IGTAI - AN IDEA GENERATION TOOL FOR AMBIENT INTELLIGENCE

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1 IGTAI - AN IDEA GENERATION TOOL FOR AMBIENT INTELLIGENCE Carlos Freitas, Goreti Marreiros, Carlos Ramos GECAD Knowledge Engineering and Decision Support Group, Porto, Portugal, carlosfilipefreitas@gmail.com Institute of Engineering Polytechnic of Porto, Porto, Portugal, {goreti; csr}@dei.isep.ipp.pt Keywords: Idea Generation, Web Based Group Decision Support System, Ubiquitous Meetings, Ambient Intelligence. Abstract Today, business group decision making is an extremely important activity. A considerable number of applications and research have been made in the past years in order to increase the effectiveness of decision making process. In order to support the idea generation process, IGTAI (Idea Generation Tool for Ambient Intelligence) prototype was created. IGTAI is a Group Decision Support System designed to support any kind of meetings namely distributed, asynchronous or face to face. It aims at helping geographically distributed (or not) people and organizations in the idea generation task, by making use of pervasive hardware in a meeting room, expanding the meeting beyond the room walls by allowing a ubiquitous access through different kinds of equipment. This paper focus on the research made to build IGTAI prototype, its architecture and its main functionalities, namely the support given in the different phases of the idea generation meeting. 1 Introduction Nowadays the increasing competitiveness implies that people/organizations need to take decisions in a short space of time. Those decisions have to be the most advantageous, taking into account the quality of the final results. This competitiveness and the way organizations are structured forces people to work in a group setting. But working in a group setting is not always an easy task. To facilitate group tasks in organizational environments decision support systems were developed. In the past, several systems have been developed to support decision making but they were mainly designed to support face-to-face meetings [1][12]. Today s research aims to develop systems that support distributed and asynchronous meetings naturally allowing a ubiquitous usage that can add intelligence and/or more efficiency to the organizational environment. This kind of environment fits well with the ambient intelligent concept. The concept of ambient intelligent was build on early ideas of ubiquitous computing introduced by Mark Weiser in 1991 [25] anticipating a digital world which consists of many distributed devices that interact with users in a natural way. In an ambient intelligent environment, people are surrounded with networks of embedded intelligent devices that provide ubiquitous information, communication and services. Intelligent devices are available whenever we need it, enabled by simple and effortless interactions, attuned to all our senses, adaptive to users and context and autonomously acting. High quality information and content must be available to any user, anywhere, at any time, and on any device. Group decision making is for definition an excellent area to demonstrate the potential of ambient intelligent environments [19][24]. If we consider a distributed meeting involving persons in different places (some in a meeting room, others in their offices, others in different countries) with access to different devices (computers, PDA, mobile phones) and with a common goal (making a decision), they will need a great amount of technological support. Besides distributed, this meeting is also asynchronous, so participants do not need to participate at the same time. Group Decision Making is a complex problem constituted by several phases: Problem definition; information gathering; Alternative identification (idea generation); analysis of the pros and cons of the different alternatives; negotiation and choice [18]. In this work we intend to approach the idea generation phase. In the idea generation task area some projects can be referred [27][4][10][15][7][9][22]. For example project [4] approaches the decision project by allowing the collection of alternatives and criteria from singular persons or experts. The facilitator has the responsibility to collect and delete/organize ideas but the project does not have a concept of collaborative idea generation task. On facilitatepro [10] the collaborative idea generation process already exists but it does not have a defined structure, there are just actions/ideas that can not be measured or rated. In that order it is not easy to advance in the decision making process as for instance to proceed to an idea evaluation and then consequently elect one of the ideas as the final solution for the problem becomes a difficult action. On Compedium [3] previous limitations are already addressed and were applied to wicked problems. However, the ubiquity access to the information is limited to desktop computers. Besides, the processing power is on the side of the user who makes queries to a DBMS (local or not). Also, in this software a mechanism to avoid the introduction of repeated content nodes does not exist, which may be critical in problems with a significant dimension.

