Extensions for Smart Conference System

Intoduction

Smart Conference System (SCS) is software system to assist conference processes. The system serves as the moderator of the section and solves the following tasks: controls the schedule of presentations, provides information about the conference participants and  allows speaker to control projector from different types of devices, e.g. laptops, mobile phones, etc. The system includes several applications that interact with each other using software platform smart-m3. The basis of smart-m3 is ontology, which formally describes the interface to the specific application. This formal description makes it easy to add new applications into the system.

This project proposes to develop 2 additional applications for SCS: web client and instant messaging (IM) service.

1. Web client

At this moment the client application of SCS is implemented for mobile devices Nokia N810 and N900. To expand the list of supported mobile devices, it is proposed to develop a web-based interface to the system. In this way, any device with a browser can operate with SCS.

Web-based interface will be implemented as a servlet in Java. This interface should have the following functions: to provide lists of participants and presentations, to allow participants to register and to specify information about their self, to let speaker operate the projector.

2. IM service

At the conference, you may need to communicate with other participants, without interfering with the speaker. For this purpose you can use the services of instant messaging (IM) ICQ, MSN, Jabber. However, the direct use of existing IM solutions in the SCS has problems. Firstly, you need to add a list of participants in the contact list of the service. Secondly, the participant may have no account of existing services. To solve these problems it is proposed to deploy a local IM server at the conference. For this server it is proposed to develop plug-in that will automatically create the accounts of participants and list of contacts from the information provided by SCS over smart-m3.

The usecase looks as following. User register in SCS. After registration an account on the local IM server is automatically created including contact list of conference members. Then user can configure his IM client for usage of the local IM server and start communicating. At this moment, IM clients are available for most mobile devices. 

As a local IM server, we selected an open IM server OpenFire, which uses Jabber protocol. For this server the plug-in will be implemented, that imports data from SCS.

The demo is scheduled for 9th FRUCT conference.

Project team

Evgeny Linsky (SUAI), mentor

Alexander Malakhov (SUAI), PhD student, developer