=Paper=
{{Paper
|id=Vol-402/paper-4
|storemode=property
|title=Stay-in-touch: a System for Ambient Social Reminders
|pdfUrl=https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-402/paper04.pdf
|volume=Vol-402
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==Stay-in-touch: a System for Ambient Social Reminders==
https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-402/paper04.pdf
Stay-in-touch: a system for ambient social reminders
Eugene Kenny, Ross Shannon and Aaron Quigley
Systems Research Group
School of Computer Science & Informatics
UCD Dublin
Ireland
ross.shannon@ucd.ie
ABSTRACT A person’s ability to regulate their own social rhythm relies
Social interactions among a group of friends will typically on their perception of time running like clockwork, but the
have a certain recurring rhythm. Most people interact with human mind’s perception of the passage of time is capricious
their own circle of friends at a range of different rates, and at best [5]. Numerous studies have pointed to the fallibility
through a range of different modalities (by phone, instant of this ability [3, 14]. Without external prompts, keeping up
messaging, face-to-face meetings etc.). When these naturally with friends — especially peripheral friends, who are not
recurring interactions are maintained effectively, people feel part of one’s close social circle — can become a matter of
at ease with the quality and stability of their social network. chance and circumstance. Because social interactions are in-
Conversely, when a person has not interacted with one of herently vague and intuitive, there is no single point in time
their friends for a longer period than they usually do, a pro- at which one is motivated to rekindle a dwindling friendship.
blem can be identified in that relationship which may require For this reason we believe that explicit cues based on histo-
action to fix. We present Stay-in-touch, an ambient informa- rically observed rhythms would help in this area, while still
tion system which provides peripheral cues to the user which feeling natural and unforced.
serve as occasional recommendations of which of their fri-
ends they should contact soon in order to keep their social Stay-in-touch provides the observer with suggestions of ac-
network in a healthy state. tions they can take to maintain the stability of their social
network through a visual interface. This encourages users to
contact their friends regularly, but also helps them to iden-
Author Keywords tify problems with certain friends early, so that they can take
Ambient displays, reminder systems, information visualisa- steps to correct a deviation before it becomes more pronoun-
tion, social networks analysis. ced. Thus, if a user tends their network well, they will have
stronger ties with a wider and more diverse set of friends.
INTRODUCTION We are particularly interested in studying the effectiveness
When modelling the social interactions among a group of of these social reminders in the context of calm computing,
friends, a certain recurring rhythm is identified, which will as defined by Weiser [15]. Our intuition is that oftentimes it
differ between social groups. Within this group, a single per- is an artefact that you come across arbitrarily which spurs
son may have a range of different rhythms with each of their you into contacting a friend about something. For example,
friends, due to the similarity of their schedules, the differing seeing a photograph of you and a friend may prompt you to
strengths of those friendships, and a range of other social talk about an experience you shared. It is along these lines
factors. When these rhythms are maintained well — that is, that we seek to provide subtle reminders of a friend at the
the person interacts with that friend at the regularity that they right time, to lead a user into reestablishing contact. If the
normally do — the health of that friendship will feel natu- user can ignore the system when all is well in their social
ral. If on the other hand the friendship falls out of rhythm, network, they will be more likely to engage with it when an
through neglect or unfortunate circumstance, and the two issue does arise. Conversely, if the system demands attention
people do not see each other or otherwise interact, this gap at too frequent an interval, the user may become frustrated
will be felt, though perhaps not always understood. and begin ignoring notifications. Finding the ideal balance
between avoiding interrupting the user’s workflow and ef-
A person’s “social rhythm” describes the rate and regularity fectively providing information when it would be beneficial
with which they interact with the various people they know. would provide valuable insights into how a busy person’s
In this regard it is a fuzzy metric; if asked how often you in- attention is divided.
teract with a certain friend of yours, you will probably reply
with “about twice a week” or “most days”, not something li- In the next section we will describe some social network
ke “once every 37 hours”. Stay-in-touch is an application we analysis research that is relevant to this project, followed by
have developed to notify a user when it detects a lull in one a discussion of the the design of the system we have built.
of their social connections. It does so by analysing their soci- Next we discuss the applicability of this type of data to am-
al interaction history through data gathered from a multitude bient information systems and describe how we could eva-
of sources, and attempting to quantify their social rhythm. luate this sort of system.
