Carlos A. Sánchez 03/04/2008

 CONCEPTS  Historical Perspective  40,000 B.C.  BABBLE - LOOPS (IBM Social Computing Lab)  Knowledge Management Application  Social Translucence  AWARE (University of Aarhus – Denmark)  Context Mediated Social Awareness in Mobile Cooperation – Healthcare environment  Java Awareness Context Framework – JACF  iSOCIALIZE (University of Aalborg – Denmark)  Mobile Social Awareness amongst family and acquaintances  Awareness Cues

What is the percent genetic difference between humans an chimpanzees? ~ 1.23% What is the percent critical difference? 0.01% to 0.02% Which one is arguably the most critical difference?

LANGUAGE : ~40,000 B.C.  CONVERSATION Why is conversation important? Synchronous Knowledge Transfer in a Social Space What was missing?

WRITING: ~ 4,000 B.C. - Cuneiform ~ 2,000 B.C. - Alphabetic Script  PERSISTENCE What did persistence bring? Asynchronous Knowledge Transfer What was missing?

Printing Press: Johan Gutenberg, 1439  Mass Dissemination of Knowledge  Standards : A book was the same everywhere  Who said what & when What did the printing press bring? Scientific Communities  Industrial Revolution What was missing?

Linking computers ARPANETX.25 - October 29 th, 1969 InternetTCP/IP - January 1 st, 1983 Linking documents WWWFirst Web Page  August 6 th,1991 What did these added? Asynchronous and Synchronous Communications Decoupling of Space and Time Instantaneous Mass Coverage Multiple way Communications What was missing?

Linking people : Web Chat rooms, collaborative filtering, mash-ups, podcasting, social navigation, social search, virtual communities, sharing, blogs, wikis What did Web 2.0 bring? A Digital knowledge oriented environment where human social interactions create and share content using the web as a platform. What is missing? Can we do better?

Conversation, Persistence, Synchronous and Asynchronous Communications, Place decoupling, mass dissemination, who said what/when, multi-way communications, knowledge communities, and linking computers, documents and people. What is used in IM systems? What is gained? What is lost?

Babble & Loops

Solid Door with “Please Open Slowly” Sign vs. Glass Door  Visibility of Social Information  Humans react faster to movement, faces and figures than printed signs  Awareness Support  I know you are in the other side. You know I’m here  We both know the social rules  Accountability  I know that you know that I know

Power of Constraints: Private vs. Public Information

Digital Systems are generally opaque to social information  In the digital world we are socially blind i.e. Waiting in Line at USPS vs. Waiting on-line for the IM tech support at ebay What could be done? More on this coming

Knowledge Management Systems Capture, Retrieval, Dissemination of and organization’s internal information Traditional View Data Mining, Text clustering, database documents Social View Production and use of knowledge is a social phenomena

Social View of Knowledge Management  Who has worked on a project?  What have they done? Can we talk to them?  How have they used existing knowledge?  Social references for calls vs. database list  Information in databases is more useful if it provides links to enter social networks Knowledge database vs. Knowledge Communities

 Conversationally Based Knowledge Community  Conversation is essential : Natural medium to create, develop and validate knowledge  Conversation is a deep interactive intellectual process  Conversation is a fundamental social process  People speak to an audience  People portray themselves through conversation

Did I say that conversation is important?

Digital Conversations PERSIST Therefore They can be synchronous or asynchronous With an intimate or vast audience Can be searched, browsed, replayed, annotated, visualized, restructured, etc.

Approaches to make Social Activity Visible  Realist i.e. Teleconferencing  Problems: Scale, cost, social cues not well conveyed, bandwidth, support  Mimetic i.e.: Virtual Environments, Avatars  Problems: Scale, has to manipulate avatars to produce social cues, support  Abstract i.e.: Waiting on-line example next slide  Less is more: easy to understand, implement and maintain

Persistent textual representation of a conversation Everybody knows that conversations are persistent and shared in a sequential structure What are the challenges?

Social Proxy of a Conversation

Structure of a Knowledge Community

Diachronic (Longitudinal) Proxies

Supporting Context-Mediated social Awareness in Mobile Cooperation

 Context Aware Computing as facilitator of social awareness  CASE: Mobile Collaboration in a hospital environment  AWARE Architecture: Generic platform for supporting context mediated social awareness  JACT: Java Awareness Context Framework

 Hospital buildings are large. People move around (not co-located).  Nurses spend large amount of times keeping track of physicians location and availability.  Interns need to consult frequently with senior doctors about patients.  Doctors in operating room frequently have to wait for test results before advancing. Meanwhile they perform other activities Who to contact? When? How? Where?

Awareness in CSCW  Goal is to minimize unwanted interruptions through context-mediate social awareness  Interruptions  90% of brief conversations are unplanned  Only 55% of people who are interrupted continue in the same activity  Blocking calls is not an option in a hospital  60% of phone calls fail to reach recipient

Context-Mediated Social Awareness  In working settings people avoid interrupting each other when proper mechanisms are in place  Monitoring: The actor’s activity provide information to be monitored i.e. operating in room 103  Displaying: The actor selects what status information to be displayed i.e. at lunch.

Awarephone requirements  Context-mediated social awareness via context cues.  Direct synchronous communications  Exchange of prioritized messages by placing virtual post-it notes on a co-worker.

Test Results  Everybody liked the system  People don’t like to provide location information  Don’t want to provide the ability to be tracked i.e. length of the coffee breaks  Cell phone is preferred to pagers  provides the ability for immediate communication  Preset messages is a desirable option

Investigating Awareness Cues for a Mobile Social Awareness Application

Goals of the Study  Understand the nature of social awareness between acquainted and closely related people  How technology as well as traditional methods of communication support awareness

Challenges  Participating families found it difficult to maintain and overview of activities of family and friends  Participants found it difficult to determine appropriate times to call or interrupt  Participants expressed concerns about sharing all kinds of information about them

Social Awareness Cues  Activity: Actions and whereabouts of partner  Status: Communication state  Relation : Defines the social relation between partners  Vicinity: Distance to partner – How much effort contact requires

Evaluation  20 Subjects at Aalborg University - Denmark  Average age: 24 years old  Five pairs acquainted – Five pairs unacquainted  Video recorded sessions: two participants per session  Wizard of Oz evaluation

Findings:  Imprecise Awareness Cues: People don’t want to provide exact location  Awareness Cues Integration Challenges Privacy Concerns i.e. location vs. activity  Difficult to Maintain a mental model of contacts  Changes and updates of awareness cues  Awareness cues requires previous social construct