Integration of synchronous and asynchronous collaboration activities

The inegrated synchronous and asynchronous collaboration (ISAAC) project [1] is constructing a communication and collaboration system to bridge traditional workgroup barriers of time and space. Possible applications include military command and control, corporate real-time collaboration, and distributed teams of research scientists. Thus, this system must host the widest possible range of applications, and must run on heterogeneous hardware.ISAAC incorporates real-time (synchronous) collaboration technologies developed by the Habanero® project [2,3] at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, with asynchronous extensions. ISAAC research is aimed at moving information between synchronous and asynchronous modes. ISAAC's session capture conceptually transforms a real-time multiple tool collaboration into multimedia document, which can be analyzed and reused by other programs. Automated segmentation and indexing of captured audio and videoteleconference traffic adds further information.