Christine Perey and Herve Boulard, Director of IDIAP .AMI is a EU project focused on technologies for collaboration. Christine Perey, invited me to their workshop on the future of meetings in Martigny, Switzerland. AMI’s community of interest members include major players such as Adobe, Cisco, Hewlett Packard, IBM ,Intel, Nokia, Polycom ,Radvision, Tandberg and smaller innovative companies. I liked the following demos :
Summarizing videos
Andrei Popescu from IDIAP demonstrated a system that displays Google-like lists of documents with indication of relevance to the current meeting discussion. They deduct keywords using speech recognition. For example minutes.pdf will be highlighted when minutes of the previous meeting are being discussed. Even a tag and document cloud during a video / audio conference seems a nice to have add-on.
Publish your meeting comic strip
Tilman Becker from DFKI generates a comic book out of your video conference displaying images of participants and bubbles with key utterances extracted. The result is cool, it generates an additional motivation for e-meetings such as brainstorming or product design .
Summarize your conferences
A presenter from University of Edinburgh demonstrated automatic summarises produced using prosodic / linguistic / structural information. Great for annotation or indexing a conference archive. Another team at UoE is working on standardization of conferencing meta-data, working with W3C multimodal browser group.
AMI’s software is open
Jferret SDK is available from IDIAP. It’s a portable Windows /Linux and extensible. One of the programmers told me it requires 2 weeks of to integrate with other 3rd party developments. All AMI components have been integrated in this SDK so you can plug-play or extend as needed.
