Paper Reading #19 - Social signal processing: detecting small group interaction in leisure activity

Reference:
Eyal Dim, Tsvi Kuflik
IUI '10 Proceedings of the 15th international conference on Intelligent user interfaces

Summary:

This paper is about social signal processing of small groups.  The social interactions are monitored for things like how close someone is for starting a conversation and voice communication.  If a system can understand the social interactions of a group, it can intervene and suggest relevant information at the right time.  The authors conducted a study to determine the possibility of automated detection of group interaction in a museum.  The study was done in the Tel-Aviv Museum of Arts and was conducted on 58 small groups.

Discussion:

I think that this was interesting.  The research could have an impact on future products.  At first I thought that the interactions would be difficult to map because everyone acts differently with different people, but I realized that there are still similarities in how people act.  I think that the research should be expanded to somewhere other than a museum to get more information though.