Cooperative work supporting method and system therefor

Abstract: There is provided a cooperative work supporting method and a system therefor, for smooth progress of a cooperative work by evaluating the participation rate, or the level of participation of each participant to the cooperative work, and utilizing such participation rate in the cooperative work. The cooperative work supporting method for use in a system for effecting a work by cooperation of plural participants, comprises determining a participation rate, indicating the level of participation to the cooperative work, for each participant; and informing each participant of such participation rate in identifiable manner. Also the participation of the participant to the cooperative work is adjusted according to the participation rate. Also there is provided a prompt requesting the adjustment of the participation rate of each participant. The participation rate is determined by the data read-out frequency and/or the data write-in frequency of each participant in the cooperative work. In informing, the participation rate is made identifiable by a change in the size of the number of colors of the image of each participant.

Description: The present invention relates to a cooperative work supporting method, for supporting appropriate participation by a group to a cooperative work in a group work environment (hereinafter called session), and a system therefor. The generation of cooperative works by groups of individuals is recently becoming popular, owing to the commercialization of high-performance computers and the advancement in distributed software. In conventional cooperative work support systems, however, no account is made for differences in levels of participation of the individual persons or terminals involved in a cooperative work. This is because, in a monofunctional cooperative work system such as a television conference system, plural cooperative works do not take place in parallel manner but rather the participants always concentrate on a single cooperative work at any one time, such as a conference. For this reason, when displaying the participants, it is customary to transfer and display the image entered from the table-top camera of each participant, without any modification. In recent years, however, there have developed situations where a person participates in a number of different cooperative works, as cooperative work by groups of individuals can be realized on a computer system. Examples of a computer apparatus for enabling a plurality of participants to contribute to a cooperative data processing operation are disclosed in US-A-4974173 and US-A-5220657. Both of these documents disclose computer networks comprising a plurality of terminals for enabling a plurality of participants to contribute to a cooperative data processing operation, and data processing means for performing data processing operations in accordance with instructions received from the terminals. Whenever data is being worked upon as part of a cooperative data processing operation, a small scale representation of that data is displayed on all of the terminals of the computer network to inform the participants in the cooperative work that particular data is being amended. In this way the workers on a project are informed as to the extent by which data on a collaborative project has been updated and hence can make an informed decision as to when they should review that data. However, none of the conventional cooperative work supporting systems discloses the evaluation of the levels of participation of individuals involved in a cooperative work. The absence of evaluation of the participation rate in cooperative works leads to the following drawbacks: 1) The interest of the participant in the cooperative work cannot be understood; 2) In case of decision for example by voting, it cannot be discriminated whether such action has been completed; 3) It cannot be discriminated whether provided real-time data has been received by an intended recipient; 4) It cannot be discriminated whether a remark has been received by other participants; and 5) Participants cannot understand their roles or positions in a cooperative work. An aim of the present invention is to provide a cooperative work supporting system free from the aforementioned drawbacks and capable of appropriately evaluating the participation rate, or the level of participation of each participant in a cooperative work and utilizing such participation rate in the cooperative work, to aid smooth progress of such a project. According to one aspect of the present invention there is provided computer apparatus for facilitating data processing for a group project involving a plurality of individuals, said apparatus comprising: processing means for performing data processing operations for a group project; receiving means for receiving, from a plurality of terminals, data processing instructions for a said group project; and means for causing said processing means to perform data processing operations in accordance with received data processing instructions received by said receiving means, characterised by: association means for associating each of said data processing instructions received by said receiving means with items of identification data adapted to be indicative of individuals contributing to a said group project; work monitoring means for generating and storing in association with said items of identification data, work contribution data indicative of the extent over determined periods of time of data processing instructions received by said receiving means