intelligence. ''SMM is to have the ability to collect information on patterns of use, who attends what type of meetings, regular meetings etc. and then to make suggestions to users who then have the opportunity to accept or reject the suggestion(s).