Photo courtesy of paulworthington

Congratulations to Informatics Master’s Student Justin Tang and Informatics Faculty Member Don Patterson on having their paper, ‘Twitter, Sensors and UI: Robust Context Modeling for Interruption Management ‘ accepted to UMAP 2010.

Abstract: In this paper, we present the results of a two-month field study of fifteen people using a software tool designed to model changes in a user’s availability. The software uses status update messages, as well as sensors, to detect changes in context. When changes are identified using a novel Kullback-Leibler Divergence algorithm, users are prompted to broadcast their current contexts to their social networks. The user interface method by which the alert is delivered is evaluated in order to minimize the impact on the user’s work flow. By carefully coupling both algorithms and user interfaces, interruptions made by the software tool can be made valuable to the user.

Congratulations Justin and Don!