Exploiting Context for Mobile User Experience Position Paper for SEMAIS 2010 Workshop

User interactions with mobile devices can be challenging for many reasons including limitations due to input and output capabilities. By leveraging context and using it to facilitate some of the interactions previously initiated by the user, we alleviate the need for some of the onerous user interactions. In the first part of my workshop presentation, I will present our effort to take a mobile calendar application, that is rich in context information and to use proactive techniques to develop an enrichment service that facilitates user interactions when they are mobile. The service demonstrates that proactive techniques that exploit context can address certain mobile user experience challenges. However, in order to extend the approach more extensively for the mobile calendar application or more generally to other mobile applications, semantic technologies are needed. Thus, the second part of my workshop presentation introduces some early work on mining free-form content in calendar fields for contextual information that can be used to further enhance mobile user experience. The result of the mining effort is to provide semantic tags for the calendar’s summary, description, and annotations. Once tagged, a variety of semantically related data and functions demonstrated in our enrichment service can then be applied to the tagged content. We examine the challenges with such content. INTRODUCTION Smartphones have gone beyond mere communication, personal information management (PIM), or Web browsing devices. With the introduction of iPhone, Palm Pre, Motorola Droid, Google’s Nexus-One, and Nokia’s N900, smartphones are enabling computing functionality for the mobile masses. However, their small form factor and varied, but limited, input capabilities pose significant challenges for the user in performing a variety of mobile tasks. Users either perform overhead tasks or mobilization tasks in an effort to cope or defer the task if it is too onerous [4, 5]. The development of mobile interaction techniques such as mSpace [8] and ShapeWriter[9] is one approach to address these challenges. A different and potentially fruitful tact is to exploit contextual information. An illustrative example is Google Suggest that offer suggestions after a few keystrokes relating to the current search results, a user’s past search histories, a specific web site or relevant advertisement. Current smartphones have two additional benefits. First, they are equipped with sensors such as GPS that can provide supplemental contextual information. Second, they are personal devices and contain the user’s PIM (e.g., address book), communication data (e.g., SMS) and user histories (e.g., call logs). By coupling context-aware techniques and mashing smartphone data and resources with Web services, future smartphone applications and services can shift the burden of certain user activities to the device while leaving significant decision-making and choice to the user. For the past couple of years, we have been using an approach that consists in part of data and functionality mashup and in part a context-aware and context-adaptation approach to enhance mobile application functionality and usability. We use the mobile calendar enrichment service that we developed to illustrate this approach; making calendar information supportive of tasks performed during mobility. The current form of the service leverages semantics inherent in the fields describing a calendar event such as date-time, location, and attendees. However, there are freeform text fields in a calendar event such as summary and description that cannot be leveraged without some mining efforts. The output of these efforts is to identify content and assign type information that can then be integrated with external data and functionality in the same way as other structured, semantically known, calendar event fields. We present our preliminary results with identifying named entities in such free-form content fields. We conclude with discussion of both the challenges as well as potentials of the combination of Web and smartphone mashup with semantics to enable adaptive, interactive, mobile services to enhance mobile user experiences. MOBILE CALENDARS Mobile calendars are interesting for several reasons. They exist as one variant of “Note-to-Self Organizers” such as Chandler, Microsoft OneNote, List.It where a note has datetime information [6]. More importantly, it is an application available on all mobile phones and PIM devices. In our own interview study of small group of mobility workers, many of them pointed to their importance during mobility to