ping a group-to-individual distributed meeting system.pdf

PING: A GROUP-TO-INDIVIDUAL DISTRIBUTED MEETING SYSTEM Yong Rui, Eric Rudolph, Li-wei He, Rico Malvar, Michael Cohen and Ivan Tashev Microsoft Research, One Microsoft Way, Redmond, WA 98052, USA ABSTRACT Group-to-individual (G2I) distribute d meeting is an important but understudied ar ea. Because of the asymmetry between different parties in G2I meetings, it has two unique challenges: 1) the remote participant tends to be ignored by the local participants; and 2) the remote participant has inferior audio, video, and data experience than the local participants. To address these issues, in this paper we present PING, a system explicitly designed for G2I distributed meetings bines recent advances in both hardware, ., microphone arrays, remote person stand-in devices, and software, ., audio-video processing, to improve users’ G2I meeting experience. We report how PING addresses the above two challenges and its system design and implementation. 1. INTRODUCTION With industry’s globalization trend, more and more teams are ing distributed. How to develop collaboration tools to make distributed teams more productive is thus important. Distributed meetings are among those tools and they have different types: ? Group-to-group (G2G): each gr oup resides in its own meeting room. ? Individual-to-individual (I2I): each individual is in his/her own office.