Communication facilitators for a distributed collaborative engineering environment
Availability of professionals and communication of corporate expertise are among the key competitive factors in a modern corporation. However, due to the growing size and geographic dispersion of corporations, making optimal use of their human resources and expertise is becoming increasingly difficult. Since a significant portion of an employee's time is spent in meetings or conferences to coordinate group efforts, conference management is a critical component of a collaborative engineering effort. This thesis describes, CAIRO (Collaborative Agent Interaction control and synchROnization system), a system for managing participants in a distributed conference. We have drawn from various models of group interaction and social communications theory in order to develop CAIRO. While most conference systems have focused on the technical issues of communicating information between computers, we have also emphasized the role of the computer as a mediator and conference control mechanism. CAIRO provides both media synchronization, i.e. insuring that all information conveyed from one participant to another is synchronized, and agent synchronization, i.e. insuring effective structuring and control of a conference.