The document discusses a framework for improving workspace awareness through contextual filtering of notifications, aimed at enhancing collaboration and knowledge exchange among enterprise workers. It highlights the challenges of information overload in social networking tools and proposes a contextual notification system to provide relevant, low-cognitive-overhead communication updates. The framework utilizes aggregated context data to notify users of significant events and foster better communication opportunities.

1. Workspace Awareness without Overload: Contextual Filtering of Social Interactions 19/07/2009, Smart Offices and Other Workspaces, Workshop of the Intelligent Environments 2009 conference, Barcelona, Spain Adrien Joly ♠, ♣ , Pierre Maret ♦ , Johann Daigremont ♠ ♠ Alcatel-Lucent Bell Labs France ♣ Université de Lyon, LIRIS UMR 5205, INSA de Lyon ♦ Université de Lyon, Laboratoire Hubert Curien, UMR CNRS 5516

2. Abstract and scope Goal : Support collaboration and knowledge exchange by enabling Ambient Awareness, based on computer-based actions and context Proposition : A tag-cloud-based framework for Context-Aware notifications First application environment : Workspace (enterprise workers) Knowledge Management Social Networking Context- Awareness CSCW * CSCW: Computer-Supported Collaborative Work

3. Ordre du jour Motivation Proposed solution The Contextual Notification Framework First results Discussion

4. 1 Motivation

5. Motivation People working in separate spaces lose visibility of their common context Office n°1 buy  Office n°2 sell  Office n°3 drive  Office n°4 test  they miss communication/collaboration opportunities lack of capitalization leads to work duplication

6. Motivation : « 1.0 » communication tools Office n°1 buy  Office n°2 sell  Office n°3 drive  Office n°4 test  Communication tools can help to increase awareness and initiate discussions I want to buy a car. Do you guys sell one? Context 1.0: hierarchy

7. Motivation : « 1.0 » communication tools Communication tools can help to increase awareness and initiate discussions … BUT make Awareness very time-consuming ! SPAM! My baby has just born He is so cute! Pills for sale -80% !!!! Office n°1 buy  Office n°2 sell  Office n°3 drive  Office n°4 test  I want to buy a car. Do you guys sell one? I want to sell my car. Anybody need one? I like driving cars. Can I test yours? I work for a magazine Cars wanted for test Context 1.0: hierarchy

8. Motivation : « 2.0 » communication tools Can Social Networking Platforms help to increase Awareness in the Enterprise ? Context 2.0: content

9. Motivation Can Social Networking Platforms help to increase Awareness in the Enterprise ? Content Sharing Expertise Promotion Social Notification Context 2.0: content

10. Motivation Can Social Networking Platforms help to increase Awareness in the Enterprise ? Numerous platforms to maintain and follow manually... Awareness turns to Overload Context 2.0: content

11. Motivation Can Social Networking Platforms help to increase Awareness in the Enterprise ? Content Sharing Expertise Promotion Social Notification Filter Enterprise worker Contributions Expertise Activities Status Updates Contacts Resources Recognition Needed Context 3.0: activity

12. 2 Proposed solution

13. Proposed solution People working in remote places lose visibility of their common context Office n°1 buy  Office n°2 sell  Office n°3 drive  Office n°4 test  they miss communication/collaboration opportunities lack of capitalization leads to work duplication ??? ??? ??? ???

14. Proposed solution Office n°1 buy  Office n°2 sell  Office n°3 drive  Office n°4 test      Contextual Notification Framework  Filtered Ambient Awareness context notifications context notifications context notifications context notifications

15. Proposed solution – Use case Bob is working on a Java development project. Alice Bob Carol    Contextual Notification Framework context notifications context notifications context notifications ??? ???

16. Proposed solution – Use case Bob is working on a Java development project, and one module does not work... Alice Bob Carol    Contextual Notification Framework context notifications context notifications context notifications ??? ???

17. Proposed solution – Use case Bob is working on a Java development project, and one module does not work... Alice and Carol have been developing this module. Alice Bob Carol    Contextual Notification Framework context notifications context notifications context notifications ??? ???

18. Proposed solution – Use case Bob is working on a Java development project, and one module does not work... Alice and Carol have been developing this module. Because she is also currently developing in Java, Alice is notified of Bob's problem. Alice Bob Carol    Contextual Notification Framework context notifications context notifications context notifications Bob SOS! Similar context

19. Proposed solution – Use case Bob is working on a Java development project, and one module does not work... Alice and Carol have been developing this module. Because she is also currently developing in Java, Alice is notified of Bob's problem. Alice Bob Carol    Contextual Notification Framework context notifications context notifications context notifications Bob SOS! Similar context Transparent context updates Contextually relevant notifications New opportunities for communication and exchange Less cognitive overload

20. 3 The Contextual Notification Framework

21. The Contextual Notification Framework - architecture Context aggregator Desktop activity sniffers Social notifier Contextual Filter Enterprise worker User’s workstation Infrastructure Interaction logs (REST interface) High level context Proposed notifications

22. The Contextual Notification Framework – Theoritical dataflow User Framework KB Low-level data and events Categorization Aggregation Filtering and aggregation Personalization Synthesis Notifi- cation Evt Evt Evt Event User's context UC1 UC3 UC2

