CAIRO: a system for facilitating communication in a distributed collaborative engineering environment

Conference management is a critical component of a collaborative engineering effort. This paper describes, CAIRO (Collaborative Agent Interaction and synchROnization system), a system for managing participants in a distributed conference. We have drawn from various models of group interaction and social communications theory in order to develop CAIRO. While most conference systems have focused on the technical issues of communicating information between computers, we have also emphasized the role of the computer as a mediator and conference control mechanism. CAIRO provides both media synchronization, i.e. insuring that all information conveyed from one participant to another is synchronized, and agent synchronization, i.e. ensuring effective structuring and control of a distributed conference.