The connector: facilitating context-aware communication

We present the Connector, a context-aware service that intelligently connects people. It maintains an awareness of its users' activities, preoccupations and social relationships to mediate a proper connection at the right time between them. In addition to providing users with important contextual cues about the availability of potential callees, the Connector adapts the behavior of the contactee's device automatically in order to avoid inappropriate interruptions.To acquire relevant context information, perceptual components analyze sensor input obtained from a smart mobile phone and --- if available --- from a variety of audio-visual sensors built into a smart meeting room environment. The Connector also uses any available multimodal interface (e.g. a speech interface to the smart phone, steerable camera-projector, targeted loudspeakers) in the smart meeting room, to deliver information to users in the most unobtrusive way possible.

[1]  A. Waibel,et al.  A one-pass decoder based on polymorphic linguistic context assignment , 2001, IEEE Workshop on Automatic Speech Recognition and Understanding, 2001. ASRU '01..

[2]  Klaus Ries,et al.  The Karlsruhe-Verbmobil speech recognition engine , 1997, 1997 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing.

[3]  W. Eric L. Grimson,et al.  Adaptive background mixture models for real-time tracking , 1999, Proceedings. 1999 IEEE Computer Society Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (Cat. No PR00149).

[4]  David Garlan,et al.  Project Aura: Toward Distraction-Free Pervasive Computing , 2002, IEEE Pervasive Comput..

[5]  Alex Waibel,et al.  Local Appearance-based 3D Face Recognition , 2006 .

[6]  Allen E. Milewski,et al.  Providing presence cues to telephone users , 2000, CSCW '00.

[7]  Andreas Krause,et al.  SenSay: a context-aware mobile phone , 2003, Seventh IEEE International Symposium on Wearable Computers, 2003. Proceedings..

[8]  Anoop Gupta,et al.  Exploring PC-telephone convergence with the enhanced telephony prototype , 2004, CHI.

[9]  John C. Tang,et al.  ConNexus to awarenex: extending awareness to mobile users , 2001, CHI.

[10]  Alexander H. Waibel,et al.  Classifying user environment for mobile applications using linear autoencoding of ambient audio , 2005, Proceedings. (ICASSP '05). IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing, 2005..

[11]  Bill N. Schilit,et al.  The PARCTAB mobile computing system , 1993, Proceedings of IEEE 4th Workshop on Workstation Operating Systems. WWOS-III.

[12]  Claudio S. Pinhanez,et al.  User-following displays , 2002, Proceedings. IEEE International Conference on Multimedia and Expo.