In this paper, we report on findings from an ethnographic study of how people use their calendars for personal information management (PIM). Our participants were faculty, staff and students who were not required to use or contribute to any specific calendaring solution, but chose to do so anyway. The study was conducted in three parts: first, an initial survey provided broad insights into how calendars were used; second, this was followed up with personal interviews of a few participants which were transcribed and content-analyzed; and third, examples of calendar artifacts were collected to inform our analysis. Findings from our study include the use of multiple reminder alarms, the reliance on paper calendars even among regular users of electronic calendars, and wide use of calendars for reporting and life-archival purposes. We conclude the paper with a discussion of what these imply for designers of interactive calendar systems and future work in PIM research.
There is a long history of calendar studies in human-com -pu -ter interaction literature. Early research on calendar use predates electronic calendars. In 1982, Kelley and Chapanis @cite_29 interviewed 23 professionals to discover how people in the business world kept track of their schedules. They found that for the individuals interviewed, calendars were indispensable and showed a lot of diversity in their use. The use of multiple calendars was prevalent, and a wide variation was seen in the time spans viewed, as well as in other aspects such as archiving, editing and portable access. Many of the problems identified in paper calendars could be solved in electronic calendars, and they concluded with a list of features for emerging electronic calendars to implement. Soon afterwards, Kincaid and Pierre @cite_28 examined the use of paper and electronic calendars in two groups, and concluded that electronic calendars failed to provide several key features such as flexibility, power, and convenience, that paper calendars did. They recommended many useful features to be incorporated into electronic calendar systems as well.
@cite_28 @cite_29
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Manufacturers of integrated electronic office systems have included electronic versions of the calendar in almost every system they offer. This paper describes a survey of office workers, carried out to examine their use both of paper calendars and of electronic calendars that are commercially available as part of integrated office systems. It assesses the degree to which electronic calendars meet the needs of users. Our survey shows that the simple paper calendar is a tool whose power and flexibility is matched by few, if any, of the current commercially available electronic calendars. Recommendations for features that should be included in electronic calendars and automatic schedulers are included. This article is an interview study of calendar use and a cognitive analysis of the interactions between the design of calendars and the task of prospective remembering. The study and analysis are coordinated to present a general critique of current electronic calendar designs and to note opportunities for future designs. The interview data reveal continued use of paper calendars in a highly computerized setting. A key conclusion is that paper calendars support prospective remembering by promoting browsing of existing appointments during subsequent calendar keeping but that this advantage is compromised in current electronic designs. Other aspects of the interviews and the analyses address the representational limitations of both paper and electronic calendars. This research explores a methodology in which design implications of qualitative empirical data are understood and systematized through theoretical analyses of existing artifacts. Twenty-three professional persons were interviewed extensively to find out how they keep their appointment calendars and to extract from that information suggestions about how calendars could be computerized. For the majority of the persons interviewed calendars are indispensable to the conduct of their business, and, in some cases, their personal lives. At the same time the data show an unexpectedly large amount of diversity in the kinds of calendars people use and in the ways they use them. Substantially more than half of the respondents have more than one calendar, with two persons using as many as six calendars at once. Portability and access from diverse locations are important for many persons. Concerns about privacy vary widely: some persons keep their calendars closely guarded, others allow free access to them. Relevant time spans covered by calendars are enormous. Some few people are concerned only with the current day and the day following, others may plan appointments a year or more in advance. A substantial number of appointments are changed after they have been made and, once again, the range is large, from about 2 per cent for some persons to about 80 per cent for others. Archiving, query patterns, and the insertion of correlated information into calendars also vary greatly among various users. In this paper, we describe Augur, a groupware calendar system to support personal calendaring practices, informal workplace communication, and the socio-technical evolution of the calendar system within a workgroup. Successful design and deployment of groupware calendar systems have been shown to depend on several converging, interacting perspectives. We describe calendar-based work practices as viewed from these perspectives, and present the Augur system in support of them. Augur allows users to retain the flexibility of personal calendars by anticipating and compensating for inaccurate calendar entries and idiosyncratic event names. We employ predictive user models of event attendance, intelligent processing of calendar text, and discovery of shared events to drive novel calendar visualizations that facilitate interpersonal communication. In addition, we visualize calendar access to support privacy management and long-term evolution of the calendar system. The increasing mass of information confronting a business or an individual have created a demand for information management applications. Time-based information, in particular, is an important part of many information access tasks. This paper explores how to use 3D graphics and interactive animation to design and implement visualizers that improve access to large masses of time-based information. Two new visualizers have been developed for the Information Visualizer: 1) the Spiral Calendar was designed for rapid access to an individual's daily schedule, and 2) the Time Lattice was designed for analyzing the time relationships among the schedules of groups of people. The Spiral Calendar embodies a new 3D graphics technique for integrating detail and context by placing objects in a 3D spiral. It demonstrates that advanced graphics techniques can enhance routine office information tasks. The Time Lattice is formed by aligning a collection of 2D calendars. 