"How what people are doing helps identify who they should be interacting with and how: Driving rich user communication experiences through context awareness and social software."

Dorée Duncan Seligmann,

Director of Collaborative Applications Research, Avaya Labs

doree@avaya.com

In this talk I will describe how semantic computing, when applied to communications, can vastly improve the way in which we interact.

Information about people, their activities in social networks, what they are currently discussing, and with whom they are conversing, can be used to establish more meaningful and successful interactions. Consider an application that is designed to automatically set up conversations on specific topics. For example, a member of a user group needs additional information about a new software patch. Such an application should use dynamic information about all the members of the group, their availability, and how they can be reached to make its selection and then connect the two people together. However, other factors should also be considered if we want our application to make the most suitable match for this specific user and topic as well as select the most effective way for their conversation to be conducted. These include the most up-to-date information about interactions within the user group, past experiences with similar problems and equipment, levels of expertise, how successfully each member communicates with different devices and modalities, durations and tone of past conversations, language, like-mindedness, and temperament. How to gather all that information and use it is among the challenges we face in our research in intelligent communications.

I will describe our work and how we capture, model, traverse and reason with user communication context using a combination of algorithms and user-mediation to determine, for example, users’ presence, availability, interruptibility, willingness to participate, expertise, and social cohesiveness, as well as predict how effective a particular communication will be and how timely a response within a social community. In addition to what new applications this can enable, I will also discuss how a shared communication context can be used to enrich the user experience and transform the appearance and behavior of, for instance, an avatar in a virtual world, a social networking page, a directory listing, and even the ringtone for an incoming call.