The Future of Business Meetings: Applications for AMI Technologies

by Christine Perey, AMI technology transfer specialist

Christine is also a speaker at the Club of Amsterdam event about the future of Business Meetings, October 5, 2006


People, processes and technologies we use in business meetings are continuously changing in order to increase efficiency in the workplace, or enhance meeting productivity. How can the addition of more technology help more than it hurts? The goal of this article is to take what is currently known about meetings and to overlay a vision of the future, to see how the addition of new technologies based on advanced signal processing and information analysis can have a positive impact on meetings.

The reader will also learn about the AMI Project and explore how moving beyond the analysis of simple verbal communications - adding non-verbal communications - can reveal deeper trends and patterns. Applications using AMI technology could give people the ability:

• to prepare better for upcoming meetings,
• to review parts of meetings in progress or past meetings missed,
• to analyze behaviors and positions taken by individuals or groups, and
• to attend multiple meetings without missing critical elements in either.

At a management level, having technologies, which analyze verbal and non-verbal content and communications, could be integrated with other enterprise managements systems to:

• be the basis of meeting behavior/methods training programs, even permitting self-analysis by participants,
• improve team construction based on team members' past meeting behaviors,
• reduce risk of disclosures and delays caused by underlying conflicts, and
• recommend strategies for human resource utilization across multiple projects and teams.

The Augmented Multimodal Interaction Project

The AMI Project, an EU-funded research project involving dozens of scientists across a fifteen-member consortium, focuses meetings in order to develop intelligent software algorithms and systems. The algorithms and related technologies under development can become core building blocks on which products and services may emerge for use by people in and between meetings.

Scientists in the AMI Project bring expertise from many disciplines. They include world-renowned experts in the fields of speech processing, video/vision processing and human-computer interfaces, as well as sociology, psychology and linguistics. The focus of their research is on the human-human communication, which occurs between people during product design meetings. The design of the research should permit expansion of the scope to include many more types of meetings and team processes.

Statistical machine learning is used by the AMI Project in the context of improving our understanding of business meetings. Machine learning will produce ...

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