Contributions in Merlin

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People are subjected to a multitude of interruptions, which in some situations are detrimental to their work performance. Consequently, the capability to predict a person’s degree of interruptability (i.e., a measure of detrimental an interruption would be to her current work) can provide a basis for a ?ltering mechanism. This paper introduces a novel approach to predict a person’s presence and interruptability in an of?ce-like environment based on audio, multi-sector motion detection using video, and the time of the day collected as sensor data. Conducting an experiment in a real of?ce environment over the length of more than 40 work days we show that the multisector motion detection data, which to our knowledge has been used for the ?rst time to this end, outperforms audio data both in presence and interruptability. We, furthermore, show, that the combination of all three data-streams improves the interruptability prediction accuracy and robustness. Finally, we use these data to predict a subject’s phone behavior (ignore or accept the incoming phone call) by combining interruptability and the estimated importance of call. We call such an application an arti?cial receptionist. Our analysis also show that the results improve when taking the temporal aspect of the context into account.

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The Intranet has been set up in the enterprises as a medium of information. Even if it was seen as a technical feature of the IT department some years ago, a paradigm change has recently taken place during the last years. The Intranet is no longer settled into the IT department, but is now an integral component of the corporate communication. It is becoming more and more important because the organization members use the Intranet systematic for the spreading of information. On higher demands of the company and his members towards the procurement and distribution of information, and also as the steady pressure to the effectiveness and efficiency increase, the Intranet is transforming from an information medium to a communication medium to a working instrument. From the fact that more and more information is distributed through the Intranet, the organization members are increasingly confronted with the problem of flooding information: Documents cannot be found, information does not reach the suitable receivers or important instructions of the management are overlooked. As a consequence, discouragement and frustration spreads among the users. On the other hand, the company wants to make information available to all of its employees in order to reassure that knowledge is on the same level or to improve the effectiveness and raise the employees' contentment. In doing so, the company often does not know whether the action taken have led to success. The reality is often another where the company thinks that the employees are provided with the desired information, whereas the employees are disappointed because of the lack of information quality. We have first conducted interviews to find out how the opinion of the enterprises towards the Intranet is, and also to find out how they use it to counteract against the flood of information and mismatch. Therefore, three signs which have validity for all enterprises can be chosen. First, the Intranet is recognized as a central tool of the corporate communication and is no longer considered as a mere toy of technology freaks. Second, the Intranet is regarded as an important information medium. Lastly, controlling the improvement of information quality is carried out by the least enterprises. Furthermore, the results from the interviews showed that the enterprises want to speed up the transformation of the Intranet. However, it is also clear that they are only at the beginning of the transformation path. To raise the quality of information, we have developed a web controlling framework. This contains a web controlling process, which arranges the steps for the creation of the information space and a web perspective pattern, which generates different views of this space. Through this procedure and with the different views, the ability to form the information space is conducted. As we have explained above, it is insufficient only to provide information and to believe that the needs of the users are satisfied with that. The information mismatches between employees and company can be caused either by excessive demand of the employees with the exposure to the medium, or when the information is not present where the users logically expects it to be. In order to find out how the user moves in the information space, we have developed the generic filter pipeline. This filter pipeline derives the user behavior on the basis of web log file data. This user behavior reflects the real behavior of the information space users. In this way it is possible to indicate the discrepancy between the information offer of the company and the information search of the users. On the basis of the results ascertained from above, the information space can be adapted to the user with the help of a derived Boehmian spiral, in order to achieve a continuous improvement of the needs and the surfing behavior of the user. However, since the information offer and the needs of the user change dynamically, the Boehmian spiral runs through regularly.

Collaborative document processing has been addressed by many approaches so far, most of which focus on document versioning and collaborative editing. We address this issue from a different angle and describe the concept and architecture of a pervasive document editing and managing system. It exploits database techniques and real-time updating for sophisticated collaboration scenarios on multiple devices. Each user is always served with upto- date documents and can organize his work based on document meta data. For this, we present our conceptual architecture for such a system and discuss it with an example.

Refactoring is one means of improving the structure of existing software. Locations where to apply refactoring are often based on subjective perceptions such as ”bad smells”, which are vague suspicions of design shortcomings. We exploit historical data extracted from repositories such as CVS and focus on change couplings: if some software parts change at the same time very often over several releases, this data can be used to point to candidates for refactoring. We adopt the concept of bad smells and provide additional change smells. Such a smell is hardly visible in the code, but easy to spot when viewing the change history. Our approach enables the detection of such smells allowing an engineer to apply refactoring on these parts of the source code to improve the evolvability of the software. For that, we analyzed the history of a large industrial system for a period of 15 months, proposed spots for refactorings based on change couplings, and performed them with the developers. After observing the system for another 15 months we finally analyzed the effectiveness of our approach. Our results support our hypothesis that the combination of change dependency analysis and refactoring is applicable and effective.