Workspace Awareness without Overload:Contextual Filtering of Social Interactions

19/07/2009, Smart Offices and Other Workspaces,Workshop of the Intelligent Environments 2009 conference, Barcelona, Spain

Adrien Joly ♠, ♣, Pierre Maret ♦, Johann Daigremont ♠

♠ Alcatel-Lucent Bell Labs France ♣ Université de Lyon, LIRIS UMR 5205, INSA de Lyon♦ Université de Lyon, Laboratoire Hubert Curien, UMR CNRS 5516

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 tag-cloud-based

framework for Context-Aware

notifications

First application environment:

Workspace (enterprise workers)

KnowledgeManagement

SocialNetworkin

g

Context-Awarenes

s

CSCW

* CSCW: Computer-Supported Collaborative Work

Ordre du jour

1.Motivation

2.Proposed solution

3.The Contextual Notification Framework

4.First results

5.Discussion

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

1 Motivation

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

Motivation

Office n°1

buy

Office n°2

sell

Office n°3

drive

Office n°4

test

People working in separate spaces lose visibility of their common context

they miss communication/collaboration opportunities

lack of capitalization leads to work duplication

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

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

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

Motivation : « 1.0 » communication tools

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

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

Motivation : « 2.0 » communication tools

Can Social Networking Platforms help to increase Awareness in the

Enterprise ?

Context 2.0: content

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

Motivation

Can Social Networking Platforms help to increase Awareness in the

Enterprise ?

Content Sharing

Expertise Promotion

Social Notification

Context 2.0: content

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

Motivation

Can Social Networking Platforms help to increase Awareness in the

Enterprise ?

Numerous platforms

to maintain and followmanually...

Awarenessturns to

Overload

Context 2.0: content

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

Motivation

Can Social Networking Platforms help to increase Awareness in the

Enterprise ?

Content Sharing

Expertise Promotion

Social Notification

Filter

Enterpriseworker

ContributionsExpertiseActivitiesStatus

UpdatesContactsResourcesRecognition

Needed

Context 3.0: activity

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

2 Proposed solution

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

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

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

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

Proposed solution

Office n°1

buy

Office n°2

sell

Office n°3

drive

Office n°4

test

Contextual Notification Framework Filtered Ambient Awareness

conte

xt

notifi

catio

ns

conte

xt

notifi

catio

ns

conte

xt

notifi

catio

ns

conte

xt

notifi

catio

ns

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

Proposed solution – Use case

Alice Bob Carol

Contextual Notification Framework

conte

xt

notifi

catio

ns

conte

xt

notifi

catio

ns

conte

xt

notifi

catio

ns

Bob is working on a Java development project.

??? ???

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

Proposed solution – Use case

Alice Bob Carol

Contextual Notification Framework

conte

xt

notifi

catio

ns

conte

xt

notifi

catio

ns

conte

xt

notifi

catio

ns

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

??? ???

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

Proposed solution – Use case

Alice Bob Carol

Contextual Notification Framework

conte

xt

notifi

catio

ns

conte

xt

notifi

catio

ns

conte

xt

notifi

catio

ns

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

Alice and Carol have been developing this module.

??? ???

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

Proposed solution – Use case

Alice Bob Carol

Contextual Notification Framework

conte

xt

notifi

catio

ns

conte

xt

notifi

catio

ns

conte

xt

notifi

catio

ns

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

Alice and Carol have been developing this module.

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

BobSOS

!

Similar context

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

Proposed solution – Use case

Alice Bob Carol

Contextual Notification Framework

conte

xt

notifi

catio

ns

conte

xt

notifi

catio

ns

conte

xt

notifi

catio

ns

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

Alice and Carol have been developing this module.

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

BobSOS

!

Similar context

Transparent context updatesTransparent context updates

Contextually relevant notificationsContextually relevant notifications

New opportunities for communication and exchangeNew opportunities for communication and exchange

Less cognitive overloadLess cognitive overload

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

3 The Contextual Notification Framework

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

The Contextual Notification Framework - architecture

Contextaggregator

Desktop activity sniffers Social notifier

ContextualFilter

Enterpriseworker

Use

r’s

work

stati

on

Infra

structu

re

Interaction logs

(REST interface)

High level context

Proposednotifications

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

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

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

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

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

The Contextual Notification Framework – Context and Events - Examples

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...

Bob is trying to compile a moduleBob is trying to compile a module

Adrien's browsing topic changedAdrien's browsing topic changed

Pierre contributed to the reportPierre contributed to the report

survey social networking mashup

community facebooktwitter ambient

awareness people

report deliverable

project-Thunderms-word WP5

contribution comments

partners minutes

Event

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

The Contextual Notification Framework – Context and Events – Detailed example

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

com.eclipse.compile()com.eclipse.compile()

alcatel-lucent.com/~bobalcatel-lucent.com/~bob

2009-03-17 14:15.012009-03-17 14:15.01

Origin: localhost:80/firefox?tabsOrigin: localhost:80/firefox?tabs

development(13)...development(13)...

Bob is trying tocompile a module

Bob is trying tocompile a module

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

4 First results

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

Appendix: Intended context providers

Done

Copyright © 2009 Alcatel-Lucent, d.r.

First results – from web navigation to contextual clouds

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

Base »

(about Firefox programming)

http://kb.mozillazine.org/Getting_started_with_extension_development

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

User

Framework

KB

Low-level data and events

Categorization

Aggregation

First results – instantiating the framework

Filtering and aggregation

Personalization

Synthesis

Notifi-cation

UC1 UC3UC2

Event

Contextualcloud

Stopwords

Browsed web pages (events)

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

Aggregation

User'scontext

Event:Opening,closing,focusingon a page

Evt

EvtEvt

Cloud similarityevaluation

Similarity graph

Sidebar

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

First results – current implementation

Contextaggregator

Desktop activity sniffers Social notifier

ContextualFilter

Enterpriseworker

Use

r’s

work

stati

on

Infra

structu

re

Interaction logs

Contextual cloud

Proposednotifications

SemanticProxyWeb service

KeyphraseExtractionAlgorithm

Del.icio.usREST API

Internet

HTML Metaextractor

Firefoxsniffer

Firefox tabevents

Sidebar

Similaritygraph

Copyright © 2009 Alcatel-Lucent, d.r.

First results – comparing four context cloud extractors

• Fixed weights

• Irrelevant words

• Works for all

• No weights

• Weird literals

• Some keywords

• Needs learning

• Weights = occurrences

• Technologies and entities

• Not descriptive

• Good weight distribution

• Clear topics

• Not for all pages

Collaborative annotation

gives a better description

of the context

Discussion

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

Discussion

Contextual Notification Framework to enable Ambient Awareness

Logging user actions on his workstation

Contextual cloud synthesis for event propagation

Context similarity evaluation for filtering relevant

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

quality of logic Generalization of the framework (outside the enterprise)

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

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

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

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.

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

Background on CSCW

Computer-Supported Collaborative WorkPrevious 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]

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

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 ?