associated by said association means with respective items of identification data; and output means for outputting output data dependent upon said work contribution data generated by said work monitoring means. Embodiments of the present invention will now be described with reference to the accompanying drawings in which: Fig. 1 is a view showing the configuration of a system embodying the present invention; Fig. 2 is a view showing an example of a speech number table employed in the above-mentioned embodiment; Fig. 3 is a flow chart showing the process for displaying the participation rate; Fig. 4 is a flow chart showing the process for evaluating a participation rate; Fig. 5 is a flow chart showing the process of displaying a participation rate; Fig. 6 comprises photographs illustrating the variation in images of a participant shown on the display according to the participation rate by the process shown in Fig. 5; Fig. 7 is a flow chart showing the process of adjusting a participation rate; Fig. 8 is a flow chart showing the process of monitoring a participation rate; Fig. 9 is a flow chart showing the process of adjusting a participation rate; Fig. 10 is a flow chart showing another process of displaying a participation rate; and Fig. 11 is a view showing the result of the displaying process shown in Fig. 10. An embodiment of the present invention will now be described in detail with reference to the accompanying drawings. This embodiment provides a group work supporting method which is featured by the adjustment of the presentation of participants or of a participation rate, according to participation rates which are evaluated by the frequency of access to a session or by the cumulative access time thereto. More specifically, there is described the evaluation of the participation rate in a cooperative editing work participated by plural persons. In particular, the present embodiment provides an example of evaluating the participation rate in relative manner by the number of data writes to a cooperative editing work and presenting the participation rate by the number of colors used in the display of the image of the participants of the session. In the following there will be at first explained the configuration of system and then the working sequence thereof. Fig. 1 shows an example of the system configuration of the present embodiment. Each of terminals 10, 20, 30 for a cooperative editing work is composed of components 100 to 150 to be explained later, and effects input/output and process for the cooperative work for each participant. In the following there will be explained an example employing three terminals, but the number of the terminals may be two, four or larger. A database management system 401 contains a statistical information database 402, including various statistics relating to the cooperative work. Communication means 500, for realizing the cooperative editing work, to be explained in the following, among plural computers, is composed for example of Ethernet or FDDI. In the present embodiment, the communication means is composed of a computer network, because the embodiment itself assumes the use of general-purpose computers, but there may also be employed a wide-area network such as ISDN. In the following there will be explained the components constituting the terminals 10 to 30. A communication device 100 is composed for example of an FDDI controller for connection to the computer network. An input device 101, to be used by the user of a program functioning on this embodiment, for entering various commands and data, is for example a keyboard, a mouse, a pad or a microphone. A CPU 102 executes programs of the cooperative editing work of the present embodiment and of evaluation of the participation rate. The present embodiment utilizes a CPU for these programs, but there may also be adopted a hardware configuration in which the independent CPU's are used respectively for these programs. An output deice 103, composed for example of a CRT display or a projector, is used for presenting, to the user, the content of the cooperative editing work of this embodiment and the result of evaluation of a participation rate. A single display device is used for the cooperative editing work and for the presentation of the participation rate for the purpose of simplicity, but there may also be employed independent display devices for these purposes. A memory device 104 stores the programs for the cooperative editing work the evaluation and presentation of the participation rate, and the data utilized by these programs. A single memory device is shown for the purpose of simplicity, but there may also be employed different memory devices respectively for the different objects of memory, or a hierarchic memory device including a secondary memory device such as a hard disk. As an example, the memory device may be divided into a main memory device storing data to be used temporarily and a secondary memory device for permanently storing a large amount of data. It may also include a read-only memory device, such as a ROM, for permanent data storage regardless of the state of the apparatus. A computer bus 105 connects the components 100 to 104 mentioned above. Fig. 2 shows an example of a table accumulating the number of data writes of each participant, corresponding to each session in this embodiment. The table shown in Fig. 2 may be stored in the statistical information database 402 or in the memory device of one of the terminals and renewed in response to each data write by a participant, and the display in each terminal may be controlled by referring to this