Most information retrieval technologies are designed to facilitate information discovery. However, much knowledge work involves finding and re-using previously seen information. We describe the design and evaluation of a system, called Stuff I’ve Seen (SIS), that facilitates information re-use. This is accomplished in two ways. First, the system provides a unified index of information that a person has seen, whether it was seen as email, web page, document, appointment, etc. Second, because the information has been seen before, rich contextual cues can be used in the search interface. The system has been used internally by more than 230 employees. We report on both qualitative and quantitative aspects of system use. Initial findings show that time and people are important retrieval cues. Users find information more easily using SIS, and use other search tools less frequently after installation.

P2P file sharing systems are rapidly becoming one of the most popular applications on the internet, with millions of users online exchanging files daily. While primarily intended for sharing multimedia files, programs such as Gnutella, Freenet, and Kazaa frequently allow other types of files to be shared. Although this has no doubt contributed to P2P filesharing's growing popularity, it raises serious security concerns about the types of files that users are aware of sharing with others. Users who accidentally or unknowingly allow their private or personal files to be shared risk disclosing their private information to other users on the network. In this

Document properties are a compelling infrastructure on which to develop document management applications. A property-based approach avoids many of the problems of traditional hierarchical storage mechanisms, reflects document organizations meaningful to user tasks, provides a means to integrate the perspectives of multiple individuals and groups, and does this all within a uniform interaction framework. Document properties can reflect not only categorizations of documents and document use, but also expressions of desired system activity, such as sharing criteria, replication management and versioning. Augmenting property-based document management systems with active properties that carry executable code enables the provision of document-based services on a property infrastructure. The combination of document properties as a uniform mechanism for document management, and active properties as a way of delivering document services, represents a new paradigm for document management infras...

This paper reports on TaskTracer — a software system being designed to help highly multitasking knowledge workers rapidly locate, discover, and reuse past processes they used to successfully complete tasks. The system monitors users ’ interaction with a computer, collects detailed records of users ’ activities and resources accessed, associates (automatically or with users ’ assistance) each interaction event with a particular task, enables users to access records of past activities and quickly restore task contexts. We present a novel Publisher-Subscriber architecture for collecting and processing users ’ activity data, describe several different user interfaces tried with TaskTracer, and discuss the possibility of applying machine learning techniques to recognize/predict users ’ tasks.

Organizations, families, institutions evolve a shared culture and history. In this work, we describe a system to facilitate conversation and storytelling about this collective past. Users explore digital archives of shared materials such as photographs, video, and text documents on a tabletop interface. Both the software and the interface encourage natural conversation and reflection. This work is an application of our ongoing research on systems for multiple, co-present users to explore digital collections. In this paper, we present a case study of our own group history along with the software extensions developed for this scenario. These extensions include methods for easily branching off from and returning to previous threads of the exploration, incorporating background contexts that support a variety of view points and flexible story sharing, and supporting the active and passive discovery of relevant information.

Medical care involves intense collaboration amongst a number of practitioners including physicians, nurses, and pharmacists Their work is concentrated on a single patient, and yet their activities, motivations, and concerns are very different We explore the use of a shared information system in helping these individuals coordinate their work In particular, we use the idea of a common information space to explore how the shared information is incorporated into the diverse work practices of an intensive care unit In addition to physical co-location, we found that providing information in many specialised representations is critical to managing their coordination. Unlike paper records, computer systems offer the ability to decouple information from its representations. This decoupling opens up a rich design space for systems that allow people with different interests, concerns and work practices to work together effectively.

People increasingly use multiple devices and Internet services to manage and share information. Since portable devices have limited resources for storage and bandwidth, it is essential to take advantage of proximity and selected replication of content. To this end we present Cimbiosys, a replication platform that permits each device to define its own content-based filtering criteria and to share updates with any other device. Cimbiosys ensures two properties not achieved by previous systems. First, every device stores exactly those items whose latest version meets arbitrary filter criteria that are independent of any hierarchical namespace. Second, every device represents its metadata in a compact form, with state proportional to the number of devices rather than the number of items. Such compact representation enables low synchronization overhead, which permits frequent synchronization even for bandwidthlimited devices. We have implemented Cimbiosys in C # and Mace. We evaluated the performance of the CIM Sync protocol in both simulation and using the Mace implementation. 1

Search systems can alleviate the need to organize personal information by helping us find it no matter where we encountered it, what we remember about it, and even if we forget it exists. Delia wants to set up a lunch meeting at a restaurant her brother had recommended last week in an email message. She should be able to find the address using one of several organizational schemes she has developed to help her manage the vast quantity of paper and electronic information she receives every day. She knows she copied information about the restaurant into her address book, but she’s not sure of the restaurant’s name, making it difficult to look it up directly. She’s not sure whether she filed the message in a folder relating to the main topic of her brother’s email message or left 58 January 2006/Vol. 49, No. 1 COMMUNICATIONS OF THE ACM it in her inbox. since she still needs to respond to him.

Email triage is the process of going through unhandled email and deciding what to do with it. This process can quickly become a serious problem for users with large volumes of email. Studies have found that people use a variety of approaches to triage their email, many of which have a social component. We believe that email clients can better support email triage by providing users with additional sorting features based on socially salient information. We present a prototype email client, SNARF (the Social Network and Relationship Finder), that aggregates social meta-data about email correspondents to aid email triage. Users can then sort their correspondents based on this meta-data, bringing emails from socially important people to the foreground. 1

As more people use e-mail at home or on the job, more people have come to experience the pain of e-mail that Denning first wrote about 20 years ago [3]. In this paper, we present data from a field study in our own company to add to the existing body of research about how people use e-mail. We then use these data and prior literature to outline a framework of the five main activities that we believe people use e-mail for. In particular, we focus on two activities that we believe have been under-studied: attending to the flow of messages they arrive, and doing "triage" on a body of new messages. In addition, we outline potential design directions for improving the e-mail experience, with a focus on e-mail clients that group messages and their replies together into threads. We present a prototype of such an interface as well as results from a lab study of the prototype.