Enriched Cyberspace Through Adaptive Multimedia Utilization for Dependable Remote Collaboration

Due to the geographical distribution, different cognitive capacity, and different domain competency of workers or learners, many misunderstandings can occur during distributed remote collaboration, leading to inefficient discussions and undesired results. To make remote collaboration more efficient and dependable, enriching cyberspace through adaptively utilizing multimedia information is proposed and evaluated. This assesses situations of remote users through information fusion of multiple biomedical sensors and the related contexts such as user profiles. Transmitting and using such information, the system adaptively supports the distributed remote collaboration by stressing, warning, and presenting keywords/summaries in multimedia. Effects of presenting keywords/summaries adaptively depending on situations and cognitive profiles of remote members are evaluated as to the decrease of not-/misunderstanding possibilities during the explanation on the Cyberspace. The evaluation demonstrates the feasibility and usefulness of the proposed method.

I. Introduction

In recent globalizing societies, remote collaboration such as distributed development or distance learning has become popular. Despite its many benefits, there is a lack of tools that could adaptively support effective interaction among users to make such collaboration a success. in remote collaboration, misunderstandings can occur during interaction due to different user backgrounds, different competency levels and different personal agendas as well as their existence in unreliable remote communication sites.