2 Considering this context we developed a prototype named IGTAI (Idea Generation Tool for Ambient Intelligence), a system able to support asynchronous idea generation meetings in any context, enabling the participants the introduction of ideas and alternatives to a group board through a simple interface, allowing or not the discussion from these proposed ideas/alternatives during the meeting. The meeting output will be an arranged multi-criteria problem. This output can then be reused in WebMeeting System [20] which supports the remaining tasks involved in the decision process such as prioritization, voting, argumentation to resolve conflict and other problems. The prototype is intended to be tested and used on a decision room with a U shape, having some equipment that aims to contribute to the creation of an intelligent environment (figure 1). Figure 1. Intelligent Decision room. IGTAI is designed to different times / different places, yet it should not deny other possible meetings configurations. The pervasive hardware is composed by interactive screens and a smart board. The achievement of such objectives implies the perception of the details of the group work like e.g. involved entities, types of group work models and idea generation techniques. Thus, this paper is organized as follows. Section 2 introduces the background research made to accomplish the objectives. It exposes some decision making models followed by a meeting task description covered by IGTAI. Still in section 2 are presented some techniques used in the idea generation process. Section 3 presents a high level description of the system architecture, the options made during the system design, a system overview and some implementation details. To finalize, the last section presents conclusions and future work. Rasmussen et al. [23] which assumes that a person who makes the decision aims to obtain maximum utility decision. Still in the rational models there is the Information Model proposed by March & Simon [17] which is an adaptation to the rational decision making model and is related with the capacity of the person who makes the decision to process the information. In the Politicians Models we find the Political model or Arena which mainly focuses on the conflict and the way it is handled. We can also find the Participation model from Koopman and Pool [16] which gives emphasis to the participation of members from the bottom of the hierarchic pyramid on the decision making process. Still on the politician models appears the Garbage Can Model initially proposed by Michael Cohen, James March e Johan Olsen [5]. This model the organizations are seen as a set of solutions looking for a set of problems. Decisions agents (participants) are seen as intermediates that seek for an opportunity to connect a problem to a solution. The participants, solutions and problems are not necessarily synchronized and they move along different opportunities. So this model enhances the time window opportunity in decision making situations. The tasks model proposed by MacGrath in 1984 classifies the tasks performed by a group in categories defined by different criteria. Some of those criteria make the tasks exclusive to one category and tasks within a category are directly connected between them. Tasks characteristics include specifications to reach the objective of the task and the procedures that a group should follow to get it. Important facts to considerer are the type of task and its complexity. McGrath built a model joining different kind of tasks made by a group on the analysis of the work group, the carried tasks and the procedures associated to the tasks. Two different axis and four quadrants compose it. The axis describes tasks and attitudes necessary to decision making execution. Conceptual or behavioural distinction is made by the horizontal axis and the vertical axis categorizing the tasks in order to support conflict resolutions or collaboration attitudes. As can be seen in Figure 2, the quadrants define the four sub processes of decision making. 2 Background This section covers the state of the art study made to support the prototype development. 2.1 Group Decision Making Models As a starting point we considered group decision making models in order to identify and analyze where idea generation fits in the decision making process. In the literature is possible to find several of references to decision making models e.g. Rational models, Politicians models, McGrath model [11][15][5][20]. Inside the rational models some variations exist, for example the Classical Rational Model proposed by Figure 2. McGrath tasks model.

