Interruption Management in ubiquitous collaborative environments: developing suitable interaction mechanisms for ASTRA

Abstract

ASTRA is a project that aims at studying awareness systems that help people to feel in touch with family and friends even when they are away from their computers and the existing widespread tools of today (IM, skype, twitter,...) are not enough. In this context, this thesis aims at addressing the problem of Interruption management. The focus will be on the design and development of different interaction mechanisms to support the definition of interruption rules as needed in ASTRA. This will require the extension of the existing Interruption Manager as well as the development of suitable user interfaces, also considering physical interfaces when appropriate. A limited evaluation of the proposed solutions will be evaluated with users.