23. The Contextual Notification Framework – Context and Events The Event : Identifies an Action (or interaction) From a person / an agent At a given timestamp The Contextual Cloud : Contains weighted tags Represents the subject / topic of the event Tags might hold additional attributes e.g. Freshness, origin, reasoning path... Event

24. The Contextual Notification Framework – Context and Events - Examples The Event : Identifies an Action (or interaction) From a person / an agent At a given timestamp The Contextual Cloud : Contains weighted tags Represents the subject / topic of the event Tags might hold additional attributes e.g. Freshness, origin, reasoning path... Bob is trying to compile a module Adrien's browsing topic changed Pierre contributed to the report Event survey social networking mashup community facebook twitter ambient awareness people report deliverable project-Thunder ms-word WP5 contribution comments partners minutes

25. The Contextual Notification Framework – Context and Events – Detailed example The Event : Identifies an Action (or interaction) From a person / an agent At a given timestamp The Contextual Cloud : Contains weighted tags Represents the subject / topic of the event Tags might hold additional attributes e.g. Freshness, origin, reasoning path... Event com.eclipse.compile() alcatel-lucent.com/~bob 2009-03-17 14:15.01 Origin: localhost:80/firefox?tabs development(13)... Bob is trying to compile a module

26. 4 First results

27. Appendix: Intended context providers Done

28. First results – from web navigation to contextual clouds Web page: « Getting started with extension development – Mozillazine Knowledge Base » (about Firefox programming) http://kb.mozillazine.org/Getting_started_with_extension_development

29. First results – instantiating the framework User Framework KB Low-level data and events Categorization Aggregation Filtering and aggregation Personalization Synthesis Notifi- cation Event Contextual cloud Stop words Browsed web pages (events) Keyword extraction (del.icio.us...) Aggregation Event: Opening, closing, focusing on a page Evt Evt Evt Cloud similarity evaluation Similarity graph Sidebar UC1 UC3 UC2 User's context

30. First results – current implementation Context aggregator Desktop activity sniffers Social notifier Contextual Filter Enterprise worker User’s workstation Infrastructure Interaction logs Contextual cloud Proposed notifications SemanticProxy Web service Keyphrase Extraction Algorithm Del.icio.us REST API Internet HTML Meta extractor Firefox sniffer Firefox tab events Sidebar Similarity graph

31. First results – comparing four context cloud extractors Fixed weights Irrelevant words Works for all No weights Weird literals Some keywords Needs learning Weights = occurrences Technologies and entities Not descriptive Good weight distribution Clear topics Not for all pages Collaborative annotation gives a better description of the context

32. Discussion

33. Discussion Contextual Notification Framework to enable Ambient Awareness Logging user actions on his workstation Contextual cloud synthesis for event propagation Context similarity evaluation for filtering relevant notifications Next steps Iterative improvement of software In-lab experiment to evaluate user acceptance and quality of logic Generalization of the framework (outside the enterprise)

34. www.alcatel-lucent.com www.alcatel-lucent.com

35. References P. Dourish and V. Bellotti. Awareness and coordination in shared workspaces. In CSCW '92: Proceedings of the 1992 ACM conference on Computer-supported cooperative work , pages 107-114, New York, NY, USA, 1992 . ACM. C. J. Amelung . A context-aware notification framework for developers of computer supported collaborative environments, PhD thesis, University of Missouri, 2005 J. B. Ellis , S. Wahid, C. Danis, and W. A. Kellogg. Task and social visualization in software development: evaluation of a prototype. In CHI '07: Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems , pages 577-586, New York, NY, USA, 2007 . ACM. A. Sarma , D. Redmiles, and A. van der Hoek. Empirical evidence of the benefits of workspace awareness in software configuration management. In SIGSOFT '08/FSE-16: Proceedings of the 16th ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Foundations of software engineering , pages 113-123, New York, NY, USA, 2008 . ACM. J. T. Biehl , M. Czerwinski, G. Smith, and G. G. Robertson. Fastdash: a visual dashboard for fostering awareness in software teams. In CHI '07: Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems , pages 1313-1322, New York, NY, USA, 2007 . ACM . A. Joly , P. Maret, and J. Daigremont. Context-awareness, the missing block of social networking. International Journal of Computer Science and Applications, 4(2), 2009 .

36. Background on CSCW Computer-Supported Collaborative Work [Dourish'92] : “ Shared Feedback ”: Human annotation of tracked actions on documents Add useful context information , and avoid duplication [Amelung'05] : Context-Aware Activity Notification System (CANS): Based on Sakai Collaboration & Learning Environment ( web platform ) Social context only: “ current membership, the collective goals of individuals ” Context = project / community of practice ! Basically, an adaptive publication/subscription system for web-based communities Applied workspace awareness systems: Collaborative bug tracking [Ellis'07] Configuration management [Sarma'08] Collaborative software development [Biehl'07] Previous works

37. Research issues Open questions for next steps How to model events and their context ? How to generate homogeneous contextual clouds ? How to filter the contextual information ? How to evaluate context proximity ?