Considerate Audio MEdiating Oracle (CAMEO): Improving teleconference calls

Ted Selker and Rahul Rajan
CMU West

This talk will show that variance in conversational dominance can significantly be reduced with proactive aural feedback. Our experiments further reveal that such feedback can also reduce the impact of extraneous noise on conversations. The talk will start by framing the considerate system stance of social feedback to a user. Can feedforward and feedback social communication reduce human system communication problems? Dozens of evocative examples bring us to begin challenge this notion in a challenging domain. We experiment to see if further loading the narrow channel of human teleconference can improve it. CAMEO is a behavior-driven design approach to address commonly occurring technical and social problems in audio-only teleconference calls. Many of the problems are associated with the missing visual channel and the low bandwidth for non-verbal signals. CAMEO seeks to sense communication problems, and frame and respond to them in considerate ways. These include scheduling of advisory prompts, and assistive mechanisms to augment this bandwidth constrained medium. This work describes using a blackboard architecture that shapes and define advisory behavior.

Slides:

There is no downloadable version of the slides for this talk available at this time.

About the speakers:

Ted Selker

Dr Ted Selker is director of Considerate systems research at Carnegie Mellon Silicon Valley where he has also been developing the campus’s research community. He is well known as a creator and tester of new scenarios for working with computing systems. Ted spent ten years as an associate Professor at the MIT Media Laboratory where he created the Context Aware Computing group, co-directed the Caltech/MIT Voting Technology Project, and directed a CI/IDI: kitchen of the future/ product design of the future project. His work is noted for creating demonstrations of a more considerate world in which intentions are recognized and respected in complex domains, such as kitchens, cars, on phones and in email. Ted’s work takes the form of prototyping concept products supported by cognitive science research. His successes at targeted product creation and enhancement earned him the role of IBM Fellow and director of User Systems Ergonomics Research. He has also served as a consulting professor at Stanford University, taught at Hampshire, University of Massachusetts at Amherst and Brown Universities and worked at Xerox PARC and Atari Research Labs. Ted's innovation has been responsible for profitable and award winning products ranging from notebook computers to operating systems. For example, his design of the TrackPoint in-keyboard pointing device is used in many notebook computers; his visualizations have made impacts ranging from improving the performance of the PowerPC to usability OS/2 ThinkPad setup to Google maps, his adaptive help system has been the basis of products as well. Ted's work has resulted in numerous awards, patents, and papers and has often been featured in the press. Ted was co-recipient of the Computer Science Policy Leader Award for Scientific American 50 in 2004, the American Association for People with Disabilities Thomas Paine Award for his work on voting technology in 2006 and the Telluride Tech fest award in 2008.

Rahul Ranjan

Rahul Rajan is a 3rd year ECE PhD student at CMU being advised by Dr. Ted Selker. His research interests include conversational user interfaces, and socially intelligent systems. Prior to joining CMU, Rahul worked for a year as a Power Amplifier Design Engineer at RFMD. He has a BS/MS in ECE from Georgia Tech.

Contact information:

Ted Selker, Rahul Rajan
CMU West