Collaboration and Education Group Anoop GuptaJonathan Grudin David BargeronSteven White Liwei HeYong Rui

Collaboration and Education Group Formed about 12 months ago Mission:  To explore novel technologies and applications that enhance collaboration and education / training  Current work focuses on streaming media Research model Evaluation: Laboratory and Field Studies Build Prototype Evaluation / Publication Refine Prototype Product Impact

Focus on Communication Effective access/use of information is key to a modern corporation (Digital Nervous System) Much of this communication can be considered presentations, formal or informal  slides and documents capture only a small part  low-cost capture and on-demand availability Relevant participants are often not collocated  must create sense of presence and awareness  provide interactivity across time and place

Three Issues that Frame Our Research There are too many presentations to attend  ability to time-compress talks  ability to summarize talks  indexes for quick search/access Knowledge-creation does not end when the talk ends  facilitating “in-context” asynchronous discussion Talks redesigned for online and asynchronous access  social implications  changes in organization and presentation of talks Production Cost End-User Value Time

Ongoing Projects MSTE and MURL: Online Seminars Time Compression and Skimming MRAS: Multimedia Annotations Flatland: Telepresentation System

MSTE Online Presentations Logs of ~10K sessions involving over 2K users Some results:  On-demand audience about 40% of live audience  60% < 5 minutes  Viewers jump around video  Initial portions much more likely to be watched Presentations will be designed differently in future  Present key messages early in talk  Present key messages early in slide  Use meaningful slide titles  Reveal talk structure in slide titles  Consider post-processing talk for on-line viewers

Analysis of Online Presentation Viewing Logs of ~10K sessions involving over 2K users Some results:  On-demand audience about 40% of live audience  60% < 5 minutes  Viewers jump around video  Initial portions much more likely to be watched Presentations will be designed differently in future  Present key messages early in talk  Present key messages early in slide  Use meaningful slide titles  Reveal talk structure in slide titles  Consider post-processing talk for on-line viewers

Time Compression: Synchronized Audio and Video To preserve pitch: throw away portion of each 100ms chunk, then stitch together Basic signal processing well known, but several systems issues Results of lab studies:  People choose ~1.4 speed, don’t adjust much  They like it  “I think it will become a necessity… Once people have experienced it they will never want to go back. Makes viewing long videos much, much easier.”  Comprehension may go up

Skimming: Compression Goes Nonlinear To beat 2x speedup, must throw away content Sources of information  audio: pauses, intonation, speech-to-text and NLP  video: scene changes  other: slide-changes, previous viewers’ patterns Lab studies of 4x-5x speedup  Viewers learn from automatic summaries  Viewers like and learn more when author-edited Mixed-initiative summarization is promising

Ongoing Projects MSTE and MURL: Online Seminars Time Compression and Skimming MRAS: Multimedia Annotations Flatland: Telepresentation System

Initial Lab Studies of Annotated Video Personal note-taking (MRAS vs. Paper)  ~1 note / minute in each condition  positioning: none in paper; ~10-15s later in MRAS  all subjects preferred MRAS (although more time), and thought more useful for future reference Shared notes study  text preferred to audio  14/18 stated more participation than in “live” class  auto-tracking particularly useful

Annotation: Field Studies & Future Work MSTE class to use MRAS and recorded lectures  Can we emulate live-classroom discussion in an asynchronous environment using MRAS?  Will people interact/learn more using MRAS rather than in “live” classroom environments?  How can we stimulate discussion / community formation in asynchronous environments? MS Usability Engineers: “highlights tapes”  Video is now organized by annotations  distribution, playlists become key features  Possible wider use in development Unified annotation platform architecture  storage, naming, sharing, user interface

Flatland Telepresentation System Joint project with the Virtual Worlds Group  Flexible architecture for rapidly prototyping distributed collaborative applications

Flatland

Flatland Telepresentation System Joint project with the Virtual Worlds Group  Flexible architecture for rapidly prototyping distributed collaborative applications Initial use in 3 multi-session MSTE classes  Presentations from desktop to remote audience Students:  Liked the convenience  Liked ability to multitask  Did not think learning suffered Instructors:  Missed familiar sources of feedback  Comfort level rose over time for 2 of 3 Overall: Lack of awareness of others a key problem

Telepresence: Issues Being Explored Can capture and replay telepresentations:  Opportunity to integrate compression, annotation Examining mixed live/remote audience designs Enhancing sense of presence and awareness  Merging real-time and asynchronous information