Contextual Filter For The Ambient Enterprise (demo Paper Proposed To Sigir'09)

Review pending -- do not distribute Contextual Filter for the Ambient Enterprise Adrien Joly

Pierre Maret

Alcatel-Lucent Bell Labs France Centre de Villarceaux Route de Villejust 91620 Nozay, France

Université de Lyon Laboratoire Hubert Curien UMR CNRS 5516 18 Rue du Professeur Benoît Lauras 42000 Saint-Etienne, France

[email protected]

[email protected]

Categories and Subject Descriptors H.4.3 [Information Systems Applications]: Communication Applications

General Terms Knowledge Management, Ambient Awareness, Social Networking, Context-Awareness

Keywords Enterprise knowledge, User activity, Context similarity, Web 2.0, Collective intelligence, Notifications, Tag clouds

1.

On the so-called Web 2.0, numerous Social Networking Sites (SNS) have known a tremendous success as they brought new ways to communicate, interact, learn about people, and share content with them. Besides improving informal social ties [3], transposing Awareness to the enterprise is very promising for promoting collaboration. However, it can easily lead to information overload, which means productivity loss. With our prototype, we propose a way to stimulate enterprise internal communication while improving the relevance of these interactions with the current working context of their users.

2.

Figure 1: Modular overview of the prototype.

PROMOTING COLLABORATION

working on, because it will not imply as much cognitive load as an interruption about a subject that is currently irrelevant.

3.

• Desktop activity sniffers that track documents being currently accessed by the user on his terminal; • a local context aggregator that gathers interaction logs from the sniffers to synthetize the current user’s work context as a tag cloud;

DOCUMENTS AS CONTEXT CUES

Our prototype relies on the assumption that common context between two people is an important factor to trigger interaction [2] (e.g. sign of respect, conversation, or exchange). On Social Networking Sites like YouTube, Facebook, or even blogs, discussions emerge from comments on content [1]. This content becomes the common context of this discussion. In the enterprise, projects and documents are potential contexts materials for interaction. Indeed, a person will respond more efficiently to a notification or request related to the project (or subject) he/she is currently

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OVERVIEW OF THE PROTOTYPE

The prototype is currently composed of four modules:

• a centralized contextual filter that evaluates the similarity of current contextual clouds of every user to filter notifications and propose collaboration when relevant; • and a social notifier that displays these notifications and collaboration proposals on the users’ terminal.

4.

REFERENCES

[1] A. Joly, P. Maret, and J. Daigremont. Context-awareness, the missing block of social networking. International Journal of Computer Science and Applications, 4(2), February 2009. [2] Y. Vogiazou, M. Dzbor, J. Komzak, and M. Eisenstadt. Buddy space: Large scale presence for communities at work and play. In Proc. ECSCW03 Workshop, 2003. [3] D. Vyas, M. van de Watering, A. Eli¨ens, and G. van der Veer. Universal Access in Human-Computer Interaction. Ambient Interaction, chapter Engineering Social Awareness in Work Environments. 2007.

Review pending -- do not distribute 5.

REQUIREMENTS

In this section, we describe the hardware, software and network access required for performing the demonstration.

5.1

Hardware

This demonstration relies on three modern workstations (i.e. 1+ GHz CPU, 1+ GB of RAM) and one server (similar configuration) that have independent operating environment (i.e. separate sessions and IP addresses) on MS Windows XP. The workstations will communicate in loopback and to the server through IP port 80. Three independent screens are needed to see the current state of these three workstations at all times. However, because these workstations will be controlled one at a time, it is possible to run them in virtual machines, on the same physical computer sharing a common keyboard and mouse, as long as each running machine has its own screen.

5.2

Software

The demonstration runs on MS Windows XP with Java 1.5. Each workstation must have Mozilla Firefox 2 (or 3) installed, and Administrative rights must be given so that additional software can be installed. The demonstration consists of the following software on each workstation: • a Java-based local server, listening on port 80; • a native daemon that hooks on Win32 APIs and connects on local port 80; • a Firefox extension that also connects on local port 80; • and additional software such as Microsoft Office 2000+, and other third-party software that will be provided for simulating office-work activities on the workstations. The central server software is a Java-based daemon listening on IP port 80, that must have direct access to the web (through port 80, without proxy) and must be accessible from the workstations (through port 80).

5.3

Network Access

The three workstations and the central server need to be connected on a same IP network, and this network must offer direct access to the web (i.e. through port 80, without proxy). No extensive bandwidth is required but the persistence and latency of the connectivity must be reliable.