this paper, we report and elaborate on the results of a field study in a pharmaceutical research organization. The objective of the study was to facilitate the design of mechanisms that help users of CSCW (Computer Supported Co-operative Work) technologies to be accessible constantly without running the risk of inappropriate interaction. Currently, this is not possible, and people experience problems accordingly. Let us start with considering this problem in some more detail.

In this paper, we argue that most current social information filtering approaches may benefit from more seriously taking into account the peculiarities of human cognition and human social behavior since current approaches only consider de-contextualized ratings. Social filtering systems exploit ratings provided by users in order to compute recommendations for other users. Typically, these ratings are detached from the situation and the social embedding in which they have been provided. Recent research on human cognition and behavior suggests that actions should not be viewed in isolation from the situation in which they occur (thus, the term "situated actions"). Accounting for the situation and the social embedding requires support for exploiting the situation rather than abstracting away the situation. In respect to exploiting the social embedding of ratings, we discuss the need for two related basic research directions. First, a self-organizing network of users trusting each other sh...

The ltering task has traditionally been dened as a special case of the information retrieval task, and undeniably, it can be performed by applying retrieval techniques. This theoretical study summarizes our experiences in viewing ltering as an adaptive and temporally-dependent process. A process that, in contrast to traditional retrieval, takes into account the dynamic nature of relevance and its temporal aspects. We investigate the nature of user interests, formulate useful types of adaptivity, and discuss the eectiveness of those types in relation to user interests. To deal with drifts, we introduce the notion of the half life of documents. Furthermore, we discuss potential dangers for eectiveness such as selectivity traps. We pay special attention to practical eciency issues by discussing term selection and incrementality. 1 Introduction The digital and networking revolution over the last decade has made large amounts of digital information available. This tremendous ...

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The thesis is a collection of five papers that approach networking from the perspective of “the New Informatics.” Networking is a kind of working practice that typically is concerned with knowledge or service work, carried out by empowered employees who are engaged in highly co-operative efforts, and who rely extensively on the use of information technology (IT). “The New Informatics ” is an artificial science that explores the possibilities for inventing new ways of using IT with the objective to produce elaborated ideas that seem likely to be applicable in several situations. The overall research question asked in the thesis is: What are the possibilities to improve existing and invent new ideas of CSCW technology use in networking? The research question is approached from an individual and a group perspective. These perspectives are investigated in two empirical studies exploring the work in a dispersed and mobile IT support

There has been an explosion of new forms of communications media for interpersonal communication. There is anecdotal evidence of people suffering from ‘information overload ’ as a result of these developments. This paper presents the results from, and analysis of, a case study of a perceived problem of information overload from e-mail in a large international organisation: Watson Wyatt Partners. The research took two approaches to exploring the problem. The first was a survey of 1500 members of staff in the UK and Europe. This was aimed at collecting factual information. The second approach was to conduct follow up interviews with 19 people at two sites in the UK to explore some of the issues raised by the survey in greater depth. In the paper, we argue that for CMCs (Computer Mediated Communications) to be effective there is a need to establish a ‘context ’ in which the message can be interpreted. In doing so we will demonstrate that ignoring the degree of ‘context ’ a media provides can adversely affect the users perceptions of that media. 1

Media companies are facing new opportunities and challenges. Communications, computing, and content industries are converging into a single, horizontally connected content value chain, where changes are frequent and activities are highly interdependent. However, before convergence and digital content are taken seriously, media companies must understand what is expected from them, how their operations will be affected, and why they should be involved. The production, distribution, and use of content rely heavily on computers and automation. This requires the content essence to be enhanced with explicit descriptions of semantics, or more specifically, semantic metadata. However, semantic metadata is useful only if its nature is understood clearly, and when its structure and usage are well defined. For this purpose, ontologies are needed to capture the essential characteristics of the content domain into a limited set of meaningful concepts. The creation and management of ontologies and semantic metadata require skills and activities that do not necessarily exist in traditional print-based publishing or broadcasting. Companies developing ontologies must understand the essential characteristics of available content, user needs, and planned or existing use of content. Furthermore, they must be able to express this information explicitly in an ontology and then reflect changes in

Email is the “killer network application”. Email is ubiquitous and pervasive. In a relatively short timeframe, the Internet has become irrevocably and deeply entrenched in our modern society primarily due to the power of its communication substrate linking people and organizations around the globe. Much work on email technology has focused on making email easy to use, permitting a wide variety of information and information types to be conveniently, reliably, and efficiently sent throughout the Internet. However, the analysis of the vast storehouse of email content accumulated or produced by individual users has received relatively little attention other than for specific tasks such as spam and virus filtering. As one paper in the literature puts it, ”the state of the art is still a messy desktop” (Denning,

Recommendation and personalization attempt to reduce information overload and retain customers. While research in both recommender systems and personalization grew mainly out of information retrieval, both areas have emerged from nascent levels to veritable and challenging research areas in their own right. Whereas no technical or sophisticated methodologies exist by which to build such systems, the field also lacks a comprehensive, yet manageable survey by which to study recommenda-tion systems and personalization facilities. In this paper, we attempt to fill that gap by presenting a thematic approach toward studying recommendation and personalization. Specifically, we present three major representative personalization themes: rec-ommendation; induction, exploration, and exploitation of social networks; and personalization of information access. We unify the presentation of the three themes which we have extracted from the rich landscape of recommender system and personal-ization research via a functional metaphor, where inputs and output to a function are identified in each theme and instantiated through a number of systems and projects visited. In addition, we examine how a number of systems implement the function through various operators and techniques. Finally, we cover several broadening aspects, such as targeting, privacy and trust,

This paper develops a conceptual framework for text filtering practice and research, and reviews present practice in the field. Text filtering is an information seeking process in which documents are selected from a dynamic text stream to satisfy a relatively stable and specific information need. A model of the information seeking process is introduced and specialized to define text filtering. The historical development of text filtering is then reviewed and case studies of recent work are used to highlight important design characteristics of modern text filtering systems. User modeling techniques drawn from information retrieval, recommender systems, machine learning and other fields are described. The paper concludes with observations on the present state of the art and implications for future research on text filtering.