Energieinformatik2017

About Energieinformatik2017 Android App

Energieinformatik is the official mobile application of the 6th D-A-CH+ Conference on Energy Informatics. It provides general information about the conference such as schedule, keynote speakers, and paper sessions. Moreover, it serves as a tool for rating the presentations during the conference. It is also used to facilitate data collection during a research study conducted at the University of Lugano, in Switzerland.

What is the study about?
The study aims to investigate the engagement of presenters and audience during a conference. Audience engagement during different performances has witnessed high interest by researchers of the last decades. However, a few researchers have investigated audience engagement during a conference. People attending a conference presentation typically provide feedback to the presenter throughout the course of the presentation by nodding, smiling, asking questions, checking email and so on. However, it is difficult for the presenter to understand audience sentiment to their presentation when presenting to large groups. It is even harder for the audience participants to understand the reactions of the people around them as they focus on the presentation per se. We argue that gauging the audience experience might provide an important measure of the quality of the presentations during a conference. Moreover, it may provide insights about audience’s most memorable moments of this experience, which then would be helpful for conference organizers to better plan future events.

In years, engagement has been mainly measured with surveys and external observations, these methods have several limitations that can be overcome by using more promising and advanced technologies such as smartphones and wearable devices.

The automated process of measuring the presenters’ and audience’s engagement during a conference can open plenty of possible solutions for presenters, audience and organizers of the conference. The presenter may get feedback on how the presentation during the conference is received by audience. Audience may benefit by getting feedback on how the other people in audience response to the same stimuli, which would further engage them with each other and the presentation itself. Finally, this feedback would be useful for conference organizers to create a memorable experience for their participants by looking at the most memorable events during the conference and creating future events based on that.
 
Goal of the project:
The aim of our project is to investigate presenter and audience engagement during a conference. In order to achieve this goal, smartphones and wearable devices will be used to gathered behavioral and physiological information from presenters and audience during the conference.