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The SOCIAL Project

Approaching Spontaneous Communication in Distributed Work Groups

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Ambient Intelligence (AmI 2015)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNISA,volume 9425))

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Abstract

The aim of the project SOCIAL is to explore possibilities to facilitate spontaneous and informal communication in spatially distributed groups by exploiting ambient intelligence and smart environments. Spontaneous and informal communication has a strong impact on the productivity, social identity, and wellbeing of work groups. The spatial distance between peers plays a key role in successfully establishing and maintaining such communication. In co-located teams, spontaneous communication occurs daily: People occasionally meet on office floors, at the coffee corner, or have lunch together. Today, due to globalization we often encounter distributed work settings that impede spontaneous communication between co-workers, as teams are distributed over branch offices located in different cities and countries. We propose to approach this problem by (1) detecting situations with the potential for spontaneous informal communication, (2) representing and raising awareness for these situations appropriately, and (3) enabling users to engage seamlessly in spontaneous communication spanning spatially separated locations. In this paper we focus on the second aspect. A pilot study is described with results on combining various interaction modalities in order to raise awareness for communication. In addition, we describe a formal representation for ambient intelligence incorporating situational context and the system itself.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    http://opencv.org/ (visited: 03/19/2015).

  2. 2.

    http://ravl.sourceforge.net/ (visited: 03/19/2015).

  3. 3.

    http://shark-project.sourceforge.net/ (visited: 03/19/2015).

  4. 4.

    We define only the set of binary relations, due to understandability. However, this can be changed to any arity of relation without influence on the remaining specification.

  5. 5.

    In general, usage of \(\diamond [t_i,t_j]\) is possible, but would lead to multiple interpretations of a single knowledge base.

  6. 6.

    Currently only brute-force model-checking is applied, however, we intend to investigate the use of existing computational reasoners to address scalability.

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Acknowledgments

We acknowledge German Research Foundation (DFG) funding for project SOCIAL (FR 806/15-1 | BO 1645/12-1). We thank the four anonymous reviewers for their thoughtful and constructive comments.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Cognitive Systems Group, University of Bremen, Bremen, Germany

    Jasper van de Ven, Frank Dylla & Christian Freksa

  2. University of Oldenburg, Oldenburg, Germany

    Dimitra Anastasiou & Susanne Boll

Authors
  1. Jasper van de Ven
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  2. Dimitra Anastasiou
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  3. Frank Dylla
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  4. Susanne Boll
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  5. Christian Freksa
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Correspondence to Jasper van de Ven .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Philips Research, Eindhoven, The Netherlands

    Boris De Ruyter

  2. Hellenic Open University, Patras, Greece

    Achilles Kameas

  3. Institute of Thessaloniki, Alexander Technological Educational, Sindos, Greece

    Periklis Chatzimisios

  4. Hellenic Open University, Patras, Greece

    Irene Mavrommati

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van de Ven, J., Anastasiou, D., Dylla, F., Boll, S., Freksa, C. (2015). The SOCIAL Project. In: De Ruyter, B., Kameas, A., Chatzimisios, P., Mavrommati, I. (eds) Ambient Intelligence. AmI 2015. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9425. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-26005-1_12

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-26005-1_12

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