Multimedia Conferencing as a Universal Paradigm for Collaboration

Multimedia interaction between users usually takes the form of conferences. We propose a taxonomy of multimedia conferencing, and develop a model that can support most types of collaborative interactions. The model provides sophisticated features such as access control with respect to diierent media streams, exibility to use multiple media channels to participate in multiple conferences simultaneously, and nested conferences. Conferences are treated as rst class objects, and we deene operations to manipulate such objects. We are carrying out a software implementation of the conferencing paradigm at