Activity-Based Computing: Computational Management of Activities Reflecting Human Intention

SUMMER 2015 63 In today’s world of ubiquitous computing, an abundance of information is constantly at hand wherever you go, whenever you desire. This can make it challenging for users to find the actual information they need in between these vast amounts of resources. Additionally, unrelated information can easily distract users from the original work they set out to do, leading separate activities to intertwine. Purposefully multitasking or not, there is an overhead associated with managing different parallel activities. The presence of too much information negatively affecting the user’s work is commonly referred to as information overload. Providing contextualized and relevant information to the user can alleviate this problem, hiding irrelevant data while pushing important information to the foreground. However, the question remains what this “context” is composed of. Historically, context is a broadly interpretable term usually encompassing the where, when, who, how, or why of any given situation. Different areas of research are trying to provide contextualized information to the user, each approaching the problem from a different angle. Although there are clear overlaps among fields, a discrepancy on focus and terminology is apparent. Personal information-management (PIM) research tries to empower users by providing extensive tool support by