Conference Proceedings

Enabling Partial Participation in Remote Meetings

Zhongyi Bai, Nadya Ee Png, Eduardo Velloso

Proceedings of the 2026 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems | ACM | Published : 2026

Open access

Abstract

We propose and explore the concept of Partial Participation, facilitating remote collaborators to contribute to meetings in which they are not able to fully participate via an AI agent acting as a proxy. During the meeting, users can monitor LLM-generated real-time meeting updates and respond to questions posed by other attendees. Through a mixed-methods user study with 24 participants using our prototype, ProxyMe, we investigated how the frequency of updates (high vs. low) and the type of response style (multiple choice vs. text input) impact perceived presence and mental workload. Our findings reveal that no single setup is universally optimal, and the partial participation fosters a moder..

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University of Melbourne Researchers