table. Otherwise, the data writes of the participant may be transmitted to the terminals so as to store the same table in the memory devices of the terminals, and the display in each terminal may be controlled by referring to its table. A session number table 200 stores pointer addresses, corresponding to the session numbers specifying the plural sessions executed by the present system. A speech number table 201 stores the numbers of data writes, corresponding to the participants a, b, c,..., participating in a session number #1 of the session number table. Similar speech number tables 202, 203 are provided for the session numbers #2 and #3. This table may be present independently from the program of each session as shown in Fig. 2, or may belong to the program of each session. [Example of system function] In the following there will be explained the work sequence of the system of the present embodiment. At first, Fig. 3 shows the procedure of evaluating the participation rate in the cooperative editing work functioning on the system configuration mentioned above: (S11) effects observation and evaluation of the participation rate of each participant to the cooperative editing work; (S12) presents thus obtained participation rate of each participant, for recognition by each participant. In the following there will be explained an example of using a same presentation of the participation rate to all the participants, but the method of presentation of the participation rate may be selected independently for each participant. In the following there will be given a detailed explanation on each of the operations outlined above, with reference to flow charts if necessary. [Example of evaluation of participation rate: Fig. 4] In the following there will be explained an example of utilizing the number of data writes to the cooperative editing work, as the criterion of evaluation: (S21) obtains the cumulative number of data writes by a participant, from the statistical information database 402 of this cooperative editing work; (S22) applies the above-mentioned step S21 to all the participants; (S23) determines the ratio of the number of data writes of each participant, to the sum of the cumulative numbers of data writes of all the participants; (S24) determines the participation rate of each participant, based on the ratio determined in the step S23 and converting the sum of the cumulative numbers of data writes of all the participants as "100". [Other examples of criterion on evaluation] In the foregoing example, the participation rate is evaluated in each cooperative work (session) in relative manner, based on the cumulative number of data writes of the participant, but there can also be conceived other criteria of evaluation as exemplified in the following: 1) Timing of participation in a cooperative work, such as "participation rate is higher if the participation is made earlier; 2) Ratio of data writes to read-outs, so that the participation rate is low for a participant who does not write but only reads; 3) Cumulative participation time to the cooperative work, such as the participation rate is higher for a longer participation time; 4) Ratio to the cumulative participation time to other cooperative works, such as the participation rate higher if the ratio of the cumulative participation time in this cooperative work is higher than that in another cooperative work. [Other examples of evaluating method] Other evaluating methods, such as those shown in the following, are also similarly applicable: 1) An absolute evaluation is employed instead of the relative evaluation within a cooperative work. For example, the participation rate is high for a participant if the number of his data writes exceeds 8 in a cooperative work; 2) The evaluation is not made by the cumulative value, but by the value within a time frame. For example, the participation rate is high for the three participants who are highest in the number of data writes within the recent 3 hours in the cooperative work. [Example 1 of presentation of participation rate: Fig. 5] In the following there will be explained an example of utilizing, as the means of presentation, the display device for displaying the image of the participant. In particular, there will be explained an example of displaying the image of the participant with a number of colors corresponding to the participation rate (Fig. 5): (S31) obtains the participation rate; (S32) digitizes the participation rate into 8 levels, from level 1 to level 8 corresponding to the incase in the participation rate. In this example there is assumed a participation rate "84", which is digitized into a level 7; (S33) obtains, for each pixel, the color information of 8 bits in each of R, G and B colors; (S34) masks the lower bits of the color information, according to the digitized level of the participation rate, as shown in the following table. In the present example, the lowest 1 bit is masked as the participation rate is level 7; Participation rate Number of lower bits to be masked Level 8 0 Level 7 1 Level 6 2 Level 5 3 Level 4 4 Level 3 5 Level 2 6 Level 1 7 (S35) applies the process of the steps S33 and S34 to all the pixels constituting the image of a participant; (S36) displays the image of a participant with thus obtained number of colors, corresponding to the participation rate; (S37) applies the process of the steps S31 to S36 to all the participants of the cooperative work. By the display in the above-explained manner of the image of the participant with the number of colors corresponding to the participation rate, the image of an active participant