Considerate Audio MEdiating Oracle (CAMEO): Improving teleconference calls

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.

Speaker: Ted Selker & Rahul Rajan, CMU West