The Vineyard Approach: A Computational Model for Determination of Awareness Foci in E-Mail-Based Collaboration

Abstract

Recent research has noted that individuals engage in multiple collaborations simultaneously and have difficulties managing these different contexts. Studies indicate that awareness of others’ activities plays an important part in collaboration. Proximity also has a strong effect on collaboration, as maintaining awareness of peers becomes harder in distributed environments. Many awareness systems have been proposed to deliver information on peers’ activities or status, which usually either require extensive configuration by the user or disseminate information regardless of users’ interests. With the increase in information available, systems must be sensitive to users’ attention foci, minimizing interruptions, and helping focus and providing information according to current tasks. We have been investigating ways to determine awareness foci through e-mail-based user interaction analysis. Our goal is to be able to draw inferences as to whom and about what a user is collaborating, enabling a system to automatically distribute awareness information and adapt itself according to users’ needs without much configuration.