can be clearly seen as indicated in the level 8 in Fig. 6, while the image becomes progressively unclear as the participation rate becomes lower (levels 7 to 1 in Fig. 6). It is thus rendered possible to provide each participant with his participation rate in visible manner. In the present example, the participation rate is presented in the display of the image of the participant, but it can also be presented by the display of a number representing the participation rate, by a color spectrum from red to blue, by a histogram, or by a change in the sampling rate of the voice. Also in displaying the image of the participant, there can be conceived, in addition to the mapping method to the number of colors explained in the foregoing, a change in the color or size of the display frame, a change in zooming ratio, a change in the number of frame in a moving image, a change in the pixel density or a change in the timing of voice synchronization. [Example of adjustment of participation rate: Fig. 7] This example includes adjusting means for adjusting the participation rate of the participant, in order to achieve smooth progress of the ensuing cooperative work, utilizing thus obtained participation rate. In the following there will be explained an adjustment method for use in an exclusive cooperative editing work, inhibiting the participation to other sessions. More precisely, the participation rate of the participant in a cooperative editing work is monitored, and, if it is lower than a predetermined value, data writes to other sessions are inhibited; (S71) observes and evaluates the participation rate of the participant himself in the cooperative editing work; (S72) monitors the participation rate of the participant himself and adjusts the participation rate if necessary. [Example of monitoring of participation rate: Fig. 8] In the following example, it is assumed that a number "30" is designated in advance as the lower limit of the participation rate: (S81) obtains the participation rate of a participant from the participation rates obtained by the evaluation; (S82) does not interfere with the proceeding if the participation rate is larger than "30"; (S83) if not, activates an adjusting procedure to be explained in the following. [Example of adjustment of participation rate: Fig. 9] For adjusting the participation rate of the participant to the cooperative editing work, there is forced an operation relating thereto. In this embodiment, there is assumed an exclusive cooperative work, and data writes to other sessions is inhibited: (S91) asks the manager of the cooperative work, managing the cooperative work, to terminate the right of data writes in other cooperative works. In the foregoing there is assumed an exclusive cooperative work in which data writes to other sessions is inhibited, but there can also be easily conceived an adjusting method of inhibiting not only the data writes but also the access to other sessions, an adjusting method of forcing the participants to participate in the cooperative work, such as in case of an urgently called conference. There can also be conceived an adjusting method of holding two participation rates as the parameters of monitoring, and adjusting the right of data writes only at the first level and the right of access also at the second level. Also in the foregoing description, it is assumed that each participant adjusts his participation rate, but it is also conceivable to adjust the participation rates of other participants under suitable managing right. Also in the foregoing description, there is explained the forcing of adjustment of the participation rate, but it is also possible to present a prompt to each participant, requesting his adjustment of the participation rate. [Example of display of participation rates in plural sessions] In this example, the obtained participation rates are presented to the participant in the readily understandable form of a bar graph, corresponding to all the cooperative works. This embodiment can be achieved by varying the presentation of the foregoing embodiment to a bar graph as explained in the following. [Example 2 of presentation of participation rate: Fig. 10] In the following there will be explained an example of displaying the participation rates of the participant, corresponding to the cooperative works, in a bar graph; (S101) obtains the participation rates in plural sessions; (S102) displays the participation rates of the plural sessions in a bar graph; (S103) applies the process of the steps S101 and S102 to all the participants of the cooperative works. Therefore, even in case plural participants simultaneously participate in plural cooperative works, each participant can easily understand the action states in such cooperative works, by the display of the participation rates as shown in Fig. 11. In the foregoing embodiments there is provided a speech number table for cumulatively storing the number of data writes, but similar data may be retrieved from the statistical information database 402 at the re-start of each session. Also the present invention is naturally applicable not only to a system consisting of plural equipment but also an apparatus consisting solely of a single equipment, and further to a case where the present invention is realized by the supply of a program to a system or an apparatus. As explained in the foregoing, the present invention aids smooth progress of a cooperative work, by adequately evaluating the level of participation of each participant to the cooperative work (i.e. participation rate) and utilizing such participation rate in the cooperative work.