2D translucent shadows provide views and interactive access to the resulting complex 3D object. The paper focuses on how these visualizations were developed. The Spiral Calendar, in particular, has gone through an entire cycle of development, including design, implementation, evaluation, revision and reuse. Our experience should prove useful to others developing user interfaces based on advanced graphics. Digital devices today have little understanding of their real-world context, and as a result they often make stupid mistakes. To improve this situation we are developing a database of world knowledge called ThoughtTreasure at the same time that we develop intelligent applications. In this paper we present one such application, SensiCal, a calendar with a degree of common sense. We discuss the pieces of common sense important in calendar management and present methods for extracting relevant information from calendar items. Office automation is used by groups of people with complex communication needs to help them reach business goals such as scheduling, tracking, reviewing, and delegating. Effective individual and group decisions are heavily dependent on communication protocols and social conventions. Because these conventions are so ingrained, they are sometimes not readily available to conscious inspection during the design of communication systems. Even more problematic, system designers may not have first hand knowledge of the conventions and protocol for the range of environments in which their systems will be used. Nevertheless, office systems must work in tandem with these conventions. Wang Laboratories has a continuing program of research directed at identifying the psychological and social factors that come into play during the adoption and use of computer communication systems and the implications of these factors for the design of those systems. Highlights of a three year program of research are presented covering implications for voice mail, electronic mail, and electronic calendars. Personal software assistants that help users with tasks like finding information, scheduling calendars, or managing work-flow will require significant customization to each individual user. For example, an assistant that helps schedule a particular user’s calendar will have to know that user’s scheduling preferences. This paper explores the potential of machine learning methods to automatically create and maintain such customized knowledge for personal software assistants. We describe the design of one particular learning assistant: a calendar manager, called CAP (Calendar APprentice), that learns user scheduling preferences from experience. Results are summarized from approximately five user-years of experience, during which CAP has learned an evolving set of several thousand rules that characterize the scheduling preferences of its users. Based on this experience, we suggest that machine learning methods may play an important role in future personal software assistants. A perpetual calendar that has a flat frame with two cavities. When cards are arranged in each cavity of the frame it will display a specific month. To display a particular number of days in a month, select the proper 31 day card and arrange the vertical slits on the card with the horizontal slit on the frame to obtain 28, 29, 30 or 31 days. To display a particular month choose the name of the month card to be viewed and insert it in the position of the frame provided for it. The few cards that are not used will remain in the frame cavities behind the month being displayed. This perpetual calendar can also display three consecutive months at one time. Resource-constrained project scheduling with the objective of minimizing project duration (RCPSP) is one of the most studied scheduling problems. In this paper we consider the RCPSP with general temporal constraints and calendar constraints. Calendar constraints make some resources unavailable on certain days in the scheduling period and force activity execution to be delayed while resources are unavailable. They arise in practice from, e.g., unavailabilities of staff during public holidays and weekends. The resulting problems are challenging optimization problems. We develop not only four different constraint programming (CP) models to tackle the problem, but also a specialized propagator for the cumulative resource constraints taking the calendar constraints into account. This propagator includes the ability to explain its inferences so it can be used in a lazy clause generation solver. We compare these models, and different search strategies on a challenging set of benchmarks using a lazy clause generation solver. We close 83 of the open problems of the benchmark set, and show that CP solutions are highly competitive with existing Mip models of the problem. Scheduling group meetings requires access to participants' calendars, typically located in scattered pockets or desks. Placing participants' calendars on-line and using a rule-based scheduler to find a time slot would alleviate the problem to some extent, but it often is difficult to trust the results, because correct scheduling rules are elusive, varying with the participants and the agenda of a particular meeting. What's needed is a comprehensive scheduling system that summarizes the available information for quick, flexible, and reliable scheduling. We have developed a prototype of a priority-based, graphical scheduling system called Visual Scheduler (VS). A controlled experiment comparing automatic scheduling with VS to manual scheduling demonstrated the former to be faster and less error prone. A field study conducted over six weeks at the UNC-CH Computer Science Department showed VS to be a generally useful system and provided valuable feedback on ways to enhance the functionality of the system to increase its value as a groupwork tool. In particular, users found priority-based time-slots and access to scheduling decision reasoning advantageous. VS has been in use by more than 75 faculty, staff, and graduate students since Fall 1987. This paper describes experimental results on using Winnow and Weighted-Majority based algorithms on a real-world calendar scheduling domain. These two algorithms have been highly studied in the theoretical machine learning literature. We show here that these algorithms can be quite competitive practically, outperforming the decision-tree approach currently in use in the Calendar Apprentice system