Developing a Context-Aware Application Using Existing Technology A Prototype for Human-Centered Computing Danyel Fisher Fall, 1999

Overview  On context (Activity, Ecologies)  On existing context systems  On the need for a context-aware system  A possible prototype  Implementation  Demonstration  Recommendation

On Existing Context  Computers require explicit invocation of applications: “Start | Programs | MS Word; File | Open Document; My Documents \ Reports \ Current \ Latest Results.doc”  Most projects require far more than  One document at a time  One interaction at a time

The Problem “Ok, so I want to work on my Databases project. I need to find that article, in PDF; I need to pull up that web page with the algorithm; I need to start Java and Matlab; I need to look over that from Kris— not the one about the party, and not the one about the other class—and I— Wait, I just got a note from one of my students. Where’s that gradebook gone?”

Solutions  Multiple desktop managers  UNIXish solution. Lots of explicit setup  EMACS “Save desktop”  Lots of files to dig through  Long load time  “Recent documents” in Windows  Microsoft Binder  Web page histories

A Little Closer…  Remembrance Agent  Watches what you, and people in your group, type. Stores and indexes old answers to questions. Search facility.  Insidious Big Brother Database (IBBDB)  EMACS attachment. Indexes all files that go through any buffer and continually recommends relevant entries in the database.

What’s Still Missing?  Automatic, permanent associations.  Manual associations  Context awareness  What am I doing right now?  How do I usually interact with this artifact?

Scope of the Problem  There is already some standing research on tracking ideas through various logs.  There are a few growing projects that try to calculate context and make recommendations.  With a poor interface, these are  Annoying (the Office Assistant)  Useless

Information Ecologies  Can accommodate many types of interaction  Can change evolutionarily  Allow careful observation  Focus on people’s interaction with information. (Davenport)

As the User Works…  The system calculates current context, suggests related artifacts  Alternately, the user navigates—and creates–a graph of related ideas.

Extra-Low-Fidelity Prototype  Hand-recorded log of a day’s interactions  November 23, 1999  Day included three different projects, advisor meeting, time in the lab with undergrads  Event Log.doc Event Log.doc  Hand-processed and labeled into contexts  Placed into graphing software

The Goal of this Demo  Conceptual model of how information is arranged  A graph of contexts, perhaps  Not really user-visible in this way

Existing Software  The Brain  Tamara Munzer’s hyperbolic trees on spheres  Not available: Xerox’s hyperbolic graphs (pending patent dispute)

DEMO: The Brain 

Reflections: The Brain  Can’t see anything more than one link away, no sense of heaviness, weight, significance  Easy to move through  Disorienting transitions

DEMO: Hyperviewer  3/ 3/

Reflections: Hyperviewer  Gives weight image  Harder to move through (Is this an inevitable tradeoff?)  This implementation has a poor UI, although that is not necessary.

Last Notes  “Spanning tree plus shortcuts” structure is great  Would have preferred a system that could deal with clouds, not specific nodes  Conceptually reduce to a graph, with different display  Is this an OS addition or a window manager replacement?

Future Work  Start collecting real-thing contexts  User studies to see examples of transitions:  Do non-research types switch topics, with so many documents, this often?  Start categorizing; apply research as it comes out