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Digital Assistant for Supporting Conference Participants: An Attempt to Combine Mobile, Ubiquitous and Web Computing Yasuyuki Sumi and Kenji Mase ATR Media Integration & Communications Research Laboratories, Advanced Telecommunications Research Institute International, Seika-cho, Soraku-gun, Kyoto 619-0288, Japan {sumi,mase}@mic.atr.co.jp http://www.mic.atr.co.jp/~sumi
Abstract. This paper describes a project of providing digital assistants to support participants in an academic conference. We provided participants at the conference with a personal assistant system with mobile and ubiquitous computing technologies and facilitated communications among the participants. We also made online services available via the Web to encourage the participants to continue their relationships even after the conference. In this paper, we show the system we provided for the project and report the results.
1
Introduction
This paper describes a project of providing digital assistants to support participants in an academic conference, the 14th Annual Conference of the Japanese Society for Artificial Intelligence (JSAI 2000, in short), which was held at the International Conference Center of Waseda University from July 4th to 7th, 2000. The aim of the project, called the JSAI 2001 Digital Assistant Project, was to enhance communications among JSAI 2000 participants. The events of various societies, such as annual conferences, give society members an attractive opportunity to experience new encounters and face-to-face knowledge exchanges, and enable them to become informants as well as audience members. However, it is unexpectedly difficult to efficiently exploit this opportunity within the period of a conference: we tend to miss other participants having shared interests or fail to attend noteworthy presentations. In addition, even if we could meet and have good discussions with other participants at the site of a conference, these relationships would likely terminate after the conference. We provided JSAI 2000 participants with a personal assistant system with mobile and ubiquitous computing technologies and facilitated communications among the participants. We also made online services available via the Web to encourage the participants to continue their relationships even after the conference. The services of the project covered from paper submission, online previewing via G. D. Abowd, B. Brumitt, S. A. N. Shafer (Eds.): Ubicomp 2001, LNCS 2201, pp. 156–175, 2001. c Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2001
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the Web, personal assistance and information sharing support at the conference site, up to Web services after the conference. In this paper, we show the system we provided for the project and report the results.
2
Digital Services for Society Events: Related Works
Digital services for society events are not rare. With the recent spread of e-mail and Web services, it has become common to use the Web to announce conferences, call for papers, submit papers, and review papers. Such digital data, however, has only been used by conference organizers to manage their conferences, not to facilitate information sharing among participants to the conferences. Recently, a lot of research has been done on communityware, software that allows large decentralized groups of people to form communities, share preferences and knowledge, and perform social activities [1]. Considering that academic societies are knowledge-centered communities, the JSAI 2000 Digital Assistant Project was therefore an attempt to build a communityware system. Related works have been done. Salomon et al. [2] provided CHI’89 participants with conference information, e.g., presentations, participants, and venues, by kiosk terminals located at the conference site. They also evaluated the usability of their services. Dey et al. [3] prototyped a mobile assistant system for conference participants by using a position detection technology with RF tags. Their aim included the facilitation of information sharing among conference participants after a conference by using not only digitized papers but also presentation materials. Although their work is of interest to us, the actual workings of their system at conferences have not been reported. There have been many works on building tour guidance systems for museum visitors and travelers (e.g., [4,5,6,7]). However, none of them have focused on the enhancement of information sharing among users. Classroom 2000 [8] was an attempt to support the sharing of course materials and hand-taken notes by applying ubiquitous computing technologies in a living educational environment. The focus of this work was on the personalization of rich digital documents automatically captured at fully equipped classrooms. Our focus, in contrast, is the enhancement of communications among users by exploiting their nomadic experiences in a larger space, i.e., a conference site. Meme Tag, an electronic name tag that is capable of exchanging short messages while facing other tags, and Community Mirror, a big screen that visualizes the spread of messages [9], are interesting efforts at facilitating interaction between people sharing interests at actual party locations. However, the exchanged information among users consists only of short messages, which are insufficient for communities. The most related work to ours has been the ICMAS’96 Mobile Assistant Project [10]. They provided portable digital assistants with various services to
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assist conference participants. The users could use e-mail and online-news services. They were also able to use a service that supported the exchange of information related to the conference with the other the users. The characteristics of our project in comparison with theirs are that we combine mobile assistant services with services on kiosk terminals located at the conference site, and we integrate online services via the Web, which can be accessed before/after the conference, with services provided at the conference site.
