Enabling Partial Participation in Remote Meetings

Paper Title

Enabling Partial Participation in Remote Meetings

Publication Info

• Topic area: Remote collaboration and AI-mediated meeting participation
• Keywords: Partial participation, remote meetings, AI proxies, multitasking, LLM updates, social presence, mental workload, meeting comprehension, hybrid work, ProxyMe

Background and Problem

• Problem / challenge: Current collaboration platforms treat participation as a binary state (fully present or absent), failing to accommodate intermittent or multitasked engagement in remote meetings.
• Significance: Addressing this gap is critical as remote and hybrid work become more prevalent, with workers often multitasking or attending overlapping meetings.
• Motivation and related work: Prior research highlights the limitations of existing meeting tools in supporting flexible participation, the challenges of multitasking, and the potential of AI-generated updates and conversational agents. However, these approaches have not been fully explored for enabling meaningful contributions from absentees during live meetings.

Solution

• Proposed approach: ProxyMe, a prototype system that enables partial participation in meetings through real-time updates and AI-mediated decision deferrals.
• Novelty:
  1. Conceptualization of partial participation as a middle ground between synchronous and asynchronous meeting involvement.
  2. Development of ProxyMe, which combines real-time updates and agent-mediated deferrals to support multitasked participation.
  3. Exploration of how update frequency and response styles influence social presence, mental workload, and comprehension in multitasking scenarios.
• Procedure and key techniques:
  • Real-time meeting updates generated by an LLM (Google Gemini 2.5 Flash-Lite) in two styles: Low-Detail/High-Frequency (LD/HF) and High-Detail/Low-Frequency (HD/LF).
  • Agent-mediated deferrals prompting user responses via multiple-choice (MC) or text-input (TI) styles.
  • A mobile-friendly interface for monitoring updates and responding to deferrals.
  • A simulated meeting environment for controlled user study.

Results

• Concrete findings:
  • Social presence ratings averaged 3.53/7, indicating moderate connection with meetings.
  • Video comprehension scores were slightly lower with LD/HF updates (-1.03 effect size), while meeting comprehension showed minimal differences across conditions.
  • Mental workload was moderate to high (mean RSME = 79.79/150), with no significant differences between conditions.
  • Participants preferred MC response style over TI, regardless of update style.
• Advantage over baselines:
  • ProxyMe enables real-time engagement and decision-making, reducing reliance on post-meeting summaries and enhancing inclusion in ongoing discussions.
  • Updates and deferrals fostered a sense of presence and allowed participants to contribute semi-synchronously.
• Experiments / evaluation:
  • A 2 × 2 factorial user study with 24 participants (aged 19–30) evaluated the effects of update style (LD/HF vs. HD/LF) and response style (MC vs. TI) on comprehension, social presence, and mental workload.
  • Participants multitasked by watching a video lecture while engaging with simulated meetings through ProxyMe.
  • Data collection included quizzes, questionnaires (e.g., Networked Minds Scale, RSME), and structured interviews.
• Limitations and future work:
  • Small, student-based sample limits generalizability to professional settings.
  • Simulated meetings lacked the complexity and social dynamics of real-world scenarios.
  • Future work should explore live meeting deployments, richer engagement methods, and adaptive system configurations.

Summary

This paper introduces partial participation as a novel paradigm for remote meetings, addressing the limitations of binary participation models. The ProxyMe prototype demonstrates how AI-generated updates and agent-mediated deferrals can enable multitasked engagement, fostering moderate social presence and comprehension. A user study revealed trade-offs between update frequency, response styles, and mental workload, highlighting the contextual and individual variability in user preferences. While ProxyMe offers a promising approach to flexible meeting participation, future research should focus on real-world applications, richer interaction methods, and balancing productivity with well-being.