While researchers have been exploring automatic presentation capture since the 1990's, real world adoption has been limited. Our research focuses on simplifying presentation capture and retrieval to reduce adoption barriers. ProjectorBox is our attempt to create a smart appliance that seamlessly captures, indexes, and archives presentation media, with streamlined user interfaces for searching, skimming, and sharing content. In this paper we describe the design of ProjectorBox and compare its use across corporate and educational settings. While our evaluation confirms the usability and utility of our approach across settings, it also highlights differences in usage and user needs, suggesting enhancements for both markets. We describe new features we have implemented to address corporate needs for enhanced privacy and security, and new user interfaces for content discovery.

AnySpot is a web service-based platform for seamlessly connecting people to their personal and shared documents wherever they go. We describe the principles behind AnySpot's design and report our experience deploying it in a large, multi-national organization.

This chapter describes how the changing information about an individual's location, environment, and social situation can be used to initiate and facilitate people's interactions with one another, individually and in groups. Context-aware communication is contrasted with other forms of context-aware computing and we characterize applications in terms of design decisions along two dimensions: the extent of autonomy in context sensing and the extent of autonomy in communication action. A number of context-aware communication applications from the research literature are presented in five application categories. Finally, a number of issues related to the design of context-aware communication applications are presented.

When people are checking in to flights, making reports to their company manager, composing music, delivering papers for exams in schools, or examining patients in hospitals, they all deal with documents and processes of documentation. In earlier times, documentation took place primarily in libraries and archives. While the latter are still important document institutions, documents today play a far more essential role in social life in many different domains and cultures. In this book, which celebrates the ten year anniversary of documentation studies in Tromsø, experts from many different disciplines, professional domains as well as cultures around the world present their way of dealing with documents, demonstrating many potential directions for the emerging broad field of documentation studies.

In a landmark article, over a half century ago, Vannevar Bush envisioned a "Memory Extender" device he dubbed the "memex". Bush's ideas anticipated and inspired numerous breakthroughs, including hypertext, the Internet, the World Wide Web, and Wikipedia. However, despite these triumphs, the memex has still not lived up to its potential in corporate settings. One reason is that corporate users often don't have sufficient time or incentives to contribute to a corporate memory or to explore others' contributions. At FXPAL, we are investigating ways to automatically create and retrieve useful corporate memories without any added burden on anyone. In this paper we discuss how ProjectorBox a smart appliance for automatic presentation capture and PAL Bar a system for proactively retrieving contextually relevant corporate memories have enabled us to integrate content from a variety of sources to create a cohesive multimedia corporate memory for our organization.

Technology abounds for capturing presentations. However, no simple solution exists that is completely automatic. ProjectorBox is a "zero user interaction" appliance that automatically captures, indexes, and manages presentation multimedia. It operates continuously to record the RGB information sent from presentation devices, such as a presenter's laptop, to display devices, such as a projector. It seamlessly captures high-resolution slide images, text and audio. It requires no operator, specialized software, or changes to current presentation practice. Automatic media analysis is used to detect presentation content and segment presentations. The analysis substantially enhances the web-based user interface for browsing, searching, and exporting captured presentations. ProjectorBox has been in use for over a year in our corporate conference room, and has been deployed in two universities. Our goal is to develop automatic capture services that address both corporate and educational needs.

Automatic lecture capture can help students, instructors, and educational institutions. Students can focus less on note-taking and more on what the instructor is saying. Instructors can provide access to lecture archives to help students study for exams and make-up missed classes. And online lecture recordings can be used to support distance learning. For these and other reasons, there has been great interest in automatically capturing classroom presentations. However, there is no simple solution that is completely automatic. ProjectorBox is our attempt to create a "zero user interaction" appliance that automatically captures, indexes, and manages presentation multimedia. It operates continuously to record the RGB information sent from presentation devices, such as an instructor's laptop, to display devices such as a projector. It seamlessly captures high-resolution slide images, text, and audio. A web-based user interface allows students to browse, search, replay, and export captured presentations.

