Multimedia Collaboration Team
A CCS research area
Area of Research
Multimedia Collaboration (MC)
is a research area within the Communication and Collaboration System
(CCS) group. Work in this area develops technologies and
prototypes for collaborative systems, both synchronous and asynchronous via
audio, video, and data, person-to-person or group-to-group.
Projects
We believe that three layers are needed to build a useful and usable Multimedia Collaboration system.
- The bottom layer is technology-centric. Here we develope computer vision based
person tracking techniques, microphone array based sound source localization, probabilistic
sensor fusion techniques using particle filters, virtual director techniques that
can intelligently determine which view to show, dewarping techniques for equalizing
people's size when captured with a wide-angle lense, etc.
- The top layer is user-centric. After all, the ultimate customers are the regular users.
In this layer, we conduct research (with help from other groups) on UI design, usibility
study, and social/psychological implications to our system. This layer is not our group's
core focus. But we believe our interaction with other groups in this layer will significantly benefit
our overall system design.
- The middle layer is the system, bridging the technology and user consideration, and delivers
the final experience.
All the three layers are focusing specifically on communication and
collaboration. For example, conducting general research on computer vision or machine learning
is not our goal. Instead, we use those as tools in CCA. Some of our current systems include:
There are many axes from which we can look at communication and collaboration scenarios. First, we can
classify the scenarios into one-way (e.g., lecture rooms) or two-way (e.g., meetings). Second, different
media can be involved, e.g., audio, video, data (PPT, exel). Third, they can be informal (e.g.,
physical/virtual hallways) or formal (e.g., physical/virtual meeting rooms). Fourth, there is a
conherent flow of pre-meeting, during-meeting, and post-meeting tools. Fifth, they can be
async (e.g., email and discussion list in SharePoint) or sync (e.g., messenger and LiveMeeting).
We are interested in all of the above.
Some core technologies that we have developed include:
Contacts
For general questions or suggestions, contact Yong Rui at (my first name plus (no space) my last name at microsoft dot com).