3 3.1
Overview of the Project Data Preparation
The conference was four days and had about 250 presentations (oral presentations and demos) and about 600 participants. We prepared a Web server to receive paper submissions before the conference. Upon submission, the authors were automatically registered as users of the JSAI 2000 Digital Assistant Project and their IDs and passwords were created. In order to provide a service enabling the browsing of conference data (papers and authors), we had to quantify these data and the user’s intention (interests, preference) somehow. For this purpose, we used keyword vectors. At the time paper were submitted, we received all of the keywords freely attached to the papers: The amount was over 650, which was not useful for indexing the papers and the user’s interests. Because of this, we prepared a thesaurus to absorb these keywords to 28 formal keywords. The data treated by the project included not only the above static data, but also data dynamically captured and updated during/after the conference, such as a user’s history of our system, preferences, and Internet resources (homepage URLs) employed by the user. 3.2
System Overview
We provided all participants with services at the conference site (called onsite services) and online services via the Web (called off-site services). The aim of the onsite services was to provide the users with information situated “now”, “here”, and “with who” in order to encourage them to share information with other conference participants while attending presentations and having face-toface discussions. The aim of the off-site services was to remove tempo-spatial constraints from information services by using the Web. Figure 1 illustrates the overview of our system. The system principally consisted of mobile devices (a portable guidance system called PalmGuide and infrared badges) carried by the users at the conference site and a Web-based online system. PalmGuide is a portable guidance system for a conference participant. It is not constantly connected with the network, but has an infrared communication port so that it can access network resources by connecting with kiosk terminals located at the conference site.
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The kiosk terminals (and AgentSalon, a kind of kiosk) were connected with the local-area network (LAN) at the conference site and accessed, via the Internet, the Web server located at ATR (our laboratory). The location server with several infrared sensors, to detect the IDs emitted by the infrared badges worn by the users, was also connected with the LAN. All of the collected data by the location server was utilized to show the current locations of the users on the site map, a service available on the kiosks. The Web server, remotely located at ATR, accumulated the data collected at the conference site, such as the users’ records using PalmGuide and infrared badge, and provided tailored service contents based on requests remotely sent from kiosks via CGI. The Web server also continuously provided off-site services for paper submission, user registration, and conference information viewing. As described above, the system was the combination of various platforms and programming languages, i.e., the Web server with a Java applet and about forty CGI programs written in Perl, PalmGuide running on PalmOS devices, information kiosks and AgentSalon with JavaScript and Microsoft Agent 1 running on Web browsers and infrared communication components written in C++, and the location server programmed with Java. 1
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4 4.1
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Services Provided Portable Guidance System: PalmGuide
We provided the participants at the conference site with PalmGuide, a hand-held guidance system. PalmGuide runs on PalmOS PDAs (Personal Digital Assistants). We prepared fifty PalmOS devices (IBM WorkPads) for the PalmGuide system. Upon borrowing a device, a user selected an agent character from among eight characters we prepared beforehand. The character representation was intended to have the agent increase the believability, consistency, and transparency of services, by having the agent show up on PalmGuide as well as on the kiosk displays and AgentSalon when the user connected his/her PalmGuide to them. Figure 2 shows example displays of PalmGuide. PalmGuide provided its user with the following four functions. – Browsing of conference program (left of Figure 2): The user could hierarchically browse dates, sessions, individual presentations, and their abstracts and authors. – Recommendation of presentations: Presentation recommendations for the next participation were calculated based on the current time and the user’s ratings for the presentations he/she had earlier attended. – Management of touring records: The user could check the presentations he/she had earlier attended (right of Figure 2). A dialogue box for the user to check a rating (1: not interesting, 2: average, 3: interesting) automatically popped-up when he/she checked the box besides the corresponding presentation title.
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– Exchange of “virtual business cards”: All PalmGuide users could exchange “virtual business cards” by turning their PDAs towards others. 4.2
Infrared Badge
We prepared infrared badges for location detection as wearable devices more casual than PalmGuide. Each badge was used as a name tag as well. We used the EIRIS system by ELPAS (Figure 3)2 . With this system, a badge emits a unique ID every four seconds and the nearest sensor detects it. All detected data is collected at the location server, which updates a table of the current location of every wearer. The table can be referenced by other machines on the LAN, and then the site map on the kiosks can show the wearers’ current locations. As can be seen in Figure 3, an EIRIS badge has a button on its back. Pushing the button emits a signal with its ID. We used this button as “marking button”. That is, the badge user could mark an interesting presentation by pushing the button when attending the presentation. The data collected by the location server was used for creating the user’s touring diary. We installed the infrared sensors of the EIRIS system at three halls for oral sessions, at eight booths for poster demonstration sessions, and at AgentSalon.
