Generals Abstract

People wish to maintain a level of awareness and communication with others in a variety of social settings at different times of the day. Awareness provides subtle cues about people's availability, rhythms, and regularity of activity (or lack thereof). One's expectations regarding the social and temporal structure of the environment, allows better coordination with others in a workgroup and enhances cognitive well being in a community.

Private/public space and time do not have well defined boundaries; they are highly malleable based on the context of situations. However our communication devices assume binary and absolute modes for interaction. Telephones can disrupt recipients and require a time-limited conversation between parties rather than an on-going awareness. Video and audio-conferencing permit open connections between participants but typically require complete engagement or attention. Communication technology can now be used to create more graceful means for peripheral awareness and background conversation.

The challenge is to develop means for extracting and representing everyday social/temporal patterns, designing lightweight communication techniques as well as shared 'community appliances'. One must consider approaches that permit on-going awareness of people's activity while allowing sufficient control to individuals to interact or retain a sense of privacy. Such methods can be evaluated in the context of casual workplace domains, distributed workgroups, infant/senior caretakers, and semi-public spaces.

This examination covers three areas related to analysis and representation of activity for enhancing community awareness and interaction. The main area, design for awareness and communication in community, is concerned with HCI approaches towards synchronous and asynchronous interaction within workgroups. The supporting technical area, recognizing human activity in audio/visual scenes, covers computational methods for representation and classification of human and environmental activity in visual and auditory scenes. The supporting context area, understanding socio-cultural behavior in public/private spaces, provides an overview of ethnographic and psychological studies within which to consider the implications of CSCW systems in social settings.