augur
It is common for people to make their schedules available to coworkers for
the purposes of determining their availability for an informal chat or
social gathering. Paper schedules tacked to doors, out-of-office messages,
and group calendar software all provide mechanisms to allow this type of
access.
Unfortunately, the uncertainty of everyday life makes it difficult for the
calendar to reflect exactly what the calendar's owner will be doing on a
given day. Meetings run late and cut into the time of other appointments,
special events conflict with recurring ones, and some events take on more
or less priority depending on other attendees, location, and one's role in
the event.
The Augur project addresses this uncertainty by using a probabilistic model
of a person's attendance habits. By learning from attendance at previous
events, the system predicts which future events are likely to be attended.
These predictions serve to inform coworkers who they are likely to see on a
given day and where they will see them.
Users enter their calendars into the Augur system simply by synchronizing
their PalmOS devices to a PC (support for iCalendar is also planned). The
calendar data is then stored in a SQL database and served to the Augur web
service.
After logging in, users may view their calendar via the interface displayed
in Figure 1. Events on their schedules are augmented with information
about which colleagues have also scheduled those events, as well as their
likelihood of attendance at those events. Users can browse the schedules
of colleagues side-by-side with their own, facilitating comparison.
We are currently using the Augur system as a test bed for understanding the
impact of intelligent assistance in groupware applications, including its
effects on the ability of users to find one another for informal chats, as
well as its effects on the image of users as perceived by themselves and
their colleagues.
See also:
augur: probabilistic
calendars
augur: social schemes
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people
Joe Tullio
David Nguyen
Jeremy Goecks
Elizabeth Mynatt
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funding
This project is funded by NSF CAREER Award #0092971. |
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publications
Tullio, J. (2003) "Intelligent Groupware to Support Communication and Persona Management" ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (Doctoral Consortium), Vancouver, British Columbia.
[pdf]
Tullio, J., Goecks, J., Mynatt, E., and Nguyen, D. (2002). "Augmenting
shared
personal calendars. Proceedings of the ACM Symposium on User Interface Software
and Technology (UIST 2002). Paris, France. [pdf]
Mynatt, E. and Tullio, J. (2001) "Inferring calendar event
attendance." In Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Intelligent User
Interfaces (IUI 2001). Santa Fe, New Mexico: ACM Press, pp. 121-128. [pdf]
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