The Centre for Speech Technology Research, The university of Edinburgh

M4: Multimodal Meeting Manager

Project Summary

M4 was concerned with the construction of a demonstration system to enable structuring, browsing and querying of an archive of automatically analysed meetings.

Project Details

The M4 project was concerned with the construction of a demonstration system to enable structuring, browsing and querying of an archive of automatically analysed meetings. The archived meetings take place in a room equipped with multimodal sensors, specifically microphones and cameras.

The objectives of the project may be illustrated by a proposed meeting browser. Consider a meeting (of 4 or 5 people), following an agenda. Offline, the meeting is segmented into agenda items. The browser follows the structure of the agenda. Clicking on an agenda item brings up a set of ways to view that topic. These might include: a textual summary; a diagrammatic discussion flow indicating which participants were involved; a set of audio or video key frames to give the essence of the discussion. It would also be possible to query the rest of the archive either by example from that segment, or through an explicit query.

At CSTR we are mainly interested in developing methods to automatically structure meetings. In particular, we have developed multisream dynamic Bayesian network models to automatically segment meetings in terms of group actions (such as monologue, discussion, etc.), using audio and visual features.

Project homepage: http://spandh.dcs.shef.ac.uk/projects/m4/index.html

Personnel

Funding Source

EU IST programme (Framework V) IST-2001-34485