Concept of a robust & training-free probabilistic system for real-time intention analysis in teams

Present-day mobility and ubiquity of computing devices make information technology accessible for user activities that are temporally and, especially, spatially distributed. Besides mobile systems this enables ubiquitous computing that – as Weiser phrased it – “enhances computer use by making many computers available throughout the physical environment, while making them effectively invisible to the user” (Weiser, 1993, pg. 75). Mobile and ubiquitous systems aim for autonomous and proactive assistance and therefore their infrastructure needs to be able to identify the users’ needs. This has two important consequences: 1. The set of devices available for interaction may change over time. This raises the challenge of adaptivity: on different devices the same abstract human-computer interaction such as entering a phone number has to be rendered differently in order to make optimal use of the specific device’s interaction mechanisms. 2. The structure of a user task becomes accessible to the computing system. This creates the opportunity of proactive assistance: if the devices in the user’s environment are able to infer her current activity, they are able to trigger actions such as providing information without explicit user interaction. In order to enable adaptivity and to use proactive assistance a concept investigated in current research on mobile and ubiquitous systems is to provide computing systems with explicit models of the user’s behavior or tasks. Even though for both fields (adaptivity and proactive assistance) any aspects of the user’s behavior or activities can be derived from psychological research on human cognition and social groups, both are seen as separate issues in system development and are addressed by different modeling concepts. This work reviews research areas of social psychology, cognitive psychology, and signal processing to collect sensible descriptions of human behavior in both group situations and problem solving situations that iii