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4.3
Information Kiosk
We set four terminals as information kiosks. As can be seen in Figure 4, each kiosk terminal was a Windows PC with an LCD touch panel. We provided the following services on the kiosk. – The site map: The user could browse the titles and abstracts of ongoing presentations by touching the displayed map. The locations of badge users 2
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Fig. 4. Information kiosk located at the conference site
were also shown on the map, and so the viewer could immediately know the popularity levels of the current presentations (Figure 5). – Semantic Map: The user could browse the semantic relationships between the presented papers, topic keywords, and participants. – Since the kiosk was connected with the Internet, the user could access Internet resources from the site map and Semantic Map, such as other participants’ Web pages.
Site map Button for Semantic Map Button for the site map Badge user icons Button for initialization Detailed information
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Although the kiosk could be used without PalmGuide, the services on the kiosk could be personalized by connecting PalmGuide. By connecting PalmGuide, the agent character on PalmGuide would migrate to the kiosk display and guide the user on how to use the kiosk. Semantic Map could also be personalized by filtering displayed information based on the user’s touring history and preferences. 4.4
Semantic Map
We provided a system called Semantic Map [11], a visual interface for browsing conference information. Semantic Map is implemented by a Java applet so a user could seamlessly use it as a front-end interface of the kiosk services at the conference site and off-site services via the Web. Semantic Map shows a graph consisting of presentation icons (rectangular icons), keyword icons (oval blue icons), and author icons (oval green icons). The user can select interesting keywords and/or participants from their lists on the right of the applet. By selecting them, the displayed icons are filtered: This shows the user’s personal viewpoint. On the graph, the icons of PalmGuide users (oval pink icons) are also displayed and linked with presentation icons according to the users’ ratings: That is, if a user evaluates a presentation as “interesting”, his/her icon is linked with the presentation icon. There is a “Web Search” button at the bottom of the applet. Pushing the button opens a window showing a list of related Web pages searched by a search
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engine (currently, Google), using keywords currently selected on Semantic Map. This means that Semantic Map enhances the user’s exploration not only within the community information collected by our servers but also among the open resources on the Web. Double-clicking presentation icons and participant icons opens their pages, which include paper abstracts and links. Semantic Map functions as a portal of our other online services, such as our Discussion Board and touring diary services. 4.5
Discussion Board
To encourage deeper interactions between presenters and audience members without tempo-spatial restrictions, we provided Discussion Board, an online discussion system. Discussion Board was provided along individual presentations and was accessible from the details page of a presentation. We intend for it to be used as a way of sending questions about a paper before a conference so that its authors can improve the presentation of the paper at the conference, as well as discussing and reporting updated information after the conference. Figure 7 shows an example display of Discussion Board. Although its interface is very similar to that of Semantic Map, Discussion Board visualizes relationships between posted messages and their writers. In the case of Discussion Board, displayed keywords are automatically extracted from posted messages by using a Japanese parser, called Chasen, developed by NAIST3 . 3
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4.6
Touring Diary
By using PalmGuide and infrared badges, the electronic “footprints” of the individual users were accumulated in the Web server. We provided the users with automatically created touring diaries by using the data. Figure 8 shows an example of a touring diary. The figure shows a list of other PalmGuide users whom the user has exchanged “virtual business cards” with and a list of the presentations he/she had attended. Since the diary was provided as a Web page, the user could use the diary as a portal for Web pages of presentations and people he/she had met at the conference. 4.7
AgentSalon
We set a big display at the conference site, called AgentSalon [12], as a chatting space for the participants. AgentSalon has a big display for use by two to five users simultaneously. We intended for AgentSalon to facilitate new encounters and face-to-face discussions between conference participants by tempting them to chats by their personal agents, which maintained their personal interests and experiences. The personal agents would migrate from PalmGuide to AgentSalon by infrared connection.
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The chatting by the agents was dynamically created according to the touring records of the users of the agents, i.e., presentations they had attended up to that point and the personal ratings they gave to them. When the users shared many presentations in their touring records, their agents mutually recommended the presentations not shared by them, and/or exchanged their users’ opinions about the individual shared presentations. We expected that such chatting by agents would provide just-in-time topics and stimulate the users’ discussions. Figure 9 shows an example display of AgentSalon and its usage at the conference. Semantic Map was displayed behind the animations of the agents and showed the touring records of the current users. The users could touch the icons of Semantic Map and browse their detailed information.
