The MITRE Multi-Modal Logger: its use in evaluation of collaborative systems

Collaborative environments have grown quite sophisticated over the years. They have evolved from simple text conferencing tools [2] to full suites of integrated multi-modal tools such as Habanero [9] or MITRE's room-based Collaborative Virtual Workspace [3, 4]. As a result, evaluating multi-modal collaborative systems is an order of magnitude more complex than single-user, single-application HCI evaluation. In the context of the DARPA Intelligent Collaboration &Visualization (IC&V) program, the MITRE HCI group has adapted its logging technology to the task of evaluating collaborative systems. The MITRE Multi-Modal Logger (MML) is a system for recording, retrieving, annotating, and visualizing data. In this paper, we describe the capabilities of the MML and its application to research including the IC&V Evaluation Working Group's work [5, 6, 7, 8, 13].