3 2.2 Meeting According to [2][6], the meeting is a consequence or an interaction objective between two or more persons (teams, groups) which can be carried through one of four possible environments: same time / same place; same time / different places; different times / same place; different times / different places. It is widely accepted that inside a group meeting there are two types of roles involved: the facilitator and the participant roles. Some authors argue that the facilitator should be a neutral person. However, sometimes, it is pointed as part of the team. Participants are the members of the group decision meeting which have to cooperate in order to execute a specific task. In the idea generation phase the group must propose ideas for a certain problem. According to Dubs e Hayne [8] there are three phases in a meeting as seen in Figure 3. Pre Meeting In Meeting Figure 3. Meeting phases For each one of these phases exist a number of tasks that should be performed. In the Pre Meeting phase the facilitator establishes the objectives, pick the group members, select the best tools, inform the participants and gives them the necessary material. On the meeting phase, from the facilitator s point of view the most important task is to monitor and observe the elapsing of the meeting. In this phase the participants perform the necessary tasks to reach meeting goals. In the last phase, the Post Meeting phase, it is important to score the obtained results and the group satisfaction on the results. It is also important to say what kind of information is useful for future meetings. 2.3 Idea Generation Techniques Post Meetin g IGTAI aims to support the group in the idea generation task. So in this section it is briefly exposed the study made. Today several Idea Generation Techniques are known e.g the Nominal Group Technique (NGT), Theory of Inventive Problem Solving Professional Classes-Great Results (TRIZ), Mind mapping, Brainstorming [21], cooperative KJ [27]. Mind mapping at its most basic form is a simple hierarchy and could be drawn in any tree-shaped format. The idea is to add a formal structure to thinking, starting on the question that is intended to answer. Brainstorming is a problem resolution method which aims the generation of the maximum number of ideas in order to solve a problem in a collaborative and non critical atmosphere. Alex Osborn, the founder of this method in 1938 cites that in group a regular person can create two times or more ideas than in singular. However for the success of this method four rules and two principles must be followed. The two principles are the judgment delay and the amount creates quality. The first principle means that in the use of this technique there is no space to criticize the other s ideas because that could stop the improvement of some ideas. The second one says that the existence of more ideas means a better final solution. In this technique still exists four rules that must be followed and they are focus on quantity ( the greater the number of ideas generated, the greater the chance of producing a radical and effective solution), no criticism (instead of immediately stating what might be wrong with an idea, the participants focus on extending or adding to it, reserving criticism for a later 'critical stage' of the process), unusual ideas are welcome (they may open new ways of thinking and provide better solutions than regular ideas) and finally combine and improve ideas ( Good ideas can be combined to form a very good idea, this approach leads to better and more complete ideas than just generation of new ideas, and increases the generation of ideas, by a process of association). 3 The IGTAI system This section begins by presenting the high level architecture from the designed prototype. Later it will present the process support made by the system in each meeting phases presented in section Architecture The presented prototype is intended to be used in all the environments suggested by [2][6]. However, its development was focused on the different times / different places environment. Thus IGTAI architecture is based on the client server architecture under the Remote Method Invocation (RMI) protocol. The server application has three major components: the provider of idea generation service; a relational database server who keeps the data; and an agent s community populated by agents who represent meeting participants of the system and an agent facilitator. For each meeting participant there is an agent and he is responsible for receiving, organize and distribute information from/to the server considering acts of those users. On these actions it is included information related with the meeting data like if participants read the idea details, the titles, if they check files. This is made in order to make the client application more adaptive to each user because with this we are able in e.g. to highlight new ideas for a specific participant. On these agents actions it is also included personal data like for example, login details, details of ideas introduced, etc. With this the performance increases considerable because the actions of read and write are on the agent and when a specific data is necessary it is already in memory avoiding the waiting for heavy SQL queries. All this allows the server to answer faster to the client and increases the global performance of the system. With these functions the system is able to work proactively to the users. The main service can be accessed by a local network or over the internet, the agents community and the database

4 can also be in different machines over the network as seen on Figure 4 to plan the meeting details such as configuring and defining the problem, perform the participant selection, defining the anonymity existence, the user ranking, if the agenda is open or closed and the possibility to use an implementation of Issue-Based Information System (IBIS) As seen in Figure 5 if the agenda is closed the facilitator will be the only user of the system that will be allowed to put ideas in the next phase. The participants only have to focus on introducing alternatives and criteria. Besides, the facilitator can keep more focus on the domain of alternatives. If the agenda is open any meeting user can contribute with ideas. Figure 4. High level architecture The McGraph tasks model was the group decision model making model followed on the development of IGTAI because it makes the distinction on which types of tasks the GDSS applications must support and in which phase of the decision making process the fits. With this we can say that IGTAI belongs to the first quadrant of Task Circumflex, the Generation quadrant, and must support planning