This book has the objectives of establishing a structure and foundation for online, computer-mediated, and thus enhanced communication, and then explaining the latest related research and issues. As a teacher of computer science, I know that my students need knowledge about the significant issues in this broad, discipline-integrated area. Some of them will be working in this area and many others will use technologies that come out of research in this area. As a sometimes consultant in multimedia, I have been frustrated for several years by not being able to provide a satisfactory solution to a workshop-giving professor who wants to be able to capture knowledge in a meaningful and automated way from video-taped conversations of his workshop’s participants. This book provides answers, starting with the difficulty of a computer understanding human conversations and continuing with participating in conversations through agents and other intelligent environments.

The overall editor, Toyoaki Nishida, proposes social intelligent design as a new research field. His research involves artificial intelligence and human-computer interaction. He wants to establish environments conducive to enhanced group or team-oriented collaboration. To start, researchers must understand conversation. This involves not just computer science, but also social psychology and cognitive psychology. Researchers need to be able to both predict and evaluate the effect of a given communication medium on conversations, as well as the effect on the dynamics of the groups involved in the conversations. The goal is to capture knowledge from conversations.

This discipline strives to provide a suite of intelligent media technologies capable of analyzing and further aiding conversations, with the objective of adding to the knowledge of the participants. Some of the technologies involve agents, total intelligent environments to help the conversational participants, adaptable content, and persistent memory.

The book is a well-assembled edited collection of contributed chapters arranged in four parts: conversational artifacts; conversational contents; conversational environment design; and conversational measurement, analysis, and modeling. Some chapter titles follow. In Part 1, we find chapters on “The Role of Humor in Interpersonal Interaction,” “Why Emotions Should Be Integrated into Conversational Agents,” and “Attentional Gestures in Dialogues between People and Robots.” In Part 2, there is a very good chapter on “Automatic Text Presentation for the Conversational Knowledge Process,” with a good section on the state of the art of natural language processing. Part 3 was the most interesting and intriguing to me. The leadoff chapter begins by describing a lecture archiving system. I found this to be very helpful. This chapter includes sections such as “Speaker Detection by Multimodal Sensors and Recognition of Dynamic Situations.” In Part 4, we find such chapters as: “The Analysis of Multimodal Three-Party Conversations” and “An Analysis of Interaction Mechanisms in Online Communities.”

This is not a computer science textbook. There are no end-of-chapter exercises. The book is meant to help graduate students and researchers obtain further understanding of this field. Developers who work in related areas may also find this book useful. The chapter authors provide many interesting and helpful examples. There is a good overall index and each chapter has references. One small complaint is that the photographs are often too confusing or too dark to understand.