Perceptual collaboration in Neem

Abstract

The Neem Platform is a research test bed for Project Neem, concerned with the development of socially and culturally aware collaborative systems in a wide range of domains. In this paper we discuss a novel use of perceptual interfaces, applied to group collaboration support. In Neem, the multimodal content of human to human interaction is analyzed and reasoned upon. Applications react to this implicit communication by dynamically adapting their behavior according to the perceived group context. In contrast, perceptual interfaces have been traditionally, employed to handle explicit (multimodal) commands from users, and are as a rule not concerned with the communication that takes place among humans. The Neem Platform is a generic (application neutral) component-based evolvable framework that provides functionality that facilitates building such perceptual collaborative applications.