People
Kay Connelly, Assistant Professor in Computer Science
The problem
The many benefits that cell phones provide are at times overshadowed by the
problems they create, as when one person’s cell phone disrupts a group
activity, such as a class, meeting or movie. Cell phone interruption is
only highlighted by the ever increasing number of mobile devices we
carry.
Many tools and techniques have been proposed in order to minimize interruption and other problems caused by mobile devices, with varying degrees of success [1].
An in situ user study using Experience Sampling Method (ESM) was conducted in order to answer the question above [2].
Context-aware telephony has long been proposed as a way to minimize cell phone interruptions that are mostly caused by the mismatch between the user’s context and the cell phone settings. This mismatch is largely due to the static nature of cell phone configuration, which depends on the user’s memory to change the configuration every time the context changes. One approach to solving this problem is to empower the caller to make better, more informed decisions about the appropriateness of making a call by providing him information about the receiver’s context. Context information can be any kind of information that helps in conveying the receiver’s availability and circumstances, such as location, activity, ambient sound and social cues such as company.. A recent study showed that providing the caller with contextual information about the receiver indeed decreases the frequency of the mismatch and enhances the level of agreement between receivers’ desires and callers’ decisions [3]. The study also showed that different contextual information generates different levels of improvements.
This approach, however, raises many privacy issues that need to be answered before judging its feasibility and practicality. For one, are people willing to disclose context information in exchange for less inappropriate interruptions? In other words, are the incentives and services offered by the context-aware telephony application good enough to overcome the privacy concerns? What kind of context information are they willing to share? What is the effect of the caller-receiver relationship on context disclosure? How do people differ, and on what do they agree?
To answer the above questions, we performed a study that focuses on exploring the sharing patterns and privacy preferences for different types of context information and for different social relations in the domain of context-aware telephony [4].
We have conducted a user study to examine the acceptability and the usefulness of the collaborative service and to incorporate users’ feedback into the early design process [5].
