Constructing a good conference schedule for a large multi-track conference needs to take into account the preferences and constraints of organizers, authors, and attendees. Creating a schedule which has fewer conflicts for authors and attendees, and thematically coherent sessions is a challenging task. Cobi introduced an alternative approach to conference scheduling by engaging the community to play an active role in the planning process. The current Cobi pipeline consists of committee-sourcing and author-sourcing to plan a conference schedule. We further explore the design space of community-sourcing by introducing attendee-sourcing -- a process that collects input from conference attendees and encodes them as preferences and constraints for creating sessions and schedule. For CHI 2014, a large multi-track conference in human-computer interaction with more than 3,000 attendees and 1,000 authors, we collected attendees' preferences by making available all the accepted papers at the conference on a paper recommendation tool we built called Confer, for a period of 45 days before announcing the conference program (sessions and schedule). We compare the preferences marked on Confer with the preferences collected from Cobi's author-sourcing approach. We show that attendee-sourcing can provide insights beyond what can be discovered by author-sourcing. For CHI 2014, the results show value in the method and attendees' participation. It produces data that provides more alternatives in scheduling and complements data collected from other methods for creating coherent sessions and reducing conflicts.
Confex @cite_6 is a commercial solution for conference management, which includes tools for scheduling. To the best of our knowledge, no existing conference management solution incorporates community input directly in the scheduling process. Conference Navigator @cite_13 and Conferator @cite_8 provide a similar set of features to Confer, including bookmarking papers of interest and building personalized schedules with paper recommendations. These systems, however, have not used the attendees' data outside of the tool itself. Our attendee-sourcing introduces a novel mechanism that uses the by-product of attendees' paper exploration in the scheduling process. Our method can even use data generated by these other tools for improving the schedule.
@cite_13 @cite_6 @cite_8
2222933349 2108376501 2014328246 47245102
As the sheer volume of information grows, information overload challenges users in many ways. Large conferences are one of the venues suffering from this overload. Faced with several parallel sessions and large volumes of papers covering diverse areas of interest, conference participants often struggle to identify the most relevant sessions to attend. The Conference Navigator 2.0 system was created to help conference participants go examine the schedule of paper presentation, add most interesting papers to individual schedule, and export this schedule to a calendar application. In addition, as a social system, the Conference Navigator 2.0 collects the wisdom of the user community and make it available through community-based recommendation interface to help individuals in making scheduling decisions. Effectively planning a large multi-track conference requires an understanding of the preferences and constraints of organizers, authors, and attendees. Traditionally, the onus of scheduling the program falls on a few dedicated organizers. Resolving conflicts becomes difficult due to the size and complexity of the schedule and the lack of insight into community members' needs and desires. Cobi presents an alternative approach to conference scheduling that engages the entire community in the planning process. Cobi comprises (a) communitysourcing applications that collect preferences, constraints, and affinity data from community members, and (b) a visual scheduling interface that combines communitysourced data and constraint-solving to enable organizers to make informed improvements to the schedule. This paper describes Cobi's scheduling tool and reports on a live deployment for planning CHI 2013, where organizers considered input from 645 authors and resolved 168 scheduling conflicts. Results show the value of integrating community input with an intelligent user interface to solve complex planning tasks. This paper presents an anatomy of Hypertext 2011 -- focusing on the dynamic and static behavior of the participants. We consider data collected by the CONFERATOR system at the conference, and provide statistics concerning participants, presenters, session chairs, different communities, and according roles. Additionally, we perform an in-depth analysis of these actors during the conference concerning their communication and track visiting behavior. Telephone based spoken dialogue systems have the potential to automate many routine tasks. Yet, to become widely accepted they must be natural, easy to use, efficient, and robust. We introduce the Conference Room Reservation System (CRRS), a mixed-initiative natural dialogue system used routinely by the employees of our lab. The CRRS allows callers to reserve or cancel rooms by simply stating their constraints in a natural way. The system prompts for missing information and offers alternative solutions if the original constraints cannot be satisfied. Our system uses Nortel Networks’ OpenSpeech continuous speech recognizer with barge-in, a robust natural language parser, and a mixed-initiative discourse manager. We describe the overall system with an emphasis on the discourse manager. We present an analysis of real data collected over several months. We then discuss the issue of defining dialogue performance metrics that are independent of the room occupancy rate.