PureVATS

A video Link
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GsFZRglkE50

Vichar Sabha

A Thought capturing Meeting platform

Arun Kumar Jindal	Prachi Jain	Srishti Gupta	Tarun Kumar Bansal	Vidushi Chaudhry
IIIT Delhi, India

Concept

In the globalization age the Style and Scale of meetings/discussions (Personal/Professional/Formal/Informal) has changed with time. Even the medium of such meetings/discussions has changed from real interaction to virtual interaction mainly due to globalization and pervasive computing. Often these meeting/discussions are time consuming and inconclusive mainly due to communication gaps. It is important to facilitate effective conductance of meeting and make efficient utilization of human resources, more importantly time. Conventionally people appoint facilitators, vibe keepers to ensure effective conductance of meetings. We propose “Minutes of Minutes/Discussions” to manage and facilitate meeting properly by tapping thoughts of the people participating in the meeting/discussion. Moreover it will log the sentiments and thoughts followed by appropriate classification (classification of thoughts is necessary since any human beings receives 60000 thoughts roughly per day) of thoughts during the whole event. It allows people to collaborate on a task even being at different places. Cellphone/tablet are small portable devices which everyone carry on the go.

The literature says effective facilitation of meetings/discussions requires setting ground rules, assign roles, ensure participant satisfaction, know how to end, summarize and debrief[1]. We try to ensure that these issues are taken care of by the proposed solution. We try to handle some of the problems faced during meeting like domination, poor listening, lack of focus, repetition, poor follow thoughts, recurrent difficulty in making decision and group rut[2].

IDEA

Mr X has it all. He is the facilitator, vibe keeper in short helps in effectively conducting the meeting. Mr X will display thoughts of all the participants on various topics of discussion anonymously. Hence help an introvert to express his views to all. He also ensures to display topics relevant to the meeting. All users’ thoughts are also logged and shown individually to each user to help them recall what was decided. All logged thoughts can be used to generate an effective summary in the end and can also be used to generate a genuine feedback.

We assume that the mobile device has power to capture thoughts of a person. During a meeting/discussion a participant has mobile phone and all his thoughts are captured and selectively sent to the cloud. Mr X uses a filter to ensure that the thoughts are in accordance with the topic of discussion and collate thoughts of all participants and classify them to different topics and displays it on Mr X.

RESPONSE

We choose three subjects who intensely involve in meetings, for our study. Subject 1 was a professor at IIIT Delhi, India. Subject 2 was a PhD student at IIIT Delhi, India and Subject 3 was a student representative at IIIT Delhi, India.

Each subject had his own vision of the problem.

Subject 1 said poor recall sometimes hinders the meeting, while Subject 2 and subject 3 concerned of shyness of participants. On showing them this solution they were harry and excited to use it.

Subject 1: We talked to Dr Ashish Sureka from IIIT-Delhi and asked for his feedback regarding Vichaar Sabha. The novel idea was highly appreciated by the Dr. Ashish along with the challenges of implementing the system.

Subject 2: Thereafter we requested Ms. Ayushi Rastogi [Phd Scholar, IIIT-Delhi] and Jyoti Leekha [Phd Scholar, IIIT-Delhi] for their feedback on Vichaar Sabha. They suggested to tap the thoughts at the moment when any of the participant speaks. Reason being that since there are numerous thoughts in a human brain so to make the dataset less noisy we should select suitable time span in which the thoughts should be captured.

Subject 3: In the end we requested the student representative, Piyush Yadav [IIIT-Delhi] to provide his inputs. He suggested that such type of systems can also be used to drive a car via thought controlled steering. Such type of systems can also be called Brain Controlled Computing System or Thought Controlled Computing System.

Link For Video

http://youtu.be/GsFZRglkE50

[1] http://www.ontariodirectors.ca/CODE_Advisories/Downloads/CODE%20Advisory%20No%208%20WEB.pdf

[2] http://www.vernalproject.org/papers/process/GettingUnstuck.pdf