For real-time communication and collaboration, the value of a service or application havily relies on the accuracy of users' presence information in order to operate effectively. Currently, the presence information is derived from keyboard and mouse activities, and is not reliable. Consider the following two scenarios. The first is: The user gets up and leaves the office. Currently, an IM has to wait for, say, 15 minutes before it changes status to “offline” or “away”. The second is: The user has not used the computer recently but he is still in the office. Currently, an IM will display a status of “offline” or “away”, although he can still be reached. We show a prototype for an accurate presence detection with a standard webcam with a built-in microphone by integrating both audio and video information, together with the usual keyboard and mouse activities.

People involved are:  Zhengyou Zhang, Rajesh Hegde, Cha Zhang

Publications:

Paper: "Office Presence Detection Using Multimodal Context Information", in Proc. IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP 2004), Vol.3, pp.773-776, May 17-21, 2004, Montreal, Quebec, Canada..

Demo: Video