Multimodal Estimation of User Interruptibility for Smart Mobile Telephones ABSTRACT

Context-aware computer systems are characterized by the ability to consider user state information in their decision logic. One example application of context-aware computing is the smart mobile telephone. Ideally, a smart mobile telephone should be able to consider both social factors (i.e. known relationships between contactor and contactee) and environmental factors (i.e. the contactee’s current locale and activity) when deciding how to handle an incoming request for communication. Toward providing this kind of user state information and improving the ability of the mobile phone to handle calls intelligently, we present work on inferring environmental factors from sensory data and using this information to predict user interruptibility. Specifically, we learn the structure and parameters of a user state model from continuous ambient audio and visual information from periodic still images, and attempt to associate the learned states with user-reported interruptibility levels. We report experimental results using this technique on real data, and show how such an approach can allow for adaptation to specific user preferences