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Results of Users’ Data
In this section, we analyze our systems’ users’ data and describe the lessons we learned. 5.1
Distribution of User Types
The users of our systems were classified the types described below. Note that only identifiable users were classified. – Registered users: All users registered for the project. This type contains users who automatically registered when they submitted a paper and users who signed-up themselves. – PalmGuide users: Users who carried the PalmGuide device at the conference site. – Badge users: Users who wore an infrared badge at the conference site. – Off-site service users: Users who logged-in to our off-site services at least once. The number of these groups naturally overlapped. Figure 10 shows the numbers and distribution of the groups’ members. From the diagram, we can make the following observations. – Over half of the users who used PalmGuide and/or the badge at the conference site logged-in to the off-site services. – Of the 203 of off-site service users, 162 utilized only the off-site services.
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– Over 60% of registered users did not use PalmGuide, badge, or off-site services. Most of them are assumed to be auto-registered participants who submitted papers, so they did not have enough motivation to use our systems. Note that there is no way to count the users who only used the kiosk service, so we cannot say how many users never used any service. – There is much overlap between users of PalmGuide and the badge. We intended these two services to be used as alternatives, but most of the active users were interested in using both of them. We prepared 50 PDAs to lend out for use with the PalmGuide system. Since most of them were used by one person during the entire conference, the total number of PalmGuide users was 65. Among them, five users used their own PalmOS devices. We expect that we will not have to prepare such PDA devices for lending out in the near future. We prepared 100 infrared badges, but the number of its users was small. We expected that the effect of a site map would be displayed on the kiosks (Figure 5), depending on the number of worn badges; however, this effect was not achieved. Such badges should be distributed to all participants like name tags for effective usage; this would also make user registration easier. However, the EIRIS badge we used is too expensive to give to all participants. Considering how to use cheaper RF tags or IC cards for this purpose is a future work. We registered 479 presenters as users of our system beforehand. In addition to these users, 136 people signed up for our services in the two-month period after we started our online service. Even now, the number of signed-up users continues to increase. As shown in Table 1, while the ratio of logins to our online service of the auto-registered users was only 18.16%, the ratio of signed-up users was over 85%. This seems reasonable considering that signed-up users are generally more highly motivated.
Table 1. Numbers of users who logged in to off-site services user login login ratio (persons) (persons) (%) Auto-registered users 479 87 18.16 136 116 85.29 Signed-up users Total 615 203 33.01
5.2
Utilization of Off-Site Services
Figure 11 shows the overall activities of our off-site services. The x-axis indicates the date and the y-axis indicates the numbers of user sign-ups and logins. Note that the login count before the conference is larger than during the conference; this indicates that online services provided by the Web offer great potential as “warming-up” activities among participants before social events.
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Fig. 11. User sign-up and login to our off-site services
Figure 12 shows the utilization of individual off-site services. Semantic Map was constantly accessed; which implies that it functioned as a browser for pre/post viewing conference information. Concerning Discussion Board, while it was launched more than a few times, its posting numbers were very low. We think the reason for this is that the posted messages could be read anonymously but those posting messages had to use their names. In the future, we need to find a way to motivate the users to join the discussions. Touring diaries were viewed after the conference, but not so much. Although we expected the touring diaries to be effective for continuously connecting users after the conference, the synergistic effect remained low among utilizations of PalmGuide (or the badge), the amount of information provided by users, and the touring diaries.
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5.3
Utilization of Onsite Services
In order to analyze the utilization of services at the conference site, we tracked the daily utilization of the information kiosks, which was the most casual service. Figure 13 shows the access numbers of four kiosks (with and without PalmGuide) and one AgentSalon system. Kiosk use without PalmGuide was consistently most popular. Figure 14 shows the utilization of individual services on the kiosks and AgentSalon. The access number of Semantic Map was significantly higher than the other services since it was launched as the default display. Interestingly, the access frequency of the touring diaries increased from the beginning to the latter part of the conference. This seems reasonable because the value of the diary increased with the utilization of PalmGuide and infrared badge.
