New tool aims to revolutionise scheduling meetings

An international EU-funded initiative aims to deliver new systems that can support a new generation of 'knowledge workers'.

The aim is to combine all the existing tools used for work-based communications, eg the internet, email, calendars, project schedulers, SMS and more to provide a single, more targeted way of scheduling meetings with international collaborators.

Computer scientists at the University of Leicester are working together with universities, corporate research centres and SMEs from six countries in the EU-funded project, inContext.

They aim to develop technology that goes beyond current internet-based collaboration techniques and meet the requirements of dynamic, multiform team working environments. Such environments arise in the new kinds of organizational structures and work interaction patterns that require highly dynamic forms of collaboration: teams bridge company boundaries, its members move around, people use mobile devices and work on many things at the same time, and so on.

Dr Stephan Reiff-Marganiec, lecturer in Computer Science at the University of Leicester and site leader of inContext, explains:

“Imagine a very common situation: a project in a large company needs to hold a meeting to make decisions on the next steps ahead. The meeting requires the attendance of the project's key people – all busy visiting customers around the world – as well as people with specific skills (say, a web designer). In order to get in touch with all these people, find out about their availability, choose a convenient time when they can all attend or make themselves represented, and select the web designer, a secretary will certainly be busy for the best part of several days…”

“The inContext project is developing a platform and techniques that make use of service-oriented computing to integrate existing tools (such as email systems, calendars, project schedulers) into a coherent system that can be used on any device, anywhere in the world, to make collaborative work more productive.”

So far, the project has concentrated on the development of a Pervasive Collaboration Service Architecture (PCSA) that allows users to connect from a PC, a mobile phone or a PDA to the system and request services.

The system automatically decides which services to offer based on the context of the requesting user and others involved in the activity: where are they? what are they doing? what have they done in similar situations before?

Making such decisions is not easy: it involves methods and techniques that support data mining, the gathering and modelling of context information, and reasoning about models in order to derive new facts. The automation of the decision-making process involves sophisticated algorithms and methods.

Many scientific results have by now been produced, and the viability of the PCSA has been demonstrated through a prototype meeting scheduler.

Dr Reiff-Marganiec says “when secretaries tell the system that a meeting is required, it will automatically collect names of people who can represent those that cannot attend, find experts in specific areas, and suggest alternative times for the meeting. It will even send invitations to people on the device that they use: email, instant messages or SMS to a mobile phone.”