Proactive contextual information systems help people locate information by automatically suggesting potentially relevant resources based on their current tasks or interests. Such systems are becoming increasingly popular, but designing user interfaces that effectively communicate recommended information is a challenge: the interface must be unobtrusive, yet communicate enough information at the right time to provide value to the user. In this paper we describe our experience with the FXPAL Bar, a proactive information system designed to provide contextual access to corporate and personal resources. In particular, we present three features designed to communicate proactive recommendations more effectively: translucent recommendation windows increase the user's awareness of particularly highly-ranked recommendations, query term highlighting communicates the relationship between a recommended document and the user's current context, and a novel recommendation digest function allows users to return to the most relevant previously recommended resources. We present empirical evidence supporting our design decisions and relate lessons learned for other designers of contextual recommendation systems.

This article describes two years of experience with a research prototype for personalizing shared workplace devices such as projectors, public displays, and multi-function copiers. The system combines users' networked resources-or "personal information clouds"—with device-specific user interfaces for performing common device tasks. We developed and compared personal interfaces that are embedded (i.e., integrated or co-located with the shared device) and portable (i.e., accessible via personal devices such as mobile phones and PDAs). Our experience indicates that a little personalization can go a long way toward improving user friendliness, efficiency, and capabilities of shared document devices, helping them "weave themselves into the fabric of everyday life". We also gained important insights into subtle differences between embedded and portable approaches to ubiquitous computing systems.

People routinely rely on physical and electronic systems to remind themselves of details regarding personal and organizational contacts. These systems include rolodexes, directories and contact databases. In order to access details regarding contacts, users must typically shift their attention from tasks they are performing to the contact system itself in order to manually look-up contacts. This paper presents an approach for automatically retrieving contacts based on users' current context. Results are presented to users in a manner that does not disrupt their tasks, but which allows them to access contact details with a single interaction. The approach promotes the discovery of new contacts that users may not have found otherwise and supports serendipity.

A basic objective of ubiquitous computing research is ubiquitous information: the ability to utilize any content or service, using devices that are always at hand, over networks that don't tie us down. Although much progress has been made, the ideal remains elusive. This paper reflects on the interrelations among three dimensions of ubiquitous information: content, devices, and networks. We use our understanding of these dimensions to motivate our own attempt to create a ubiquitous information system by combining unlimited World Wide Web content with mobile phones and mobile phone networks. We briefly describe a middleware proxy system we developed to increase the usefulness of very small devices as Internet terminals. We conclude with a post-mortem analysis highlighting lessons learned for others interested in information systems for very small devices.

Everywhere we go, we are surrounded by shared devices: TVs, stereos, and appliances in the home; copiers, fax machines, and projectors in the office; phones and vending machines in public. Because these devices don't know who we are, they provide the same user interface and functionality to everyone. This paper describes a system for personalizing workplace document devices- projectors, public displays, and multi-function copiers-that has been in use for over two years in our organization. We compare user interfaces that are embedded (i.e., integrated or co-located with the shared device) versus portable (i.e., accessible via portable devices such as mobile phones or PDAs). We summarize lessons learned for others designing interfaces for shared ubiquitous devices.

This paper describes how the changing information about an individual's location, environment, and social situation can be used to initiate and facilitate people's interactions with one another, individually and in groups. Context-aware communication is contrasted with other forms of context-aware computing and we characterize applications in terms of design decisions along two dimensions: the extent of autonomy in context sensing and the extent of autonomy in communication action. A number of context-aware communication applications from the research literature are presented in five application categories. Finally, a number of issues related to the design of context-aware communication applications are presented.

Squeezing desktop Web content into smart phones and text pagers is more practical with separate interfaces for navigation and content manipulation. m-Links, a middleware proxy system, supports this dual-mode browsing, offering phonetop users an extendable set of actions.

As ubiquitous computing becomes widespread, we are increasingly coming into contact with "shared" computer-enhanced devices, such as cars, televisions, and photocopiers. Our interest is in identifying general issues in personalizing such shared everyday devices. Our approach is to compare alternative personalization methods by deploying and using alternative personalization interfaces (portable and embedded) for three shared devices in our workplace (a presentation PC, a plasma display for brainstorming, and a multi-function copier). This paper presents the comparative prototyping methodology we employed, the experimental system we deployed, observations and feedback from use, and resulting issues in designing personalized shared ubiquitous devices.

