A lot of the communication at the workplace -via the phone as well as face-to-face -occurs in inappropriate contexts, disturbing meetings and conversations, invading personal and corporate privacy, and more broadly breaking social norms. This is because both, callers and visitors in front of closed office doors, face the same problem: they can only guess the other person's current availability for a conversation. We present a context-aware Virtual Secretary designed to facilitate more socially appropriate communication at the workplace. This service aims towards understanding a person's activity in smart offices, and passes on important contextual information to callers and visitors in order to facilitate more informed human decisions about how and when to initiate contact. We have deployed this Virtual Secretary in the office of a senior researcher, mediating all his actual phone calls and in-person meetings for several weeks. With the Virtual Secretary active, the number of inappropriate workplace interruptions could be significantly reduced.

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Abstract. In this thriving world of mobile communications, the difficulty of communication is no longer contacting someone (the receiver), but rather contacting them in a socially appropriate manner. Ideally, senders should have some understanding of a receiver's availability in order to make contact at the right time, in the right contexts, and with the optimal communication medium. This paper describes our ongoing research on the Connector, an adaptive and contextaware service designed to facilitate efficient and appropriate communication. We describe a set of empirical studies whose results converge upon the important subject of people's availability in mobile contexts.s

In this thriving world of mobile communications, the difficulty of communication is no longer contacting someone, but rather contacting people in a socially appropriate manner. Ideally, senders should have some understanding of a receiver's availability in order to make contact at the right time, in the right contexts, and with the optimal communication medium.We describe the design and implementation of MyConnector, an adaptive and context-aware service designed to facilitate efficient and appropriate communication, based on each party's availability. One of the chief design questions of such a service is to produce technologies with sufficient contextual awareness to decide upon a person's availability for communication. We present results from a pilot study comparing a number of context cues and their predictive power for gauging one's availability. is hosted by an Exchange server. The clientserver communication is XML-based over TCP or GPRS.Speech or graphical user interfaces run on a variety of client platforms, such as smartphones, laptops, and traditional telephones. MyConnector clients running on WinXP or as web service integrate phone, instant messaging and email communication channels. Users can choose between a variety of communication channels depending on available devices and communication networks. Their main purpose is to broadcast receiver availability to senders to enable more informed decisions on when and how to contact somebody. Communication channelsDiscussing all features of the four Connector clients goes beyond the scope of this paper. In the following, we will concentrate on how each of the clients broadcasts receiver availability to potential contact persons.

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