Common Sense on the Go : Giving Mobile Applications an Understanding of Everyday Life

Mobile devices such as cell phones and PDAs present unique challenges and opportunities. The challenge is that user interaction is limited by small screens and keyboards (if the device has them at all!). Naive transfer of applications from full-size computers often fails because the interaction becomes too cumbersome for the user. The opportunity is that, because the device is carried by the user at all times and used in a much wider range of situations than a desk-bound computer, new possibilities emerge to provide intelligent and appropriate assistance to the user in a just-in-time fashion. We aim to address these challenges and opportunities by giving portable devices Commonsense Knowledge -a large collection of simple facts about people and everyday life. Common Sense can reduce the need for explicit user input because the machine can make better guesses about what the user might want in a particular situation than could a conventional application. Common Sense can also make better use of contextual information like time, location, personal data, user preferences, and partial recognition, because it can better understand the implication of context for helping the user. We will illustrate our approach with descriptions of several applications we have implemented for portable devices using Open Mind, a collection of over 688,000 commonsense statements. These include a dynamic phrasebook for tourists, an assistant for searching personal social networks, and a predictive typing aid that uses semantic information rather than statistics to suggest word completions.