Copyright © 2008 for the individual papers by the papers'
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purposes. Re-publication of material from this volume
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SOCIAL NETWORK ANALYSIS stronger through positive interactions. We wish to visualise
Previous studies have analysed social rhythms in socio- these details of the network from a single user’s perspective,
technical systems, although the focus of these studies was and allow them to answer questions about the health of their
on the general trends of social rhythms apparent on a lar- network at a glance.
ge scale. Golder et al. studied interactions between colle-
ge students over the social networking site Facebook, and
found that students’ social calendars were heavily influenced
by their school schedule [12]. Leskovec et al. analysed all Data Sources
conversations conducted over Microsoft’s Messenger instant Ambient systems can leverage the vast amounts of data
messaging service in the month of June 2006, and concluded available from the physical and virtual worlds. We now lea-
that users of similar age, language and location were most li- ve digital traces of most of our social interactions: all of our
kely to communicate frequently [7]. email is archived on a server somewhere, our instant messa-
ges are logged locally and remotely, posts to social network
“Dunbar’s number” is a proposed upper bound to the num- profiles are publicly visible, and so on. Even co-location da-
ber of people an individual can maintain stable social rela- ta can be recorded if the users both wear a tracking device
tionships with. Among humans, this bound stands at appro- of some kind, allowing the identification of events like two
ximately 150, and is due to the cognitive overheads invol- people conversing in a research lab.
ved in remembering and being able to meaningfully interact
with others [4]. Although social networking applications ha- Though all of this data is attractive, for this first version of
ve long allowed users to have many more than this number the Stay-in-touch system, we decided to focus on records of
of “friends” identified within the system [2], it is unlikely mobile phone interactions, which we are able to access from
that a user would report that they are friends with all of these our telecommunication provider’s website. The software has
people in the traditional sense [1]. been built to be agnostic to the nature of the interactions, so
adding support for emails in future, for example, is a mat-
Online social networking sites are generally used to main- ter of writing a small client to parse the user’s inbox and
tain social connections which were originally forged offli- find mails that they have sent or received from their friends.
ne [10]. These websites present a low-cost way for people to These, along with other discrete interactions, can then be en-
stay in contact with a wide array of friends and acquaintan- tered into the system.
ces. Combined with temporal reminders, sites like Facebook
are an ideal avenue through which to evolve, maintain and
reenforce a user’s social circle.
The visual display
That said, a person’s social network cannot be described by Our visualisation is built using Processing [11], a Java-based
data from any one source. Though the majority of a user’s visualisation framework which supports rapid prototyping of
friends may indeed be present in an online social networking visualisation techniques.
website, they will also have friends that they interact with
purely offline, or mostly by phone or email. These ongoing Stay-in-touch presents a time series plot, visible in Figu-
social interactions are equally valid in characterising a user’s re 1. Each row represents a person’s social interactions with
circle of friends. one of their friends, showing mobile phone interactions; blue
dots indicate phone calls, with the size of the dot reflecting
the length of the call, while red dots indicate text messa-
VISUALISING SOCIAL INTERACTIONS ges and are uniformly-sized. Weeks are subtly delineated by
There have been many visualisations generated of social net- differing background colours to provide users with an indi-
works, particularly since the rise of social networking web- cation of their longer-term habits at a glance.
sites and the rich data sets they present. Many visualisations
use a familiar node-link diagram of a graph [6]. These visua- The current day is highlighted, and the next week is visible
lisations will often present the graph from an “ego-centric” on the right of the display. Cues for future interactions are
perspective, where the user being analysed is shown at the displayed in this area in the form of hollow circles. Their
centre of the view, with their friends arrayed around them. colour and size indicate the type of interaction suggested,
In this project, because we are not interested in the network based on a prediction algorithm that we have written for this
links that exist between friends, we can dispense with this purpose. Predicted social interactions are drawn on the day
network view, and focus on the strength of the connections that our algorithm has calculated to be most likely for them
between a user and their immediate network of friends. to occur, but the user can see them a week in advance. This
gives the user several opportunities to act on the information
A weakness we have identified with existing network visua- being presented to them at an appropriate time.
lisations is that they treat all edges in the network as being
uniformly-weighted. That is, an edge is either present or not If the user does not interact with their friend in any way be-
present; there is no gradation to the strength of each link, fore the suggested interaction , an “X” is marked at this posi-
and all links are drawn with equal length. In real life, we tion and this is counted as a “miss”. The prominent marking
know that friendships do not behave like this. The social of these events (or non-events, if you will) serve to draw the
links between people become weaker over time and grow user’s attention to these more critical cues.
