Creative Meeting Support

Abstract

A face-to-face meeting is one of the basic social activities; it is necessary to analyze it in order to understand human social interaction in detail. This research is a scientific analysis of human social interactions. We are researching a mechanism to promote innovation by supporting discussions based on the premise that innovations result from discussions. Ideas are created and developed during conversations in creative meetings like those in brainstorming. Ideas are also refined in the process of repeated discussions. In our previous research of discussion mining, we specifically collected various data on meetings (statements and their relationships, presentation materials such as slides, audio, and video, and participants’ evaluations of statements). We developed a method to automatically extract important statements to be considered after the meetings by using the collected data. Actions such as investigations and implementations are performed in relation to these statements. Here, we present an idea that automatically extracted statements leading to innovations facilitate creative activities after meetings. Our research was aimed at deeply analyzing face-to-face meetings and supporting human creative activities by appropriately feeding back knowledge discovered in the meetings. We particularly analyzed the features of statements made during discussions. We developed a system called a “meeting recorder” for that purpose. The meeting recorder consists of a 360° panoramic video camera that records meetings in audio–visual scenes, a tablet application that allows users to browse meeting materials and add various notes to them with a stylus, speech recognition that identifies speakers and transcribes speech contents of all meeting participants, and a minute server that integrates all meeting-related information and creates the meeting minutes. We also developed a system that supports the activities after meetings called the “creative activity support system.” This system supports users in quoting statements extracted from the minutes, in writing notes and reports, in creating activity plans, in managing schedules to accomplish tasks, and in evaluating other members’ results within the group.