Aggregating Presentation Design Knowledge to Improve Idea Transfer

Rapid and effective knowledge transfer is essential to timely and effective decision making in organizations of all types and sizes. We propose an innovative approach that will overcome the primary challenges to the rapid and accurate presentation of ideas, analysis, and plans. At the core of the proposed PresentWell system is a just-in-time authoring aid that will support users in the selection and application of principles and patterns for briefing design. Through a natural human-system dialog, this aid will incrementally elicit the user’s intent as well as gather important contextual information (e.g., available presentation time and the profile of the target audience). With this information the aid will be able to guide the user in the selection of appropriate presentation elements as well as the overall organization of the presentation. During the briefing PresentWell will provide real-time guidance to the presenter regarding how to best utilize their remaining time. Finally, we will explore the potential for judiciously collecting real-time feedback as a means for providing the presenter with an awareness of the uncertainties of the audience. In Phase I we will build a prototype to prove the feasibility of this approach.