PhD position - Towards a Smart Tool for Supporting Facilitation of Group Decision Making Meetings

This thesis work will contribute to the development of group decision-support systems and multi-agent systems in the Cooperative multi-agent systems team (IRIT).

Problem description:

Organizations are often faced with complex problems that no individual in the organization can solve alone, so it is not surprising that collaborative group work has become a fundamental aspect of organizations [De Vreede et al., 2006]. Therefore, in most organizations, decisions do not appear as a result produced by a single decision-maker, but as a compromise between several decision-makers who often have different interests and objectives. Indeed, decisions often require expertise of several people, in particular those concerned by the decision. Even today, the main tool of collective decision-making remains the face-to-face meeting. However, it is not uncommon for these meetings to be perceived as unproductive in terms of efficient use of time and achievement of objectives.
Many collaborative technologies such as Group Support Systems have shown that under certain conditions these systems can greatly improve the efficiency of group work [Briggs et al., 2010]. However, in spite of good results, these technologies are still very difficult to be really used in organizations [Viguié, 2010]. This is generally due to the lack of training on groupware (and also on group processes conveyed) of people using these devices [Briggs et al 2005]. A simple solution would be to use a professional facilitator. Unfortunately, the availability of skilled facilitators is rare and expensive for organizations [Agres et al., 2005].
In order to fully benefit from collaborative technologies in group decision-making meetings, we propose to assist the participant having the role of facilitator (novice) in its task of meeting facilitation. To this end, our goal is to develop a system to support the facilitation of group decision-making meetings [Adla, 2010]. Moreover, this system must be able to adapt as automatically as possible to its context of use. The paradigm of adaptive multi-agent systems (AMAS [Gleizes et al., 2007]) seems to offer a very interesting solution to this problem.
In this thesis work, we will pay particular attention to time management in group decision-making meetings and on the assessment of real-time effectiveness of meetings. Following the work of Adla in [Adla, 2010], we propose to segment the collective decision-making into phases (ideas Generation, Choice, Reporting…) in which are associated group processes. A first study has already realized on the real-time assessment of the effectiveness of group decision-making meetings [Camilleri and Zaraté, 2009, Ait-Haddou et al., 2010]. In this study, we focused on the idea generation phase and the brainstorming process. In order to estimate and analyze the brainstorming sessions, we tried to automatically predict the production of ideas in real time (during the meeting). This work is based on dynamic models of ideas production proposed by Brown and Paulus in [Brown and Paulus, 1996]. We tried to determine the model parameters [Ait-Haddou et al., 2010].

Organisation:

Laboratoire de recherche : IRIT (institut de Recherche en Informatique de Toulouse) Computer science Institute of Toulouse France Team: SMAC (Systèmes multi-agents coopératifs) Cooperative multi-agent systems

Interested applicants send their application to

Supervisor : Marie-Pierre Gleizes Email : marie-pierre.gleizes@irit.fr
Co-Supervisor: Guy Camilleri Email : guy.camilleri@irit.fr

References:

• Abdelkader Adla (2010) : Aide à la Facilitation pour une prise de Décision Collective : Proposition d'un Modèle et d'un Outil. Thèse de doctorat, Université de Toulouse.
• Ait-Haddou, H., Camilleri, G., Zaraté, P. (2010): “Parameters calculation of brainstorming dynamic models”. In: G.J. De Vreede (ed.) Group Decision and Negotiation (GDN), Delft, Netherlands, pp. 24-26.
• Agres, A., Vreede, G. J. de, Briggs, R. O. (2005), "A Tale of Two Cities: Case Studies of GSS Transition in Two Organizations," Group Decision and Negotiation, 14, 256-266.
• Briggs, R. O., Kolfschoten, G. L., Vreede, G. J.de (2005), "Toward a Theoretical Model of Consensus Building," in Americas Conference on Information Systems, Omaha.
• Brown, V., Paulus, P.B. (1996): “A simple dynamic model of social factors in group brainstorming”. Small Group Research 27(1), pp 91-114.
• Guy Camilleri, Pascale Zaraté (2009). Towards a dynamic estimation of collective decision-making meetings efficiency. Dans : Group Decision and Negotiation (GDN 2009), Toronto Canada, 14/06/2009-17/06/2009, Marc Kilgour, Qiang Wang (Eds.), Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS), p. 27-29.
• Marie-Pierre Gleizes, Valérie Camps, Jean-Pierre Georgé, Davy Capera (2007). Engineering Systems which Generate Emergent Functionalities. Dans “Engineering Environment-Mediated Multiagent Systems - Satellite Conference held at The European Conference on Complex Systems (EEMMAS 2007)”, Danny Weyns, Sven Brueckner, Yves Demazeau (Eds.), Springer-Verlag, Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence (LNAI) 5049.
• Philippe Viguié (2010). Pilotage d’implémentations d’outils de TCAO au sein d’une organisation : Une Approche Méthodologique. Thèse de doctorat, Université Paul Sabatier.
• Vreede, G. J. de, Briggs, R. O., Kolfschoten, G.L. (2006) "ThinkLets: A Pattern Language for Facilitated and Practitioner-Guided Collaboration Processes," International Journal of Computer Applications in Technology, vol. 25, 140-154.