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User Distribution of PalmGuide Utilization
Thus far, we have only discussed the aggregated results of all users. Now, we will discuss the trends of system utilization by individual users. Figure 15 shows the user distribution of utilized PalmGuide functions. Concerning the numbers of kiosk access and card exchange, users who never used these services were the majority, and the user numbers nearly decreased with the increase in utilization numbers. On the other hand, the utilization of the presentation check function was completely different depending on the users. Over half of the PalmGuide users checked over 10 presentations for attendance histories, and there were 11 users who checked more than 30. This implies that
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PalmGuide was accepted by most users as a casual interface during conference attendance. 5.5
User Distribution of Off-Site Service Utilization
Figure 16 illustrates the utilization of our off-site services. Figure 16 (1) shows the user distribution of logins to the off-site services. While about half of the users logged in only once, some of the users logged in about 40 times over two months. The most utilized off-site service was Semantic Map for browsing conference information such as papers and presenters. Figure 16 (2) shows the utilization of Semantic Map. Most of the users launched Semantic Map a few times. Surprisingly, there were few users who launched it over 30 times for the two-month
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period. In order to more deeply understand this utilization of Semantic Map, let us look at the number of keyword selections on Semantic Map in Figure 16 (3). On Semantic Map, a user can select keywords to explore conference information. Therefore, the frequency of keyword selections can be regarded as the user’s activity while using Semantic Map. In our case, since one third of all users never selected a keyword, we can assume that quite a few users launched Semantic Map without any aim. On the other hand, we can also see a gentle peak around 20 times, indicating that most of the users understood and actually used Semantic Map. Some very active users made keyword selections over 100 times. According to our records, the most active users used Semantic Map before the conference (for only eight days). This implies that Semantic Map functioned effectively as a way to preview the conference. 5.6
Correlations between Utilizations of Services
In a more detailed analysis, Table 2 shows the correlations between the utilizations of various services (PalmGuide functions and off-site services) by PalmGuide users. We assumed a positive correlation between two with a correlation factor of more than 0.4, which is bold-faced in the table.
Table 2. Correlations between utilizations of various services by PalmGuide users kiosk record card login(1) login(2) login(3) login(t) over- discuss diary view kiosk 1 record .2605 1 card .0926 .2716 1 login(1) -.1853 -.0520 -.0014 1 login(2) -.0410 .0868 .0030 -.0785 1 login(3) -.0102 .2878 -.0249 -.0359 -.0821 1 login(t) -.1914 .0493 -.0076 .9388 .1332 .2223 1 overview -.1920 .0576 -.0039 .6668 .3514 .1474 .7669 1 discuss .0532 .3783 .1080 .0296 .1075 .3567 .1521 .1215 1 diary .0502 .1928 .0062 -.0733 .3778 .0000 .0167 .4245 .3617 1 kiosk: kiosk access with PalmGuide, record: presentation check, card: card exchange, login(1,2,3,t): off-site service login (before, during, after conference, total), semmap: Semantic Map, discussion: Discussion Board, diary: touring diary
A very strong correlation appears between off-site service login before the conference and its total, which means most logins were done before the conference. Additionally, there was a positive correlation between Semantic Map utilization and off-site service login. Therefore, we can assume that such active users, who used PalmGuide at the conference site, were highly motivated by our service before the conference. A positive correlation also appears between
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diary browsing and Semantic Map utilization. This means that Semantic Map functioned as a portal of personal diaries and Internet resources related to the presentations and participants of the conference.
6
Subjective Evaluations
We asked onsite service users to fill out a questionnaire when they returned the PDAs and/or the badge. We received answers from 35 users. Our questions asked whether the user has used individual functions on PalmGuide, information kiosks, and AgentSalon, and if so, whether it was effective. At the same time, we also asked about off-site services for previewing the conference. The following is a summary of the results. – All functions of PalmGuide except card exchanging were used (or noticed) by most of the PalmGuide users without the need for detailed instructions and their effectiveness was acknowledged. – The migration of agent characters from PalmGuide to kiosks was easily understood and used with pleasure. – Although some authors registered links to their personal Web pages for details pages of their papers, most users were not aware of these. The major reason was thought to be the fact that the number of linked pages was very small. – We employed the same Semantic Map applet for the kiosk displays and the AgentSalon’s background. In spite of this, the Semantic Map on AgentSalon was regarded as more effective. We believe that conference participants would prefer collaborative Web browsing with a big screen rather than single use with a kiosk terminal.
7
Conclusions
We reported the implementation and experimental results of a digital assistant system for conference participants. Our trial use showed that the system was still in an early stage because the provided services were not well matured and the participants were typically not used to such services. We believe that online services for pre/post conferences and onsite services for enriching face-to-face meetings at a conference site are mutually compensable and synergic. Therefore, it is important to continue such services so that they will eventually be firmly rooted in the conference operations of academic communities.
Acknowledgments The JSAI 2000 Digital Assistant Project was a highly collaborative work. Valuable contributions to the systems described in this paper were made by Tetsushi Yamamoto, Tadashi Takumi, and Yasuhiro Tanaka. Keiko Nakao took part in
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the design and illustration of the agent characters. We would also like to thank the JSAI 2000 Program Committee for supporting our project. Finally, we would like to thank Ryohei Nakatsu for his continuous support. This work was supported in part by CREST of JST (Japan Science and Technology Corporation).
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