MyConnector

Abstract

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.

Using Mobile Technology to Bring Families Together

“…Examples of those systems are The Family Window (Judge, Neustaedter, & Kurtz, 2010), ASTRA Awareness System (Romero, Markopoulos, Baren, Ruyter, Ijsselsteijn, & Farshchian, 2007), Huggy Pajama (Teh, Cheok, Peiris, Choi, Thuong, & Lai, 2008), and Virtual Intimate Object (Kaye, Levitt, Nevins, Golden, & Schmidt, 2005). Research about family awareness has also been undertaken: both in-house, such as Whereabouts Clock (Brown, Taylor, Izadi, Sellen, Kaye, & Eardley, 2007) or HomeNote (Sellen et al, 2006), and between houses, such as Connector (Danninger, Kluge, & Stiefelhagen, 2006). Many of these applications use mobile technology to realize the connection between remote family members.…”

Agents, Availability Awareness, and Decision Making

“…From the perspective of "users as a resource," human computer interaction research has provided several availability-oriented solutions. Most of the efforts have focused on detecting if a user is and not necessarily when the user will become online and available (Begole et al 2004;Danninger et al 2006;Muhlenbrock et al 2004). However, there are probabilistic models that can track and predict humans' presence and availability.…”