Activity based computing Rahul Nair Advisor : Dr. Elizabeth Mynatt Collaborator: Steve Voida 22...
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Transcript of Activity based computing Rahul Nair Advisor : Dr. Elizabeth Mynatt Collaborator: Steve Voida 22...
Activity based computing
Rahul Nair
Advisor : Dr. Elizabeth Mynatt
Collaborator: Steve Voida
22 April 2004
History of Kimura
Multitasking support Peripheral displays Background Awareness Montage visualizations
Motivation
People seldom perform simple atomic actions
Look at the big picture Lots of tools to do individual stuff No good way to tie in all the work related to
an “activity”
But we don’t know what an “activity” is...
What is an activity?
Different for each individual Granularity varies
– “Getting a masters” – “Printing a paper”
How do people think about activity?– Micro level– Monolithic– Hierarchical
Goals
Learn about users mental model Collect the artifacts of an activity Look for links between actions on a computer
and activities Can we use actions to predict/classify
activities?
Study Design Alternatives
Ethnographic – Really difficult to follow people around– Limited manpower available
Diary study– Users often forget to note down tasks
Experience Sampling– Good compromise between the two– Can be made adaptive and context aware
Study Design
Pre-study questionnaire Record user activities over a 2 week period
– Documents– Email information– Web pages– Window activity
Users name each activity Long semi structured post study interview
Software
Visual basic application for window, web page and PDF tracking– Detect task changes using window rhythms– Pop ups to remind users to name tasks– Adapt to user feedback
VBA code for Outlook, Word and Excel Instrumented version of Pine
Pilot study
3 users over a one week period Web pages and email contacts provide good
identification Accuracy is dependant on users task
granularity– Varies from 40-80%
Need more data to draw final conclusions
Current status
Started last week Currently have 8 users
– Grad students, professors, non academic users
Try to get the widest possible range of users Interviews at the end of the two weeks
Future work
Data analysis Find a common task model for users Integrate with Kimura Indexing activities to aid recall Possible release as a time management tool
Questions?
Would you like to participate?
Related work
Virtual workspaces– Rooms, virtual desktop managers, etc...
Multitasking studies– Gonzalez 04, Czerwinski 04
Email studies– Bellotti, Gwizdka 02