awareness without overload

Awareness without Overload

in Computer-Supported Collaborative Environments

Adrien Joly

Universiteit Twente, 19/03/2009

PhD supervisor: Pr. Pierre Maret

2 | Awareness without Overload | March 2009 Copyright © 2009 Alcatel-Lucent, d.r.

Abstract and scope

Goal: Support collaboration and

knowledge exchange by enabling

Ambient Awareness, based on

computer-based actions and

context

Proposition: A framework for Context-

Aware notifications

First application environment:

Enterprise workers

KnowledgeManagement

SocialNetworking

Context-Awareness

CSCE

* CSCE: Computer-Supported Collaboration Environment

Ordre du jour

1.Motivation

2.Proposed solution

3.The Contextual Notification Framework

4.Research issues

5.Discussion


1 Motivation


Motivation

Have you met Ted?

Social networking is about creating and maintaining ties

between people that are emotionally connected or have

common interests


Motivation

Creation of new ties (as well as conversations) rely on:

Relevance of potential match

The common context of encounter

Trust as a warranty of relevance

Have you met Ted?

Transportation Conference


Motivation

Office n°1

buy

Office n°2

sell

Office n°3

drive

Office n°4

test

People working in remote places lose visibility of their common context

they miss communication/collaboration opportunities

lack of capitalization leads to work duplication


Motivation : « 1.0 » communication tools

Office n°1

buy

Office n°2

sell

Office n°3

drive

Office n°4

test

Communication tools can help to increase awareness and initiate discussions

I want to buy a car.

Do you guys sell one?

Context 1.0: hierarchy



Communication tools can help to increase awareness and initiate discussions

… BUT make Awareness very time-consuming!

SPAM!

My baby has just born

He is so cute!

Pills for sale

-80% !!!!

Office n°1

buy

Office n°2

sell

Office n°3

drive

Office n°4

test

I want to buy a car.

Do you guys sell one? I want to sell my car.

Anybody need one?

I like driving cars.

Can I test yours? I work for a magazine

Cars wanted for test

Context 1.0: hierarchy



Can Social Networking Platforms help to increase Awareness in the Enterprise ?

Context 2.0: content


Motivation


Content Sharing

Expertise Promotion

Social Notification



Motivation


Numerous platformsto maintain and follow

manually...

Awarenessturns to

Overload



Motivation


Content Sharing

Expertise Promotion

Social Notification

Filter

Enterpriseworker

ContributionsExpertiseActivitiesStatus

UpdatesContactsResourcesRecognition

Needed

Context 3.0: the user!


Background on CSCEComputer-Supported Collaborative Environments Previous works [Dourish'92]: “Shared Feedback”:

Human annotation of tracked actions on documents

Add useful context information, and avoid duplication

[Amelung'05]: Context-Aware Activity Notification System (CANS):

Based on Sakai Collaboration & Learning Environment (web platform)

Social context only: “current membership, the collective goals of individuals”

– Context = project / community of practice !

Basically, an adaptive publication/subscription system for web-based communities

Applied workspace awareness systems:

Collaborative bug tracking [Ellis'07]

Configuration management [Sarma'08]

Collaborative software development [Biehl'07]


2 Proposed solution


Proposed solution

Office n°1

buy

Office n°2

sell

Office n°3

drive

Office n°4

test

People working in remote places lose visibility of their common context

they miss communication/collaboration opportunities

lack of capitalization leads to work duplication

??? ??? ??? ???


Proposed solution

Office n°1

buy

Office n°2

sell

Office n°3

drive

Office n°4

test

Contextual Notification Framework Filtered Ambient Awareness

context

notifications

context

notifications

context

notifications

context

notifications


Proposed solution – Use case

Alice Bob Carol

Contextual Notification Framework

context

notifications

context

notifications

context

notifications

Bob is working on a Java development project.??? ???



Alice Bob Carol


context

notifications

context

notifications

context

notifications

Bob is working on a Java development project, and one module does not work...

??? ???



Alice Bob Carol


context

notifications

context

notifications

context

notifications


Alice and Carol have been developing this module.

??? ???



Alice Bob Carol


context

notifications

context

notifications

context

notifications



Because she is also currently developing in Java, Alice is notified of Bob's problem.

BobSOS!

