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There are many research institutions carrying out research on one topic or another related to meetings. In here some of the projects that have led the research efforts in the latest years are pointed out.
The Interactive Multimodal Information Management (IM2), ongoing program sponsored by the Swiss government, aims at the study of multimodal interaction, covering a wide range of activities and applications, including the recognition and interpretation of spoken, written and gestured languages, computer vision, and the automatic indexation and management of multimedia documents. Other important related themes are information content protection, data access control, and the structuring, retrieval and presentation of multimedia information (Interactive Multimodal Information Management (IM2) website, 2006). Linked to IM2, the project named m4 (multimodal meeting manager) was supported by the EU IST Programme and ran from 2002 to 2005. It was concerned with the construction of an automated meeting browser to be able to browse, query and structure meetings taking place in a room equipped with multiple sensors (Multimodal Meeting Manager (M4) website, 2006).
The project Computers in the Human Interaction Loop (CHIL) aims at the creation of computers to help in the normal human-human interaction, in a non obtrusive way. CHIL is an Integrated Project (IP) within the European Union (EU) sixth framework program which started in 2004 for three years. Within the many lines of research it opened, several intelligent meeting rooms with audio and video sensors were built where data is collected and research is performed on the lecture-type meetings (Computers in the Human Interaction Loop (CHIL) website, 2006).
The project Augmented Multimodal Interaction (AMI) is focused on the use of advanced signal processing, machine learning models and social interaction dynamics to improve human-to-human communications, particularly during business meetings between local and remote (virtual) participants (Augmented Multiparty Interaction (AMI) website, 2006). The AMI project is also an IP project within the European sixth framework program, focusing on the conference-type meetings. AMI has been granted a continuation project (called AMIDA) within the European Union seventh framework program.
There are other projects with emphasis on multimodal interaction and human-to-human communications. Some of them are the ``Similar'' network of excellence (Similar Network of Excellence website, 2006), the Pascal network (Pattern analysis, Statistical modeling and Computational learning (Pascal) website, 2006) and Humaine emotions research (Humaine emotion research website, 2006) in Europe, and Video analysis and content extraction for defense intelligence (VACE) (Video analysis and content extraction for defense intelligence (ARDA-VACE II), 2006) and Cognitive Assistant that Learns and Organizes (CALO) (Cognitive Assistant that Learns and Organizes (CALO) website, 2006) in the USA.