From documents to tasks: deriving user tasks from document usage patterns

A typical knowledge worker is involved in multiple tasks and switches frequently between them every work day. These frequent switches become expensive because each task switch requires some recovery time as well as the reconstitution of task context. First task management support systems have been proposed in recent years in order to assist the user during these switches. However, these systems still need a fairly big amount of investment from the user side in order to either learn to use or train such a system. In order to reduce the necessary amount of training, this paper proposes a new approach for automatically estimating a user’s tasks from document interactions in an unsupervised manner. While most previous approaches to task detection look at the content of documents or window titles, which might raise confidentiality and privacy issues, our approach only requires document identifiers and the temporal switch history between them as input. Our prototype system monitors a user...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2010
• Where: IUI
• Authors: Oliver Brdiczka
• Keywords: Documents, IUI 2010, Similarity Matrix, Software Engineering, User’s Desktop