The Neem Platform: an Evolvable Framework for Perceptual Collaborative Applications ; CU-CS-936-02

The Neem Platform is a research test bed for Project Neem, concerned with the development of socially and culturally aware collaborative systems in a wide range of domains, through development of situated applications that target specific group cultures and alternative theories. The Neem Platform is a generic (application neutral) component-based framework that provides functionality that facilitates building such collaborative applications. Given the wide variety of target applications, the platform provides more than a closed set of behaviors it is itself evolvable. Its functionality can be extended and adapted through facilities provided by a coordination mechanism that isolates computation from coordination concerns. Application development on top of this platform is facilitated by reuse of common functionality, as well as from embedded support for Wizard of Oz experiments. A novelty of Project Neem is its focus on the dynamic aspects that characterize group interaction under a Perceptual Interface paradigm. Participants’ multimodal interactions such as voice exchanges, textual messages, widget operations and eventually gestures, eye gaze and facial expressions are reified and made available to applications, that apply situated reasoning, using this rich contextual information to dynamically adapt their behavior. The system presents itself multimodally as well, through a set of virtual participants automated entities that are perceived by human participants as having personalities and emotions, making use of animation and voice generation.