Written for a seminar at Universiteit Twente (Netherlands) in March 2009, this presentation by Adrien Joly (Alcatel-Lucent Bell Labs France) introduces approaches for improved enterprise communication and collaboration, which motivates a convergent framework of real-time contextual notifications based on employees' work context. The framework is presented and current research issues (work in progress) are introduced.

1. Awareness without Overload
in Computer-Supported Collaborative Environments
Adrien Joly
Universiteit Twente, 19/03/2009
PhD supervisor: Pr. Pierre Maret

2. Abstract and scope
Goal: Support collaboration and
knowledge exchange by enabling
Knowledge Social Ambient Awareness, based on
Management Networking
actions and
computer-based
CSCE
context
Proposition: A framework for Context-
Context-
Awareness Aware notifications
First application environment:
Enterprise workers
* CSCE: Computer-Supported Collaboration Environment
Copyright © 2009 Alcatel-Lucent, d.r.
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3. Ordre du jour
1. Motivation
2. Proposed solution
3. The Contextual Notification Framework
4. Research issues
5. Discussion

4. 1 Motivation
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5. Motivation
Social networking ties
is about creating and maintaining
people that are emotionally connected or have
between
common interests
Have you
met Ted?
 
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6. Motivation
new ties (as well as conversations) rely on:
Creation of
 Relevance of potential match
common context of encounter
 The
 Trust as a warranty of relevance
Transportation Conference
Have you
met Ted?
 
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7. Motivation
Office n°2
Office n°1 Office n°3 Office n°4
sell
buy drive test
People working in remote places lose visibility of their common context
communication/collaboration opportunities
they miss
lack of capitalization leads to work duplication
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8. Conte
Motivation : « 1.0 » communication tools
xt 1.0
: hiera
rchy
Communication tools can help to increase awareness and initiate discussions
I want to buy a car.
Do you guys sell one?
Office n°2
Office n°1 Office n°3 Office n°4
sell
buy drive test
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8 | Awareness without Overload | March 2009

9. Conte
Motivation : « 1.0 » communication tools
xt 1.0
: hiera
rchy
Communication tools can help to increase awareness and initiate discussions
Awareness very time-consuming!
… BUT make
My baby has just born
Pills for sale
I like driving cars.
I want to buy a car.
He is so cute!
-80% !!!!
I want to sell my car. I test yours?
Can
Do you guys sell one? I work for a magazine
SPAM! Anybody need one? Cars wanted for test
Office n°2
Office n°1 Office n°3 Office n°4
sell
buy drive test
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9 | Awareness without Overload | March 2009

10. Conte
Motivation : « 2.0 » communication tools
xt 2.0
: cont
ent
Social Networking Platforms help to increase Awareness in the Enterprise ?
Can
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11. Conte
Motivation
xt 2.0
: cont
ent
Social Networking Platforms help to increase Awareness in the Enterprise ?
Can
Content Sharing
Expertise Promotion
Social Notification
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12. Conte
Motivation
xt 2.0
: cont
ent
Social Networking Platforms help to increase Awareness in the Enterprise ?
Can
Numerous platforms
to maintain and follow
manually...
Awareness
turns to
Overload
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13. Conte
Motivation
xt 3.0
: the u
ser!
Social Networking Platforms help to increase Awareness in the Enterprise ?
Can
Needed
Content Sharing Contributions
Expertise
Activities
Status
Expertise Promotion Filter
Updates
Contacts
Resources
Social Notification Recognition Enterprise
worker
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14. Background on CSCE
Previo
us wor
Computer-Supported Collaborative Environments
ks
 [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]
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15. 2 Proposed solution
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16. Proposed solution
Office n°2
Office n°1 Office n°3 Office n°4
???
sell
buy drive test
??? ???
???
People working in remote places lose visibility of their common context
communication/collaboration opportunities
they miss
lack of capitalization leads to work duplication
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16 | Awareness without Overload | March 2009

17. Proposed solution
Office n°2
Office n°1 Office n°3 Office n°4
sell
buy drive test


 
notifications
notifications
notifications
notifications
context
context
context
context
Contextual Notification Framework
 Filtered Ambient Awareness
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18. Proposed solution – Use case
Bob
Alice Carol Bob is working on a
Java development
??? ??? project.

 
notifications
notifications
notifications
context
context
context
Contextual Notification Framework
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19. Proposed solution – Use case
Bob
Alice Carol Bob is working on a
Java development
??? ??? project, and one
module does not
work...

