Office workers are today often faced with the dilemma of being focused on the present activity and yet available for incoming calls on their mobile phone. Current technology does not support this situation. Many intrusive calls seem to occur as consequence of the lack of information about the recipient's context. The focus of this thesis is the initiation of mobile communication via mobile phon...

In this paper, we present a computational approach to understanding and augmenting the conversational knowledge process that is a collective activity for knowledge creation, management, and application, where conversational communications are used as a primary means of interaction among participating agents. The key idea is conversation quantization, a technique of approximating a continuous fl...

The author describes a system for defining conversation policies that allows conversants to exchange explicit representations of how they use messages to get things done. This system allows conversation policies to be defined for one or more conversation partners. It does not require that every partner be aware of the other’s conversation policies; however, it does provide more capabilities if ...

A café table is a traditional setting for conversation. Tabletop displays may have an active role in this connection. In particular for a museum scenario, conversation after the visit is important for a joint elaboration of a small group visit experience. We propose the museum café as the location to introduce a tabletop display meant to foster and support conversation about the visit. The goal...

Existing open-domain human-computer conversation systems are typically passive: they either synthesize or retrieve a reply provided with a humanissued utterance. It is generally presumed that humans should take the role to lead the conversation and introduce new content when a stalemate occurs, and that computers only need to “respond.” In this paper, we propose STALEMATEBREAKER, a conversation...

This research examined whether children with autism could be trained to improve their conversational skills and whether this led to changes in standard tests of theory of mind (ToM). Three high-functioning children with autism participated in a multiple baseline across participants design. The children were taught how to initiate a conversation, take turns during conversation, listen attentivel...

One of the primary tools of collective intelligence is conversation. Conversation takes many forms, from interactive storytelling, to an emerging lingua franca of structured conversation, Issue-based information systems (IBIS) and related forms of contested discourse. Conversation federation facilitates improved collective intelligence for sensemaking and for decision making. Federating convers...

Research has demonstrated that pupil dilation can be an effective indicator of human cognition. When two people converse face-to-face, the body language, gaze, eye movements or visual cues in general play an instrumental role in determining the course of the conversation. However, it is not known how our pupils might actually react in a computer mediated conversation. was divided into two phase...

Recent criticism within LAP challenges the theoretical basis of the “conversation for action” schema described by Winograd & Flores (1986) as an approach for modelling interaction. The criticism points to conversation analysis, as practiced in the fields of Sociology and Communication, as a remedy. The remedy can be taken further, however. It is suggested here that the concepts of felicity cond...