"Ask the Author": an academic conference supported system using wireless and mobile devices

International conference meetings play important role in exchanging researchers' ideas. Further conversations are often triggered by asking questions in conferences. How to use the mobile devices computing power to increase the amount, raising the quality of interactions, and facilitating presenters in collecting audiences' questions in conferences are important. In this paper, a system named ''Ask the Author" which is applied in helping audiences ask questions prior conference, during the conference and post conference. An experiment of the system had been studied at the Computer Supported Collaborative Learning (CSCL) 2005 conference held this year and some useful and elaborative observations were discussed.