 
notifications
notifications
notifications
context
context
context
Contextual Notification Framework
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20. Proposed solution – Use case
Bob
Alice Carol Bob is working on a
Java development
??? ??? project, and one
module does not
work...
Alice and Carol have

  been developing this
notifications
notifications
notifications
module.
context
context
context
Contextual Notification Framework
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21. Proposed solution – Use case
Bob
Alice Carol Bob is working on a
Java development
Bob
project, and one
SOS!
module does not
work...
Alice and Carol have

  been developing this
notifications
notifications
notifications
module.
context
context
context
Because she is also
Similar context currently developing
in Java, Alice is
notified of Bob's
Contextual Notification Framework problem.
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22. Proposed solution – Use case
Bob
Alice Carol Bob is working on a
Transparent context updates Java development
Bob
project, and one
SOS!
module does not
work...
Contextually relevant notifications
Alice and Carol have

  been developing this
notifications
notifications
notifications
module.
context
context
context
New opportunities for communication and exchange is also
Because she
Similar context currently developing
in Java, Alice is
notified of Bob's
Contextual Notification Framework
Less cognitive overload
problem.
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23. 3 The Contextual Notification Framework
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24. The Contextual Notification Framework - architecture
High level context
Infrastructure
Context Contextual
User’s workstation
aggregator Filter
Interaction logs
Proposed
(REST interface) notifications
Desktop activity
Social notifier
sniffers
Enterprise
worker
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25. The Contextual Notification Framework – Theoritical dataflow
Evt
UC1 UC3
Evt
Framework Evt
UC2
User's Filtering and aggregation
Event
context
Personalization
Synthesis
Aggregation
KB
Notifi-
Categorization cation
Low-level data and events
User
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26. The Contextual Notification Framework – Context and Events
Event:
The
 Identifies an Action (or interaction)
 From a person / an agent
timestamp
 At a given
Event
Contextual Cloud:
The
weighted tags
 Contains
 Represents the subject / topic of the event
 Tags might hold additional attributes
 e.g. Freshness, origin, reasoning path...
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27. The Contextual Notification Framework – Context and Events - Examples
Event:
The
 Identifies an Action (or interaction)
Bob is trying to compile a module
 From a person / an agent
Adrien's browsing topic changed
timestamp
 At a given
Event
Pierre contributed to the report
Contextual Cloud:
The
report deliverable
weighted tags
 Contains
survey social
project-Thunder
networking mashup
Represents the subject / topic of the event

ms-word WP5
facebook
community contribution
 Tags might hold additional attributes comments
partners minutes
twitter ambient
 e.g. Freshness, origin, reasoning path...
awareness people
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28. The Contextual Notification Framework – Context and Events – Detailed
example
Event:
The
Bob is trying to
compile a module  Identifies an Action (or interaction)
com.eclipse.compile()
 From a person / an agent
alcatel-lucent.com/~bob
timestamp
 At a given 2009-03-17 14:15.01
Event
Contextual Cloud:
The
weighted tags development(13)...
 Contains
 Represents the subject / topic of the event
 Tags might hold additional attributes
 e.g. Freshness, origin, reasoning path...
Origin: localhost:80/firefox?tabs
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29. The Contextual Notification Framework – Current implementation
Evt
Evt
Framework
Contextual Evt
cloud
Cloud similarity evaluation
Event:
Opening,
Threshold
closing,
focusing
Stop
Aggregation
on a page
words
Notifi-
Keyword extraction cation
(del.icio.us...)
Browsed web pages (events)
User
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30. 4 Research issues
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31. 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 ?
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32. Discussion

33. Discussion
Contextual Notification Framework to enable Ambient Awareness:
 Logging user actions on his workstation
 Event propagation with contextual synthesis
 Context similarity evaluation for filtering relevant notifications
 Designed for minimal user interaction and system transparency
(privacy & trust)
Next steps:
 Iterative improvement of software
 In-lab experiment to evaluate user acceptance and quality of
logic
 Generalization of the framework (outside the enterprise)
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34. 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.
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35. www.alcatel-lucent.com
www.alcatel-lucent.com
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36. Appendix

37. Appendix: Keyword extraction results
Web page: « Getting started with extension development – Mozillazine Knowledge Base »
(about Firefox programming)
http://kb.mozillazine.org/Getting_started_with_extension_development
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38. Appendix: Intended context providers
Done
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