tasks and creative tasks. The prototype was designed to support the three meeting phases identified by Dubs e Hayne [7]. As we said before the IGTAI aims to support the two types of actors involved in group decision process, the facilitator and the participant. In that order two components were developed: the client facilitator module and the client participant module. The first one supports the three meeting phases while the second only supports the meeting and post meeting phase. This happens because at the pre meeting phase only planning activities are considered and they are performed exclusively by the facilitator. Next we illustrate the process support given by the prototype to each structure of idea generation process. With this support it is intended to maximize important process gains like for instance more information, synergy, learning, stimulation, more objective evaluation and the minimization of process losses like domination of some members, failure to remember among others. This assertion is based on [13] and this classification is used on next three sub sections. It will also be presented in Figures 5, 6, 7, 8 an example for the problem Where should we open a new store?. This meeting have started in the Intelligent Decision room and two ideas where produced, the shopping center and the Traditional commerce, which where written together with other notes in the smart board with MIMIO white board software [26]. The file with those notes was attached to the problem node after the physical meeting ended. 3.2 Pre-Meeting The task support used on the prototype at this phase is only directed to the facilitator role, because only planning activities are performed. At this phase the facilitator needs Figure 5. Pre meeting panel The IBIS check means that if it is active the users are able to make two distinct actions. One is making a comment to an idea or criteria that can be catalogued as positive, negative or neutral. The odder action available is a clarification request that can be answered by anyone in the meeting. 3.3 In-Meeting In the IGTAI prototype the task support used in the idea generation meeting phase was a union between: Brainstorming Mind - Mapping An idea, alternative and criteria objects distinguish In order to facilitate and simplify the development of cognitive work (Figure 6 left side) IGTAI Brainstorming IGTAI follows the process structure of brainstorming technique. The four rules and the two principles should be followed during the idea generation meeting, in order to achieve the benefits inherent to brainstorming. However, the principle of judgment delay and the no criticism rule of brainstorming, which defend that ideas should not be criticized at this phase, are questioned by several authors. So, we introduce the IBIS option in the system which removes (when activated) the judgement delay rule and the no criticism orientation. This allows users to request explanations about a specific idea/alternative/criteria or exposing personal thoughts about an idea / criteria.

5 To decrease the disadvantages of brainstorming some variants of the technique where introduced: The ideas are introduced in the system in parallel in spite of sequentially, which allows the decrease of process noise like concentration/production blocking or domination by some members; Idea anonymity introduction in order to decrease the conformance pressure and evaluation apprehension; A user ranking that consists on a three bar graphic representing the number of ideas introduced by the current user, the number of ideas from the worst and from the best one as well as the total number of ideas introduced. This will give a productivity idea and a little bit of competition which could lead to a productivity increase (Figure 6 right side); The mobile version of the prototype (Figure 7) only covers this meeting state mainly because of computational problems. However the main purpose is to allow participants to have the group memory anywhere. This can be particularly useful when they are searching for new alternatives on the field and want to consult the ones already introduced. This version also allows the input of new nodes on the tree. When the user works offline he may decide to perform the synchronization of the nodes created offline adding them to the problem. A XML structure will update the meetings where user participates and that are on In-Meeting state IGTAI Mind Mapping IGTAI has an area where all the ideas proposed by the group are placed. This functionality will create the group memory that bring to the system a decreasing of process losses like attention blocking or failure to remember, among others. On the other hand, it will increase process gains as synergy and more information. The tree structure used in this area was inspired on the Mind-Mapping technique. With this adaptation we intend to facilitate the idea circulation process and consequently the triggering of new ideas. Figure 7. In Meeting mobile application On the desktop tool the suggestion of already introduced criteria is an interesting behaviour. For example if the problem is Where to open a new store and other users already introduced an alternative with the criteria parking places that criteria will be suggested to new alternatives added to the problem. However the user is not forced to add it. This is done in order to decrease the uncertainty and noise present in information (e.g. avoid the existence of duplicated criteria resulting from mistype errors). A task reserved to the facilitator is to conclude the meeting and to trigger the post meeting support. 3.4 Post-Meeting Figure 6. In Meeting Desktop panel IGTAI ideas, alternatives and criteria In the tree structure six types of objects can be displayed, they correspond to problem, ideas, alternatives, criteria, questions and comments witch one with their own graphical symbol. It is also possible to associate objects to tree nodes such as files. The objects to problem, ideas, alternatives, criteria nodes allow us to reach, at the end, a structured problem in a multi criteria format. Questions and comments nodes represent the IBIS implementation on the system. In this phase both actors are supported. The goal of post meeting phase is a summary of the activities performed in the in meeting phase. For this a report containing the details of the meeting, such as problem definition, options used, a table containing the multi criteria problem and the graphical information such as the total number of developed ideas over the meeting time is presented. The multi criteria table could have empty values because the application did not force the participants to add all criteria to the entire alternatives range (Figure 8).

