Augmenting shared personal calendars

ABSTRACT

In this paper, we describe Augur, a groupware calendar system to support personal calendaring practices, informal workplace communication, and the socio-technical evolution of the calendar system within a workgroup. Successful design and deployment of groupware calendar systems have been shown to depend on several converging, interacting perspectives. We describe calendar-based work practices as viewed from these perspectives, and present the Augur system in support of them. Augur allows users to retain the flexibility of personal calendars by anticipating and compensating for inaccurate calendar entries and idiosyncratic event names. We employ predictive user models of event attendance, intelligent processing of calendar text, and discovery of shared events to drive novel calendar visualizations that facilitate interpersonal communication. In addition, we visualize calendar access to support privacy management and long-term evolution of the calendar system.

REFERENCES

• 1: Ashbrook, D. and Starner, T. (2002) "Enabling Ad-hoc Collaboration Through Schedule Learning and Prediction" In CHI2002 Workshop on Mobile Ad-hoc Collaboration.
• 2: David Beard , Murugappan Palaniappan , Alan Humm , David Banks , Anil Nair , Yen-Ping Shan, A visual calendar for scheduling group meetings, Proceedings of the 1990 ACM conference on Computer-supported cooperative work, p.279-290, October 07-10, 1990, Los Angeles, California, United States [doi>10.1145/99332.99361]
• 3: James Bo Begole , John C. Tang , Randall B. Smith , Nicole Yankelovich, Work rhythms: analyzing visualizations of awareness histories of distributed groups, Proceedings of the 2002 ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work, November 16-20, 2002, New Orleans, Louisiana, USA [doi>10.1145/587078.587125]
• 4: Erin Bradner , Wendy A. Kellogg , Thomas Erickson, The adoption and use of “BABBLE”: a field study of chat in the workplace, Proceedings of the Sixth European conference on Computer supported cooperative work, p.139-158, August 1999, Copenghagen, Denmark
• 5: Thomas Erickson , Wendy A. Kellogg, Social translucence: an approach to designing systems that support social processes, ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction (TOCHI), v.7 n.1, p.59-83, March 2000 [doi>10.1145/344949.345004]
• 6: Daniel A. Ford , Joann Ruvolo , Stefan Edlund , Jussi Myllymaki , James Kaufman , Jared Jackson , Martin Gerlach, Tempus Fugit: a system for making semantic connections, Proceedings of the tenth international conference on Information and knowledge management, October 05-10, 2001, Atlanta, Georgia, USA [doi>10.1145/502585.502673]
• 7: Jonathan Grudin, Groupware and social dynamics: eight challenges for developers, Communications of the ACM, v.37 n.1, p.92-105, Jan. 1994 [doi>10.1145/175222.175230]
• 8: Jonathan Grudin , Leysia Palen, Emerging Groupware Successes in Major Corporations: Studies of Adoption and Adaptation, Proceedings of the International Conference on Worldwide Computing and Its Applications, p.142-153, March 10-11, 1997
• 9: Saul Greenberg, Peepholes: low cost awareness of one's community, Conference companion on Human factors in computing systems: common ground, p.206-207, April 13-18, 1996, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada [doi>10.1145/257089.257283]
• 10: Hill, W.C. and Hollan, J.D. (1993), "History-enriched digital objects", Third ACM Conference on Computers, Freedom and Privacy, pp. 917-20.
• 11: Horvitz, E., Breese, J., Heckerman, D., Hovel, D., and Rommelse, K. (1998) "The Lumiere Project: Bayesian User Modeling for Inferring the Goals and Needs of Software Users" In Proc. Fourteenth Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence.
• 12: Eric Horvitz , Tim Paek, A computational architecture for conversation, Proceedings of the seventh international conference on User modeling, p.201-210, June 1999, Banff, Canada
• 13: Thorsten Joachims, Text Categorization with Suport Vector Machines: Learning with Many Relevant Features, Proceedings of the 10th European Conference on Machine Learning, p.137-142, April 21-23, 1998
• 14: Robert E. Kraut , Carmen Egido , Jolene Galegher, Patterns of contact and communication in scientific research collaborations, Intellectual teamwork: social and technological foundations of cooperative work, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc., Mahwah, NJ, 1990
• 15: Madigan, D., Mosurski, K., and Almond, R. (1996) "Graphical Explanation in Belief Networks" In Journal of Computational and Graphical Statistics, 6(2), pp. 160-181.
• 16: Jock D. Mackinlay , George G. Robertson , Robert DeLine, Developing calendar visualizers for the information visualizer, Proceedings of the 7th annual ACM symposium on User interface software and technology, p.109-118, November 02-04, 1994, Marina del Rey, California, United States [doi>10.1145/192426.192470]
• 17: Elizabeth Mynatt , Joe Tullio, Inferring calendar event attendance, Proceedings of the 6th international conference on Intelligent user interfaces, p.121-128, January 14-17, 2001, Santa Fe, New Mexico, United States [doi>10.1145/359784.360310]
• 18: Norsys Corp, http://www.norsys.com/
• 19: Leysia Palen, Social, individual and technological issues for groupware calendar systems, Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems: the CHI is the limit, p.17-24, May 15-20, 1999, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States [doi>10.1145/302979.302982]
• 20: Leysia Palen , Jonathan Grudin, Discretionary adoption of group support software: lessons from calendar applications, Implementing collaboration technologies in industry: case examples and lessons learned, Springer-Verlag, London, 2003
• 21: Bradley J. Rhodes, Margin notes: building a contextually aware associative memory, Proceedings of the 5th international conference on Intelligent user interfaces, p.219-224, January 09-12, 2000, New Orleans, Louisiana, United States [doi>10.1145/325737.325850]
• 22: Salton, G. (1991). Developments in Automatic Text Retrieval. Science, Vol 253, pp. 974-97.
• 23: SVMLight, http://svmlight.joachims.org/
• 24: VCalendar specification. http://www.imc.org
• 25: Viégas, F. and Donath, J. (2002) "PostHistory: Visualizing Email Networks Over Time" In Proc. of the International Sunbelt Social Network Conference XXII.
• 26: Steve Whittaker , David Frohlich , Owen Daly-Jones, Informal workplace communication: what is it like and how might we support it?, Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems: celebrating interdependence, p.131-137, April 24-28, 1994, Boston, Massachusetts, United States [doi>10.1145/191666.191726]
• 27: Steve Whittaker, Rethinking video as a technology for interpersonal communications: theory and design implications, International Journal of Human-Computer Studies, v.42 n.5, p.501-529, May 1995 [doi>10.1006/ijhc.1995.1022]

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.4 INFORMATION SYSTEMS APPLICATIONS
      H.4.1 Office Automation
          Subjects: Groupware

Additional Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.4 INFORMATION SYSTEMS APPLICATIONS
      H.4.1 Office Automation
          Subjects: Time management (e.g., calendars, schedules)
  H.5 INFORMATION INTERFACES AND PRESENTATION (I.7)
      H.5.3 Group and Organization Interfaces
          Subjects: Collaborative computing; Asynchronous interaction

  I. Computing Methodologies
  I.7 DOCUMENT AND TEXT PROCESSING
      I.7.2 Document Preparation
          Subjects: Index generation

General Terms:
Experimentation, Human Factors, Reliability

Keywords:
groupware calendar system, privacy management, social visualization, text classification, user modeling