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In this paper, an influence model is used to recognize functional roles played during meetings. Previous works on the same corpus demonstrated a high recognition accuracy using SVMs with RBF kernels. In this paper, we discuss the problems of that approach, mainly over-fitting, the curse of dimensionality and the inability to generalize to different group configurations. We present results obtained with an influence modeling method that avoid these problems and ensures both greater robustness and generalization capability.

In this paper we present an annotated audio-video corpus of multi-party meetings. The multimodal corpus provides for each subject involved in the experimental sessions six annotation dimensions referring to group dynamics; speech activity and body activity. The corpus is based on 11 audio and video recorded sessions which took place in a lab setting appropriately equipped with cameras and microphones. Our main concern in collecting this multimodal corpus was to explore the possibility of providing feedback services to facilitate group processes and to enhance self awareness among small groups engaged in meetings. We therefore introduce a coding scheme for annotating relevant functional roles that appear in a small group interaction. We also discuss the reliability of the coding scheme and we present the first results for automatic classification.

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In this paper, we describe the first prototype of a system called StoryTable, aimed at supporting a group of children in the activity of storytelling. The system is based on a special multiuser touchable device (the MERL DiamondTouch) and it was designed with the purpose of enforcing collaboration between children. The paper discusses how the main design choices were influenced by the paradigm of cooperative learning and presents two observational studies to assess the effects of the different design choices on the storytelling activity.