Ubittention @ UbiComp

Ubittention: Smart & Ambient Notification and Attention Management

Users of digital devices are increasingly confronted with a tremendous amount of notifications that appear on multiple devices and screens in their environment. If a user owns a smartphone, a tablet, a smartwatch and a laptop and an email-client is installed on all of these devices an incoming email produces up to four notifications — one on each device. In the future, we will receive notifications from all our ubiquitous devices. Therefore, we need a smart attention management for incoming notifications. One way for a less interrupting attention management could be the use of ambient representations of incoming notifications.

The goal of this workshop is to discuss how the problems of information overload and overchoice — in our opinion two of the most relevant problems in information technology for the next few decades — can be solved. In the era of the Internet of Things (IoT) we have to handle incoming notifications from all our devices. Together with developments in smart city environments or with smart mobility the information overload will grow. In this workshop, we want to focus on a larger understanding of the different roles notifications can play in a wide variety of computing environments including the office, the home, in cars, and other smart environments.

Topics of the workshop include, but are not limited to:
– Understanding behavior and habits around notifications
– Detection/prediction of availability, attention, and opportune moments for interruptions
– Ambient, peripheral, distributed and multimodal presentation of information or augmentation
– Timing of pro-active recommendations and user engagements
– Infrastructures, frameworks and tools for the development of smart attention systems
– Strategies for attention management from notifications of IoT devices
– Use of ambient representations for “BigData analysis”
– Management of information overload in “Smart City” environment and Cyber-Physical Systems or “Smart Mobility” and Vehicle environment