BusyBody: Creating and Fielding Personalized Models of the Cost of Interruption
Eric Horvitz, Paul Koch, Johnson Apacible
Adaptive Systems & Interaction
Microsoft Research
Redmond, WA 98052
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Abstract:
Interest has been growing in opportunities to build and deploy statistical models that can infer a computer user’s current interruptability from computer activity and relevant contextual information. We describe a system that intermittently asks users to assess their perceived interruptability during a training phase and that builds decision-theoretic models with the ability to predict the cost of interrupting the user. The models are used at run-time to compute the expected cost of interruptions, providing a mediator for incoming notifications, based on a consideration of a user’s current and recent history of computer activity, meeting status, location, time of day, and whether a conversation is detected.
Keywords: Models of attention, multi-tasking, notifications, cost of interruptions, user modeling
In: Proceedings of CSCW, Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work, Chicago, Illinois, November 2004. ACM Press.
Related Background
- "Learning and Reasoning about Interruption." Paper on learning statistical models for predicting the cost of interruption from multiple classes of sensors, streams of information.
- "Probabilistic Forecasting of Presence and Availability." Paper on the Coordinate system on forecasting presence and availability.
- "Balancing Awareness and Interruption: Investigation of Notification Deferral Policies." Paper on studies of bounded deferral.
- Bayesphone." Paper on precomputation of action and value of information for guiding call handling.
- Paper on the Attention Manager and Priorities projects.
- Considerate Computing, Wayt Gibbs, Scientific American, January '05 (article on Notification Platform and Bestcom projects).
- Papers describing efforts to probe the cost of interruptions on users.
- Story highlighting several efforts, including Coordinate, Priorities, and Notification Platform: "18th-century theory is new force in computing", Michael Kanellos,
CNET, February 2003.
Author Email: horvitz@microsoft.com
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