Claims: Computer apparatus for facilitating data processing for a group project involving a plurality of individuals, said apparatus comprising: processing means for performing data processing operations for a group project; receiving means for receiving, from a plurality of terminals (10,20,30), data processing instructions for a said group project; and means for causing said processing means to perform data processing operations in accordance with received data processing instructions received by said receiving means, characterised by : association means for associating each of said data processing instructions received by said receiving means with items of identification data adapted to be indicative of individuals contributing to a said group project; work monitoring means (401, 402) for generating and storing in association with said items of identification data, work contribution data indicative of the extent over determined periods of time of data processing instructions received by said receiving means associated by said association means with respective items of identification data; and output means for outputting output data dependent upon said work contribution data generated by said work monitoring means (401, 402) and wherein said means for causing said processing means to perform data processing operations is arranged to permit or inhibit data processing operations associated by said association means with items of identification data based upon said output data output by said output means. Computer apparatus in accordance with claim 1, wherein said work monitoring means (401,402) is arranged to determine said work contribution data based upon the frequency of data processing instructions for the retrieval of data relating to a group project associated by said association means with respective items of identification data. Computer apparatus in accordance with claim 1 or 2, wherein said work monitoring means (401,402) is arranged to determine said work contribution data based upon the frequency of data processing instructions received by said receiving means for the input of data associated by said association means with respective items of identification data. Computer apparatus in accordance with claim 1, wherein said work monitoring means (401,402) is arranged to determine said work contribution data based upon the ratio of the frequency of data instructions for the retrieval of data to the frequency of data instructions for the input of data received by said receiving means associated by said association means with respective items of identification data. Computer apparatus in accordance with claim 1, wherein said work monitoring means (401,402) is arranged to determine said work contribution data based upon the total number of data instructions received by said receiving means associated by said association means with respective items of identification data. Computer apparatus in accordance with claim 1, wherein said work monitoring means (401,402) is arranged to determine said work contribution data based upon the timing of data processing instructions received by said receiving means associated with respective items of identification data. Computer apparatus in accordance with claim 1, wherein said work monitoring means (401,402) is arranged to determine work contribution data based upon a comparison of data processing instructions received by said receiving means associated by said association means with respective items of identification data relative to data processing instructions received by said receiving means associated by said association means with other items of identification data. Computer apparatus in accordance with any preceding claim, wherein said means for causing is arranged to inhibit said processing means from performing data processing operations in accordance with received data processing instructions associated with items of identification data when said work contribution data associated with said items of identification data reaches a predetermined value. Computer apparatus in accordance with claim 8, wherein said means for causing is arranged to inhibit or permit the processing of data processing operations relating to the input of data associated by said association means with items of identification data associated with work contribution data which reaches a first value and to inhibit or permit the processing of data processing operations relating to retrieval of data associated with data processing instructions received by said receiving means associated with items of identification data by said association means associated with work contribution data which reaches a second value. A computer network comprising: a plurality of terminals (10,20,30) for generating data processing instructions for a group project; and computer apparatus in accordance with any one of claims 1 to 9. A computer network in accordance with claim 10, wherein said terminals (10,20,30) are arranged to display images indicative of individuals contributing to a said group project and the colour or size of a display frame of said images, the zooming level, the number of colours in the images, the frame rate of moving images, the pixel density of the images, the delay and voice synchronisation of the images or the volume of sound associated with images is determined for each of said images based upon said output data output by said output means. A computer network in accordance with claim 10, wherein said terminals are arranged to display images indicative of individuals contributing to a said group project and to vary the colour spectrum of said images on the basis of said output data output by said output means. A computer network in accordance with claim 10, wherein said terminals (10,20,30) are arranged to display a bar graph where said bar graph is representative of said data output by said output means. A computer network in accordance with claim 10, wherein said terminals (10,20,30) are arranged to display images indicative of individuals contributing to a said group project, each of said images having an associated audio file, wherein the sampling rate of the audio file associated with each of the images is set on the basis of said output data output by said output means. A computer network in accordance with any of claims 10 to 14, wherein said terminals (10,20,30) are arranged to display a prompt requesting the input of data processing instructions and based upon said output data output by said output means. A recording medium storing computer implementable process steps for generating within a programmable computer a computer apparatus in accordance with any claims of claims 1 to 9.

Inventors: KUROSAWA TAKAHIRO, KUROSAWA, TAKAHIRO, Kurosawa, Takahiro, c/o Canon K.K.
Applicants: CANON KK, CANON KABUSHIKI KAISHA
Application year: 1996
Main classification: G06F17
IPC codes: G06Q10, G06F15, G06F13, H04N7