Evaluating ubiquitous systems is hard, and has attracted the attention of others in the research community. These investigators, like others in CSCW, argue there is a basic mismatch between traditional evaluation techniques and the needs posed by ubiquitous systems. Namely, these systems are embedded in a variety of complex real world environments that cannot be easily modeled (as required by theoretical analyses), simulated, measured, or controlled (as required by laboratory experiments). As a result, many investigators have abandoned traditional comparative evaluation techniques and opted instead for techniques adapted from the social sciences, such as anthropology. We wanted to perform a comparative evaluation similar to a laboratory experiment, but in such a way that we could observe the effects of our design decisions in relatively unconstrained, real world use. This led us to the process described in this paper.

A basic objective of Weiser's Ubiquitous Computing vision is ubiquitous information access: being able to utilize any content or service (e.g., all the rich media content and services on the WWW), using devices that are always "at hand" (embedded in environments or portable), over a network with universal coverage and adequate bandwidth. Although much progress has been made, the ideal remains elusive. This paper examines the inter-relations among three dimensions of ubiquitous information systems: (1) ubiquitous content; (2) ubiquitous devices; and (3) ubiquitous networking. We use the space defined by these dimensions to reflect on the tradeoffs designers make and to chart some past and current information systems. Given this background, we present m-Links (mobile links), a new system that takes aim at the elusive ideal of ubiquitous information. Our approach builds on wireless web phone technologies because of their trend towards ubiquitous devices and networking (the second and third dimensions). Yet such very small devices sacrifice usability as rich media Internet terminals (the first dimension). To offset this limitation, we propose a new information access model for very small devices that supports a much wider range of content and services than previously possible. We have built this system with an emphasis on open systems extensibility and describe its design and implementation.

In this paper we describe the Mobile Link (m-Links) infrastructure for utilizing existing World Wide Web content and services on wireless phones and other very small Internet terminals. Very small devices, typically with 3-20 lines of text, provide portability and other functionality while sacrificing usability as Internet terminals. In order to provide access on such limited hardware we propose a small device web navigation model that is more appropriate than the desktop computers web browsing model. We introduce a middleware proxy, the Navigation Engine, to facilitate the navigation model by concisely displaying the Webs link (i.e., URL) structure. Because not all Web information is appropriately "linked," the Navigation Engine incorporates data-detectors to extract bits of useful information such as phone numbers and addresses. In order to maximize program-data composibility, multiple network-based services (similar to browser plug-ins) are keyed to a links attributes such as its MIME type. We have built this system with an emphasis on user extensibility and we describe the design and implementation as well as a basic set of middleware services that we have found to be particularly important.

The two most commonly used techniques for evaluating the fit between application design and use - namely, usability testing and beta testing with user feedback - suffer from a number of limitations that restrict evaluation scale (in the case of usability tests) and data quality (in the case of beta tests). They also fail to provide developers with an adequate basis for: (1) assessing the impact of suspected problems on users at large, and (2) deciding where to focus development and evaluation resources to maximize the benefit for users at large. This paper describes an agent-based approach for collecting usage data and user feedback over the Internet that addresses these limitations to provide developers with a complementary source of usage- and usability-related information. Contributions include: a theory to motivate and guide data collection, an architecture capable of supporting very large scale data collection, and real-word experience suggesting the proposed approach is complementary to existing practice.

Modern window-based user interface systems generate user interface events as natural products of their normal operation. Because such events can be automatically captured and because they indicate user behavior with respect to an application's user interface, they have long been regarded as a potentially fruitful source of information regarding application usage and usability. However, because user interface events are typically voluminos and rich in detail, automated support is generally required to extract information at a level of abstraction that is useful to investigators interested in analyzing application usage or evaluating usability. This survey examines computer-aided techniques used by HCI practitioners and researchers to extract usability-related information from user interface events. A framework is presented to help HCI practitioners and researchers categorize and compare the approaches that have been, or might fruitfully be, applied to this problem. Because many of the techniques in the research literature have not been evaluated in practice, this survey provides a conceptual evaluation to help identify some of the relative merits and drawbacks of the various classes of approaches. Ideas for future research in this area are also presented. This survey addresses the following questions: How might user interface events be used in evaluating usability? How are user interface events related to other forms of usability data? What are the key challenges faced by investigators wishing to exploit this data? What approaches have been brought to bear on this problem and how do they compare to one another? What are some of the important open research questions in this area?