Serendipitous sharing through
personal information environments
Jeff Pierce
Dr Jeff Pierce is an Assistant Professor in the College of Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology, where he conducts research on next-generation user interfaces. Pierce leads the Personal Information Environments research group and co-directs the Adaptive Personalized Information Environments lab with Dr Charles Isbell. "We are connected 24/7, but don't yet have reasonable access to data with mobile phones", says Pierce, who is working to change that fact. In receiver, he talks about how mobile phones can become an extension of the PC.
 |
Those two trends present an opportunity, but also several challenges. The opportunity is to allow workers to take advantage of their heterogeneous collection of computing devices to access, interact with, and share their information at any time using any of their devices. The challenges are that currently the contents of those devices may differ drastically because workers perform different tasks with different devices at different times; all devices are not physically or network accessible at all times; and current computing devices, because each largely assumes that it is a user's only device, provide little to no support for coordinating activities across them.
The following scenario illustrates these challenges:
Alice is visiting a satellite corporate office and arranges to meet Bob, a colleague, for lunch. They discuss how their respective jobs are going and exchange details of recent projects. During their conversation, Bob expresses an interest in reading a market research report that Alice just recently finished writing. Unfortunately, it is on her desktop computer, which is back in her home office. Rather than immediately sharing the report with Bob, Alice must remember to email it to him when she returns from her trip.
The solution we propose to overcome the challenges and realize the opportunity is to take a worker's collection of heterogeneous personal computing devices and organize them into a personal information environment. Devices in such an environment should be aware of each other, able to contact each other regardless of intervening firewalls and changing network addresses, and able to actively help users manage information and activities across them.
We tackled the problem of helping users serendipitously share files with others as an initial motivating example and step toward our proposed solution. Mobile information workers frequently need to share files with or receive them from others. While workers currently have access to a variety of file-sharing mechanisms (eg email, posting them on a web page, putting them on a USB flash drive, point-to-point "beaming"), existing mechanisms assume either that users have direct access (either physical or network) to the device containing the files or that the user has anticipated the need to share them.