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A context-aware virtual secretary in a smart office environment

Published: 26 October 2008 Publication History

Abstract

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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  • (2023)Neighbor-Environment Observer: An Intelligent Agent for Immersive Working CompanionshipProceedings of the 36th Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology10.1145/3586183.3606728(1-14)Online publication date: 29-Oct-2023
  • (2021)Designing a System Based on Robotic Assistance for Privacy Awareness in Smart Environments2021 IEEE 12th Annual Ubiquitous Computing, Electronics & Mobile Communication Conference (UEMCON)10.1109/UEMCON53757.2021.9666672(0427-0432)Online publication date: 1-Dec-2021
  • (2020)Exploring Smart Agents for the Interaction with Multimodal Mediated EnvironmentsMultimodal Technologies and Interaction10.3390/mti40200274:2(27)Online publication date: 6-Jun-2020
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    cover image ACM Conferences
    MM '08: Proceedings of the 16th ACM international conference on Multimedia
    October 2008
    1206 pages
    ISBN:9781605583037
    DOI:10.1145/1459359
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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    Publication History

    Published: 26 October 2008

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    Author Tags

    1. availability
    2. computer-mediated communication
    3. context-awareness
    4. field experiment
    5. interruptibility
    6. smart space
    7. virtual secretary
    8. workplace

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    October 26 - 31, 2008
    British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada

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    Overall Acceptance Rate 995 of 4,171 submissions, 24%

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    Cited By

    View all
    • (2023)Neighbor-Environment Observer: An Intelligent Agent for Immersive Working CompanionshipProceedings of the 36th Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology10.1145/3586183.3606728(1-14)Online publication date: 29-Oct-2023
    • (2021)Designing a System Based on Robotic Assistance for Privacy Awareness in Smart Environments2021 IEEE 12th Annual Ubiquitous Computing, Electronics & Mobile Communication Conference (UEMCON)10.1109/UEMCON53757.2021.9666672(0427-0432)Online publication date: 1-Dec-2021
    • (2020)Exploring Smart Agents for the Interaction with Multimodal Mediated EnvironmentsMultimodal Technologies and Interaction10.3390/mti40200274:2(27)Online publication date: 6-Jun-2020
    • (2019)SpaceState: Ad-Hoc Definition and Recognition of Hierarchical Room States for Smart EnvironmentsProceedings of the 2019 ACM International Conference on Interactive Surfaces and Spaces10.1145/3343055.3359715(303-314)Online publication date: 10-Nov-2019
    • (2017)Improved Multi-user Interaction in a Smart Environment Through a Preference-Based Conflict Resolution Virtual Assistant2017 International Conference on Intelligent Environments (IE)10.1109/IE.2017.21(100-107)Online publication date: Aug-2017
    • (2015)Interdisciplinary design patterns for socially aware computingProceedings of the 37th International Conference on Software Engineering - Volume 210.5555/2819009.2819084(477-486)Online publication date: 16-May-2015
    • (2015)Interdisciplinary Design Patterns for Socially Aware Computing2015 IEEE/ACM 37th IEEE International Conference on Software Engineering10.1109/ICSE.2015.180(477-486)Online publication date: May-2015
    • (2014)Collaborative Context PredictionSocio-technical Design of Ubiquitous Computing Systems10.1007/978-3-319-05044-7_8(131-150)Online publication date: 29-Mar-2014
    • (2013)Estimation of interruptibility during office work based on PC activity and conversationProceedings of the 15th international conference on Human Interface and the Management of Information: information and interaction for learning, culture, collaboration and business - Volume Part III10.1007/978-3-642-39226-9_33(297-306)Online publication date: 21-Jul-2013
    • (2010)HIMAProceedings of the 2010 International Conference on Electrical and Control Engineering10.1109/iCECE.2010.1272(5242-5245)Online publication date: 25-Jun-2010
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