in terms of both accuracy and speed. One of the contributions of this paper is a new variant on the Winnow algorithm (used in the experiments) that is especially suited to conditions with string-valued classifications, and we give a theoretical analysis of its performance. In addition we show how Winnow can be applied to achieve a good accuracy coverage tradeoff and explore issues that arise such as concept drift. We also provide an analysis of a policy for discarding predictors in Weighted-Majority that allows it to speed up as it learns. A study of email responsiveness was conducted to understand how the timing of email responses conveys important information. Interviews and observations explored users' perceptions of how they responded to email and formed expectations of others' responses to them. We identified ways in which users maintain and cultivate a responsiveness image for projecting expectations about their email response. We also discuss other contextual cues people use to discover email responsiveness, which include using other tools such as the calendar and phone, accounting for the amount of work time overlap available, and establishing a pacing between email correspondents. These cues help users develop a sense of when to expect a response and when breakdown has occurred, requiring further action. Abstract Using a mathematical model based on existing models in the literature, the response of tumor and tumor-bed cell populations to fractionated radiation therapy is investigated. Problems of determining the optimal dose schedule for a given treatment calendar (specified number of doses and time intervals between doses) are formulated. A theoretical and computational method for solving such problems is proposed. Representative results, which support the efficacy of the method, are presented and discussed. As the sheer volume of information grows, information overload challenges users in many ways. Large conferences are one of the venues suffering from this overload. Faced with several parallel sessions and large volumes of papers covering diverse areas of interest, conference participants often struggle to identify the most relevant sessions to attend. The Conference Navigator 2.0 system was created to help conference participants go examine the schedule of paper presentation, add most interesting papers to individual schedule, and export this schedule to a calendar application. In addition, as a social system, the Conference Navigator 2.0 collects the wisdom of the user community and make it available through community-based recommendation interface to help individuals in making scheduling decisions. SenSay is a context-aware mobile phone that adapts to dynamically changing environmental and physiological states. In addition to manipulating ringer volume, vibration, and phone alerts, SenSay can provide remote callers with the ability to communicate the urgency of their calls, make call suggestions to users when they are idle, and provide the caller with feedback on the current status of the SenSay user. A number of sensors including accelerometers, light, and microphones are mounted at various points on the body to provide data about the user’s context. A decision module uses a set of rules to analyze the sensor data and manage a state machine composed of uninterruptible, idle, active and normal states. Results from our threshold analyses show a clear delineation can be made among several user states by examining sensor data trends. SenSay augments its contextual knowledge by tapping into applications such as electronic calendars, address books, and task lists. We present a simple algorithm for maintaining a replicated distributed dictionary which achieves high availability of data, rapid processing of atomic actions, efficient utilization of storage, and tolerance to node or network failures including lost or duplicated messages. It does not require transaction logs, synchronized clocks, or other complicated mechanisms for its operation. It achieves consistency contraints which are considerably weaker than serial consistency but nonetheless are adequate for many dictionary applications such as electronic appointment calendars and mail systems. The degree of consistency achieved depends on the particular history of operation of the system in a way that is intuitive and easily understood. The algorithm implements a "best effort" approximation to full serial consistency, relative to whatever internode communication has successfully taken place, so the semantics are fully specified even under partial failure of the system. Both the correctness of the algorithm and the utility of such weak semantics depend heavily on special properties of the dictionary operations. A new method is presented to get an insight into univariate time series data. The problem addressed is how to identify patterns and trends on multiple time scales (days, weeks, seasons) simultaneously. The solution presented is to cluster similar daily data patterns, and to visualize the average patterns as graphs and the corresponding days on a calendar. This presentation provides a quick insight into both standard and exceptional patterns. Furthermore, it is well suited to interactive exploration. Two applications, numbers of employees present and energy consumption, are presented. A new priority queue implementation for the future event set problem is described in this article. The new implementation is shown experimentally to be O(1) in queue size for the priority increment distributions recently considered by Jones in his review article. It displays hold times three times shorter than splay trees for a queue size of 10,000 events. The new implementation, called a calendar queue, is a very simple structure of the multiple list variety using a novel solution to the overflow problem. Windows Mobile devices are becoming more widely used and can be a valuable source of evidence in a variety of investigations. These portable devices can contain details about an individual's communications, contacts, calendar, online activities, and whereabouts at specific times. Although forensic analysts can apply their knowledge of other Microsoft operating systems to Windows Mobile devices, there are sufficient differences that require specialized knowledge and tools to locate and interpret digital evidence on these systems. This paper provides an overview of Windows Mobile Forensics, describing various methods of acquiring and examining data on Windows Mobile devices. The locations and data formats of useful information on these systems are described, including text messages, multimedia, e-mail, Web browsing artifacts, and Registry entries. This paper concludes with an illustrative scenario involving MobileSpy monitoring software.