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wContact: improving social communication
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| 12.87 MB | Adobe PDF |
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Abstract(s)
Contact management today is ubiquitous and multi‐channel: phone, IM, email, VOIP to name but a few. However, the contact management technology commonly in use today has not changed significantly in many years. It remains far from an ideal service, falling down on issues such as its utility, ease of interaction, the efforts required to maintain it and its reliability.
Another important factor relies how mobile communication devices have become more commonplace increasing the potential to be interrupted by them. Indeed, it has been argued that technologies such as the mobile phone have “reconfigured time and space”. They have also fundamentally altered notions of availability, promoting a vision in which users are always‐on and continually connected. While this confers many advantages it also increases the potential for disruption to users engaged in other activities or seeking rest
This document describes wContact, a system that provides a unified service of synchronized contact profiles (incorporating privacy controls) that contain all contact info. This is held in a distributed system (a cloud computing service) and broadcast over a data connection to address book clients. Ultimately this takes the form of a minimal social network where adding or removing contacts is equivalent to adding or removing a friend in a more conventional service such as Facebook.
The wContact is complemented with a system which automatically manages status on a mobile device. Its contribution lies in the adoption of a number of recent technological advances to create a realistic framework for a sophisticated mobile context‐sensitive tool to capture activity and infer and share availability. It does so by proposing a context model based on the integration of multiple sensor inputs (e.g. microphone and accelerometer) and internal device state (e.g. battery level) which is broadcasted.
In summary, wContact represents a substantial improvement over today’s systems in how contacts are treated and managed. It focuses on simplifying the way they are exchanged, increasing the quantity and quality of contact details and providing awareness clues to better mediate engagement with contacts. Finally, to ensure the durability of contacts the system provides a seamless automatic update process.
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Software Engineering . Faculdade de Ciências Exatas e da Engenharia