Similar context



Alice Bob Carol


context

notifications

context

notifications

context

notifications



Because she is also currently developing in Java, Alice is notified of Bob's problem.

BobSOS!

Similar context

Transparent context updates

Contextually relevant notifications

New opportunities for communication and exchange

Less cognitive overload


3 The Contextual Notification Framework


The Contextual Notification Framework - architecture

Contextaggregator

Desktop activity sniffers Social notifier

ContextualFilter

Enterpriseworker

Use

r’s

wor

ksta

tion

Infrastructure

Interaction logs

(REST interface)

High level context

Proposednotifications


User

Framework

KB

Low-level data and events

Categorization

Aggregation

The Contextual Notification Framework – Theoritical dataflow

Filtering and aggregation

Personalization

Synthesis

Notifi-cation

User'scontext

UC1 UC3UC2

Evt

EvtEvt

Event


The Contextual Notification Framework – Context and Events

The Event:

Identifies an Action (or interaction)

From a person / an agent

At a given timestamp

The Contextual Cloud:

Contains weighted tags

Represents the subject / topic of the event

Tags might hold additional attributes

e.g. Freshness, origin, reasoning path...

Event


The Contextual Notification Framework – Context and Events - Examples

The Event:









Bob is trying to compile a module

Adrien's browsing topic changed

Pierre contributed to the report

survey social networking mashup

community facebooktwitter ambientawareness people

report deliverable

project-Thunderms-word WP5

contribution commentspartners minutes

Event


The Contextual Notification Framework – Context and Events – Detailed example

The Event:









Event

com.eclipse.compile()

alcatel-lucent.com/~bob

2009-03-17 14:15.01

Origin: localhost:80/firefox?tabs

development(13)...

Bob is trying tocompile a module


User

Framework

Stopwords

Browsed web pages (events)

Keyword extraction(del.icio.us...)

Aggregation

Contextualcloud

The Contextual Notification Framework – Current implementation

Cloud similarity evaluation

Threshold

Notifi-cation

Event:Opening,closing,focusingon a page

Evt

EvtEvt


4 Research issues


Research issues

Open questions for next steps

How to model events and their context ?

How to generate homogeneous contextual clouds ?

How to filter the contextual information ?

How to evaluate context proximity ?

Discussion


Discussion

Contextual Notification Framework to enable Ambient Awareness: Logging user actions on his workstation Event propagation with contextual synthesis Context similarity evaluation for filtering relevant notifications Designed for minimal user interaction and system transparency

(privacy & trust)

Next steps: Iterative improvement of software In-lab experiment to evaluate user acceptance and quality of

logic Generalization of the framework (outside the enterprise)


References

P. Dourish and V. Bellotti. Awareness and coordination in shared workspaces. In CSCW '92: Proceedings of the

1992 ACM conference on Computer-supported cooperative work, pages 107-114, New York, NY, USA, 1992. ACM.

C. J. Amelung. A context-aware notification framework for developers of computer supported

collaborative environments, PhD thesis, University of Missouri, 2005

J. B. Ellis, S. Wahid, C. Danis, and W. A. Kellogg. Task and social visualization in software development:

evaluation of a prototype. In CHI '07: Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems,

pages 577-586, New York, NY, USA, 2007. ACM.

A. Sarma, D. Redmiles, and A. van der Hoek. Empirical evidence of the benefits of workspace awareness in

software configuration management. In SIGSOFT '08/FSE-16: Proceedings of the 16th ACM SIGSOFT International

Symposium on Foundations of software engineering, pages 113-123, New York, NY, USA, 2008. ACM.

J. T. Biehl, M. Czerwinski, G. Smith, and G. G. Robertson. Fastdash: a visual dashboard for fostering awareness

in software teams. In CHI '07: Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems, pages 1313-1322, New York, NY, USA, 2007. ACM.

A. Joly, P. Maret, and J. Daigremont. Context-awareness, the missing block of social networking. International

Journal of Computer Science and Applications, 4(2), 2009.


www.alcatel-lucent.comwww.alcatel-lucent.com

Appendix


Appendix: Keyword extraction results

Web page: « Getting started with extension development – Mozillazine Knowledge Base »

(about Firefox programming)

http://kb.mozillazine.org/Getting_started_with_extension_development

http://kb.mozillazine.org/Getting_started_with_extension_development


Appendix: Intended context providers

Done

awareness without overload

Technology