6 4 Conclusions and future work Figure 8. Post Meeting panel 3.5 Implementation details The programming language used was Java J2SE 5.0 and the communication between the client and the server was provided by the RMI Java technology. The desktop clients were implemented in a Java applet which allows its invocation over the internet by any browser. The mobile client uses the Java Micro Edition and the package Java ME RMI 1.0. The data generated by the prototype is stored on the server side in a MySql relational data base. For the development of the agents community the Open Agents Architecture (OAA) was used, developed at SRI International. OAA is a framework for integrating a community of heterogeneous software agents in a distributed environment and is structured to minimize the effort of creating new agents. It allows the creation of agents in various programming languages and operating platforms and this particular detail will allows us to reuse agents executed in others works. With this kind of development tools we achieve an application platform independency. The goal of this research is to build an idea generation tool supporting a ubiquitous group decision meeting dedicated to the idea generation task. It was intended to build a simple tool capable of being used by users with little experience in informatics systems, with group knowledge management, ubiquitous access, user adaptiveness and proactiveness, platform independence and the formulation of a multi criteria problem at the end of a work session. These objectives were accomplished. The idea generation prototype has been currently designed and its implementation is in the test phase. Once the laboratory tests are concluded, experiments will be organized in the intelligent decision room. With this it will be possible to observe the impact of ubiquitous idea generation in decision making process. As future work we intend to improve the characteristics of the agent community in order to support the first two meeting phases. In the Pre-meeting it is intended to support tasks related with group formation process. We think that it will be useful to the facilitator that the agents community could suggest him a group constitution, for the actual decision problem, based on previous meetings data. In the In Meeting phase it is intended to support the participants when an idea is added to a problem. Here the server adds the idea to the problem but at the same time it creates a process in the agents community to ask if it is possible that that idea has already been introduced in that meeting. If the answer is positive then the participant and facilitator must be alerted when they are using the tool. Another possibility to be explored in this phase is the system to suggest ideas from past problems. Acknowledgements The work described in this paper is included in ArgEmotionAgents project (POSI / EIA / / 2004), which is a project supported by FCT (Science & Technology Foundation Portugal). References Figure 9. Login panel and starting tabbed menu The user interface used was tabbed panels as seen on figure 9. [1] Barrocas, Nuno. Ferramentas de Apoio ao Planeamento e Condução de Reuniões Electrónicas. Instituto Superior Técnico. Lisboa, Universidade Técnica de Lisboa, 1999 [2] Bostrom, R., Anson, R., Clawson, V., Group facilitation and group support systems. Jessup and Valacich (editors), Group Support Systems: New Perspectives. Macmillan, 1993a [3] Buckingham Shum, Dr S and Selvin, A and Sierhuis, Dr M and Conklin, Dr J and Haley, C and Nuseibeh, Prof B Hypermedia Support for Argumentation-Based Rationale: 15 Years on from gibis and QOC, in Dutoit, A and McCall, R and Mistrik, I and Paech, B, Eds. Rationale Management in Software Engineering, pp Springer-Verlag, 2006 [4] Cao, P.P.; Burstein, F.V., "An asynchronous group decision support system study for intelligent multicriteria decision making," System Sciences. HICSS-32. Proceedings of the 32nd Annual Hawaii International Conference on, vol.track1, 1999

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