Figure 1. The Stay-in-touch display, showing a record of a user’s interactions with a subset of their friends. Blue circles are phone calls; the size of
the circle reflects the length of the call. Red circles are SMS text messages. Suggested future social interactions are indicated by hollow circles on the
right, giving the user time to act on those suggestions when it is convenient.
AT ODDS WITH AMBIENCE ambient display which delivers information about planes ar-
Neely et al. have previously explored their hypothesis that riving and leaving an airport; while passengers might find
some context sources are more applicable to being presen- this interesting and informative, air-traffic controllers would
ted in an ambient manner than others [9]. The reasons they have no use for it.
described are precision, criticality, periodicity, interpretabi-
lity and self-descriptiveness. This example highlights the fact that only certain classes
of notifications suit application as an ambient display. This
We add to these three properties of the system’s primary out- leads us to our key question: to what degree can reminders
put which we think make it a good candidate for application and notifications be incorporated into ambient systems, be-
in an ambient display — the reminders are passive, temporal fore the notion of calm computing is rendered meaningless?
and simple. Passive means that changes in the information
do not always require immediate attention; users can take
note of reminders but choose not to act on them until later. FUTURE APPLICATIONS
Temporal means that the data changes over time; if the dis- The implementation described above could be used as both
play remains at the periphery of a person’s attention, they an interactive display, where a user filters the information
can monitor for changes while concentrating on other activi- processed by the system manually to achieve insights into
ties. Simple means that the information can be digested ea- their social trends, or as a information display, which allows
sily; at a basic level, a reminder simply consists of the name a user to passively get a feel for the general health of their
of a friend who they should contact soon. Other information social environment in an instant. However, the application of
may be present, such as a suggested contact time or medium, the Stay-in-touch model to a more inherently ambient soluti-
but this only serves to augment the primary information. on could take a radically different form. An example of such
an ambient display in the area of social information is the
These three properties correspond well to the interacti- Whereabouts Clock developed at Microsoft Research [13].
on, reaction and comprehension model proposed by Mc- This is a glanceable ambient display placed on a wall in a
Crickard et al. [8]. Not all notification systems are as well- home, which displays the current location of all of the mem-
suited to an ambient implementation. Consider as a counter- bers of the family. One could imagine a similar display for
point the visualisation an air-traffic controller uses to direct the Stay-in-touch model, which displays a collection of avat-
planes at an airport. It satisfies none of the above criteria: the ars representing some of the user’s friends. The health of
information requires immediate response, as planes must be the social connection for each friend could be indicated on
given clearance to land or take off as quickly as possible; a danger scale — green meaning the relationship is growing
while the data does change with time, typically while there in strength, yellow indicating no change and red suggesting
is any activity it is in a constant state of flux, and must be a decline in the frequency of interactions.
monitored constantly; and there are typically a huge number
of variables to take into account for each notification, such Since the critical information output for the user — remin-
as the plane’s location, scheduled departure/arrival time, cur- ders indicating when a friendship is stagnating — is atomic
rent velocity, etc. It would of course be possible to create an and relatively simple, it could be used in conjunction with a
number of lo-fi data delivery methods. The user could subs-
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Acknowledgements: This work is supported by Science 2007.
Foundation Ireland through an Undergraduate Research Ex-
13. A. Sellen, R. Eardley, S. Izadi, and R. Harper. The
perience and Knowledge grant (UREKA), and under grant
whereabouts clock: early testing of a situated
number 03/CE2/I303-1, “LERO: the Irish Software Engi-
awareness device. In CHI ’06: CHI ’06 extended
neering Research Centre.”
abstracts on Human factors in computing systems,
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