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Temporal task footprinting: identifying routine tasks by their temporal patterns

Published:07 February 2010Publication History

ABSTRACT

This paper introduces a new representation for describing routine tasks, called temporal task footprints. Routines are characterized by their temporal regularity or rhythm. Temporal pattern analysis (T-patterns) can be used to isolate frequent recurrent patterns in routine tasks that appear repeatedly in the same temporal configuration. Using tf-idf statistics, each task can then be defined in terms of its temporal task footprint, a ranked list of temporal patterns along with their typical frequencies. Experimental evaluations using data of 29 days observing and logging 10 subjects showed that temporal task footprints of application windows, email and document usage outperform decision tree and SVMs in recognizing the subjects' tasks.

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        cover image ACM Conferences
        IUI '10: Proceedings of the 15th international conference on Intelligent user interfaces
        February 2010
        460 pages
        ISBN:9781605585154
        DOI:10.1145/1719970

        Copyright © 2010 ACM

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        Publication History

        • Published: 7 February 2010

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