Measuring the level of engagement among participants in a meeting is crucial for evaluating collective understanding. While previous studies have utilized multiple sensors, such as wearable devices, to gauge engagement levels in offline environments, the shift to remote meetings due to the COVID-19 pandemic presents new challenges. In this study, we propose a method for measuring student engagement during online meetings using only the built-in web cameras on their devices. We collect high, middle, and low engagement level recording data from 24 students. We decided to collect data using the role-acting approach instead of conventional self-reporting or post-experiment annotation. With the feature extraction based approach, we achieved a classification rate of 46.7%. With a deep learning based approach, we achieved a classification rate of 89.5% using MobileNetV2 for leave-one-participant-out cross-validation, which demonstrated higher accuracy than previous studies. From the model, we implement an application EnGauge and conduct a pilot study. The results demonstrate a new approach to data collection, an optimal engagement level recognition model, and application scenarios.

The emergence of various types of commercial cameras (compact, high resolution, high angle of view, high speed, and high dynamic range, etc.) has contributed significantly to the understanding of human activities. By taking advantage of the characteristic of a high angle of view, this paper demonstrates a system that recognizes micro-behaviors and a small group discussion with a single 360 degree camera towards quantified meeting analysis. We propose a method that recognizes speaking and nodding, which have often been overlooked in existing research, from a video stream of face images and a random forest classifier. The proposed approach was evaluated on our three datasets. In order to create the first and the second datasets, we asked participants to meet physically: 16 sets of five minutes data from 21 unique participants and seven sets of 10 min meeting data from 12 unique participants. The experimental results showed that our approach could detect speaking and nodding with a macro average f1-score of 67.9% in a 10-fold random split cross-validation and a macro average f1-score of 62.5% in a leave-one-participant-out cross-validation. By considering the increased demand for an online meeting due to the COVID-19 pandemic, we also record faces on a screen that are captured by web cameras as the third dataset and discussed the potential and challenges of applying our ideas to virtual video conferences.

Although language learners have different contexts and motivations, sensing personal backgrounds to optimize learning materials has still been challenging. By focusing on the huge movement of Social Networking Services (SNS) such as Instagram, we came up with the idea of utilizing social posts, in particular images, as learning materials. This paper presents our working prototype of the proposed system that extracts keywords from these images and leverages GPT-3 to generate sentences for acquiring new vocabulary around the keywords. By conducting a pilot study involving three users, we found that 2.2 words appeared as unknown words for the user in one generated sentence on average, and there is room for improvement in the proposed system. These findings can be utilized in a large-scale evaluation designed in the future.

Engagement is one of the core cognitive states in communication. Increased engagement improves the quality and immersion of the conversation. In this demonstration, we aim to present a metacognition augmentation application called Metacognition-EnGauge. This work aims to discover three research questions. Does self-metacognition augmentation of engagement levels support participant to be engaged in the meetings? Does group-metacognition augmentation of engagement levels support participant to be engaged in the meetings? Do participants prefer none, self, or group-metacognition augmentation intervention in the online meetings? To answer these questions, we conducted online meeting experiments with 18 participants. As a result, we found that self-metacognition augmentation outperformed well on increasing average engagement levels. According to the survey, participant preference shows group-metacognition as the best intervention.