[QueueNews] Too Much Information

QueueNews queuenews at acmqueue.com
Mon Sep 4 08:00:02 PDT 2006 

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Latest Articles:


Too Much Information
Users often are not comfortable with others knowing what they were
doing. Context-aware applications are the wave of the future, but many
challenges remain.
http://acmqueue.com/rd.php?c.410
   (scroll down to read an excerpt from this article)


Automatic for the People - Transcript
Transcript of interview with Rob Gingell, CTO of Cassatt
http://acmqueue.com/rd.php?c.409



Latest Blog Posts:

Charlene O'Hanlon

Gadget Blaster
http://www.acmqueue.com/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=370
Those who know or have met me know I never go anywhere without my
beloved Sidekick II, which I acquired last year as a complement to my
regular cell phone (and through a different carrier). Lately, though,
Ive been thinking of consolidation. 

Community Effort
http://www.acmqueue.com/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=369
One thing I have grown to admire about the developer community is the
collaborative environment in which developers do their job.  

Terry Coatta

Saved by Services
http://www.acmqueue.com/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=368
Words cannot express how grateful I am for the coming of the web and
the
attendant "services revolution". But let me try anyway.


Computers Still Cool (and Profitable too)
http://www.acmqueue.com/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=362
The years following the tech bust of 2000 were not the happiest of
times
to be in the high tech industry.  


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New article on ACM Queue:
Too Much Information
http://acmqueue.com/rd.php?c.410
Two applications reveal the key challenges in making context-aware
computing a reality.
by Jim Christensen, Jeremy Sussman, Stephen Levy, William E. Bennett,
Tracee Ve
tting Wolf, Wendy A. Kellogg, IBM Research

>From the HCI issue, vol. 4, no. 6 - July/August 2006

article excerpt:
As mobile computing devices and a variety of sensors become
ubiquitous, new resources for applications and services - often
collectively referred to under the rubric of context-aware computing -
are becoming available to designers and developers. In this article, we
consider the potential benefits and issues that arise from leveraging
context awareness in new communication services that include the
convergence of VoIP (voice over IP) and traditional information
technology. 

To ground the discussion, we describe two services
that IBM has developed and deployed over the past few years to help
people communicate more effectively. We examine techniques that have
proven effective, as well as problems that remain unsolved. The two
services have a somewhat different focus. The first, called Grapevine,
helps a person communicate with another individual using an aggregated
and filtered set of contextual information. The second, the IBM
Rendezvous Service, helps people meet and talk on the telephone. While
people clearly do these things today without additional help from
context-aware services, the goals of such services are to allow people
to make better communication choices, engage in a richer and more
valuable interaction, and waste less time in accomplishing their
interactions, while providing significant cost savings to the
enterprise.


 The Promise and Perils of Context-Aware
 Computing

Many have noted that computing has long since
expanded beyond the desktop. For example, Thomas P. Moran of IBM's
Almaden Research Center and Paul Dourish of the University of
California
wrote in 2001:


  Computation is now packaged in a variety
  of devices. Smaller and lighter laptop/notebooks, as powerful as
  conventional personal computers, free us from the confines of the
  single
  desk. Specialized devices such as handheld personal organizers are
  portable enough to be with us all the time. Wireless technology
  allows
  devices to be fully interconnected with the electronic world.
  Cameras
  and VCRs are being supplanted by digital equivalents, while we
  increasingly listen to music on devices that are digital and
  solid-state. Cell phones are really networked computers. The
  distinction
  between communication and computation is blurring, not only in the
  devices, but also in the variety of ways computation allows us to
  communicate, from email to chat to voice to video.^1

 It is against this backdrop that the almost
 mesmerizing promise of context-aware computing emerges: cellphones
 that
 know when to be quiet; sensors that can judge an opportune time to
 interrupt. What's next? Perhaps a corporate credit card that can warn
 if
 an expense you are about to charge is not reimbursable? While the
 dream
 of intelligent devices has been alive for some time in the computer
 science community, it has not yet had a profound effect on the
 applications and services we use to get our jobs done. Why not?

 The simple answer is because it is hard to do well - or even well
 enough. After all, the desktop is a relatively controlled environment,
 whereas the real world is dynamic and complex. The gap between what
 technology can "understand" as context and how people understand
 context
 is significant. Indeed, some critics have asserted that context-aware
 computing makes a fundamental error in trying to remove the human from
 the control loop in creating intelligent autonomous devices.^2
 A different tactic is to capture context but render its results unto
 humans to decide what actions to take. It is this tack that IBM
 research
 has taken in applying context awareness to some of the communications
 tools that IBM employees use every day. It has not yet had the
 profound
 effect that we think is possible (perhaps inevitable), and here we
 consider some of the reasons for this result.

 IBM
 Grapevine

 The Grapevine service (originally described in the
 February 2004 issue of ACM Queue)^3 was used inside IBM
 beginning in 2001, and the research project was completed in 2005. Its
 most useful features have been absorbed into IBM product offerings. In
 a
 nutshell, Grapevine revealed a user's context to observers through a
 new
 dynamic program element that was embedded in popular existing
 applications such as e-mail, instant messaging, enterprise directory,
 Web sites, etc. This program element was presented to end users as a
 business card with realtime information, called a Grapevine e-card.
 Figure 1 is an example of an e-card.

 The e-card provided
 information about the owner's current context and activities. This
 allowed potential communicators to leverage contextual information in
 making decisions about when to initiate a contact and via which
 channel.
 Sources of context used by Grapevine were personal computers, mobile
 wireless PDAs, telephones, and motion detectors. The context extracted
 and derived from these devices included physical location, computer
 application activity (for example, was the user currently using IM or
 e-mail?), and telephone activity.

 Making a user's activity
 visible to others raises privacy and control issues, so Grapevine also
 provided a simple model for specifying a default level of
 context-awareness for one's e-card, and person- or group-specific
 mechanisms for allowing greater "translucence" of context. How did
 this
 help people communicate? How well did people cope with the potential
 issues?

 Location Awareness is a Good Thing

 The
 current or last-known physical location of a person was the most
 useful
 information provided by the Grapevine service. Observers used a
 subject's location not only to select an appropriate means of
 communication (instant message, e-mail, walk to the office), but also
 on
 occasion to decide whom to communicate with. For example, if you find
 that the person you want to communicate with was last known to be on
 the
 other side of the country one hour ago, you might choose another
 person
 for an inquiry. Notice that the person's last known location was
 combined with the time that the subject was last known to be at that
 location. A timestamp can make "stale" location information useful.

 Location was combined with other information to support a
 communication decision. For example, a colleague may observe that you
 are online from home in the early morning, and then you go offline.
 That
 colleague infers (correctly) that you are on your way to the office,
 and
 decides rather than calling to wait to speak with you in person when
 you
 arrive.
 Read the rest of this article at acmqueue.com
 http://acmqueue.com/rd.php?c.410
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 http://acmqueue.com/modules.php?name=Queuecasts&id=8
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