Social Awareness

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Social Awareness

• Carlos A. Sánchez
• 03/04/2008

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Agenda

• CONCEPTS
• Historical Perspective ? 40,000 B.C.
• BABBLE - LOOPS (IBM Social Computing Lab)
• Knowledge Management Application
• Social Translucence
• AWARE (University of Aarhus Denmark)
• Context Mediated Social Awareness in Mobile
  Cooperation Healthcare environment
• Java Awareness Context Framework JACF
• iSOCIALIZE (University of Aalborg Denmark)
• Mobile Social Awareness amongst family and
  acquaintances
• Awareness Cues

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Historical Perspective (I)

• What is the percent genetic difference between
  humans an chimpanzees?
• 1.23
• What is the percent critical difference?
• 0.01 to 0.02
• Which one is arguably the most critical
  difference?

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Historical Perspective (II)

• LANGUAGE 40,000 B.C.
• CONVERSATION
• Why is conversation important?
• Synchronous Knowledge Transfer in a Social Space
• What was missing?

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Historical Perspective (III)

• WRITING 4,000 B.C. - Cuneiform
• 2,000 B.C. - Alphabetic Script
• PERSISTENCE
• What did persistence bring?
• Asynchronous Knowledge Transfer
• What was missing?

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Historical Perspective (IV)

• Printing Press Johan Gutenberg, 1439
• ? Mass Dissemination of Knowledge
• ? Standards A book was the same everywhere
• ? Who said what when
• What did the printing press bring?
• Scientific Communities ? Industrial Revolution
• What was missing?

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Historical Perspective (V)

• Linking computers
• ARPANET X.25 - October 29th, 1969
• Internet TCP/IP - January 1st, 1983
• Linking documents
• WWW First Web Page ? August 6th ,1991
• What did these added?
• Asynchronous and Synchronous Communications
• Decoupling of Space and Time
• Instantaneous Mass Coverage
• Multiple way Communications
• What was missing?

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Historical Perspective (VI)

• Linking people Web 2.0 - 2004
• Chat rooms, collaborative filtering, mash-ups,
  podcasting, social navigation, social search,
  virtual communities, sharing, blogs, wikis
• What did Web 2.0 bring?
• A Digital knowledge oriented environment where
  human social interactions create and share
  content using the web as a platform.
• What is missing?
• Can we do better?

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Concepts Review

• Conversation, Persistence, Synchronous and
  Asynchronous Communications, Place decoupling,
  mass dissemination, who said what/when, multi-way
  communications, knowledge communities, and
  linking computers, documents and people.
• What is used in IM systems?
• What is gained? What is lost?

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Social Translucence

• Babble Loops

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Social Translucence - Properties

• Solid Door with Please Open Slowly Sign
• vs. Glass Door
• Visibility of Social Information
• Humans react faster to movement, faces and
  figures than printed signs
• Awareness Support
• I know you are in the other side. You know Im
  here
• We both know the social rules
• Accountability
• I know that you know that I know

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Social Translucence Translucent vs.
Transparent
Power of Constraints Private vs. Public
Information
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Social Translucence Opaque Digital Systems

• Digital Systems are generally opaque to social
  information
• In the digital world we are socially blind
• i.e. Waiting in Line at USPS vs.
• Waiting on-line for the IM tech support at ebay
• What could be done? More on this coming

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Social Translucence - Babble

• Knowledge Management Systems
• Capture, Retrieval, Dissemination of and
  organizations internal information
• Traditional View
• Data Mining, Text clustering, database documents
• Social View
• Production and use of knowledge is a social
  phenomena

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Social Translucence - Babble

• Social View of Knowledge Management
• Who has worked on a project?
• What have they done? Can we talk to them?
• How have they used existing knowledge?
• Social references for calls vs. database list
• Information in databases is more useful if it
  provides links to enter social networks
• Knowledge database vs. Knowledge Communities

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Social Translucence - Babble

• Conversationally Based Knowledge Community
• Conversation is essential Natural medium to
  create, develop and validate knowledge
• Conversation is a deep interactive intellectual
  process
• Conversation is a fundamental social process
• People speak to an audience
• People portray themselves through conversation

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Social Translucence - Conversation

• Did I say that conversation is important?

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Social Translucence Digital Conversation

• Digital Conversations PERSIST
• Therefore
• They can be synchronous or asynchronous
• With an intimate or vast audience
• Can be searched, browsed, replayed, annotated,
  visualized, restructured, etc.

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Social Translucence Activity Support

• Approaches to make Social Activity Visible
• Realist i.e. Teleconferencing
• Problems Scale, cost, social cues not well
  conveyed, bandwidth, support
• Mimetic i.e. Virtual Environments, Avatars
• Problems Scale, has to manipulate avatars to
  produce social cues, support
• Abstract i.e. Waiting on-line example next slide
• Less is more easy to understand, implement and
  maintain

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Social Translucence Abstract Social Proxies
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Social Translucence BabbleKnowledge Management
Community
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Social Translucence LOOPSWeb Interface
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Social Translucence LoopsBulletin Board
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Social Translucence - Babble
Persistent textual representation of a
conversation
Everybody knows that conversations are persistent
and shared in a sequential structure What are
the challenges?
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Social Translucence - Babble
Social Proxy of a Conversation
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Social Translucence - Babble
Structure of a Knowledge Community
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Social Translucence - Babble
Diachronic (Longitudinal) Proxies
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The AWARE Architecture

• Supporting Context-Mediated social Awareness in
  Mobile Cooperation

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AWARE Architecture

• Context Aware Computing as facilitator of social
  awareness
• CASE Mobile Collaboration in a hospital
  environment
• AWARE Architecture Generic platform for
  supporting context mediated social awareness
• JACT Java Awareness Context Framework

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AWARE Architecture Operational Issues

• Hospital buildings are large. People move around
  (not co-located).
• Nurses spend large amount of times keeping track
  of physicians location and availability.
• Interns need to consult frequently with senior
  doctors about patients.
• Doctors in operating room frequently have to wait
  for test results before advancing. Meanwhile they
  perform other activities
• Who to contact? When? How? Where?

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AWARE Architecture

• Awareness in CSCW
• Goal is to minimize unwanted interruptions
  through context-mediate social awareness
• Interruptions
• 90 of brief conversations are unplanned
• Only 55 of people who are interrupted continue
  in the same activity
• Blocking calls is not an option in a hospital
• 60 of phone calls fail to reach recipient

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AWARE Architecture

• Context-Mediated Social Awareness
• In working settings people avoid interrupting
  each other when proper mechanisms are in place
• Monitoring The actors activity provide
  information to be monitored i.e. operating in
  room 103
• Displaying The actor selects what status
  information to be displayed i.e. at lunch.

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AWARE Architecture

• Awarephone requirements
• Context-mediated social awareness via context
  cues.
• Direct synchronous communications
• Exchange of prioritized messages by placing
  virtual post-it notes on a co-worker.

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AWARE Architecture
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AWARE Architecture

• Test Results
• Everybody liked the system
• People dont like to provide location information
• Dont want to provide the ability to be tracked
  i.e. length of the coffee breaks
• Cell phone is preferred to pagers ? provides the
  ability for immediate communication
• Preset messages is a desirable option

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AWARE Architecture
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AWARE Architecture - JACF
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iSocialize

• Investigating Awareness Cues for a Mobile Social
  Awareness Application

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iSocialize

• Goals of the Study
• Understand the nature of social awareness between
  acquainted and closely related people
• How technology as well as traditional methods of
  communication support awareness

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iSocialize

• Challenges
• Participating families found it difficult to
  maintain and overview of activities of family and
  friends
• Participants found it difficult to determine
  appropriate times to call or interrupt
• Participants expressed concerns about sharing all
  kinds of information about them

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iSocialize

• Social Awareness Cues
• Activity Actions and whereabouts of partner
• Status Communication state
• Relation Defines the social relation between
  partners
• Vicinity Distance to partner How much effort
  contact requires

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iSocialize
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iSocialize
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iSocialize
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iSocialize
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iSocialize
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iSocialize

• Evaluation
• 20 Subjects at Aalborg University - Denmark
• Average age 24 years old
• Five pairs acquainted Five pairs unacquainted
• Video recorded sessions two participants per
  session
• Wizard of Oz evaluation

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iSocialize

• Findings
• Imprecise Awareness Cues People dont want to
  provide exact location
• Awareness Cues Integration Challenges Privacy
  Concerns i.e. location vs. activity
• Difficult to Maintain a mental model of contacts
• Changes and updates of awareness cues
• Awareness cues requires previous social construct

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Thats all FolksThank you!