Daniel Avrahami
Scott E. Hudson
ABSTRACT
For the majority of us, inter-personal communication is an essential part of our daily lives. Instant Messaging, or IM, has been growing in popularity for personal and work-related communication. The low cost of sending a message, combined with the limited awareness provided by current IM systems result in messages often arriving at inconvenient or disruptive times. In a step towards solving this problem, we created statistical models that successfully predict responsiveness to incoming instant messages -- simply put: whether the receiver is likely to respond to a message within a certain time period. These models were constructed using a large corpus of real IM interaction collected from 16 participants, including over 90,000 messages. The models we present can predict, with accuracy as high as 90.1%, whether a message sent to begin a new session of communication would get a response within 30 seconds, 1, 2, 5, and 10 minutes. This type of prediction can be used, for example, to drive online-status indicators, or in services aimed at finding potential communicators.
- Avrahami, D., Gergle, D., Hudson, S.E. and Kiesler, S. Improving the match between callers and receivers: A study on the effect of contextual information on cell phone interruptions. Behavior & Information Technology (in press). Google Scholar
Digital Library
- Avrahami D. & Hudson S. E. QnA: Augmenting an instant messaging client to balance user responsiveness and performance. In Proc. CSCW'04, ACM Press (2004), 515--518. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Barabási, A.L. The origin of bursts and heavy tails in human dynamics. Nature, 435, Nature Publishing (2005), 207--211.Google Scholar
- Begole J., Matsakis N. E. & Tang J. C. Lilsys: Sensing unavailability. In Proc. CSCW'04, ACM Press (2004). Google ScholarDigital Library
- Begole, J., Tang, J.C., Smith, R.E., and Yankelovich, N. Work rhythms: Analyzing visualizations of awareness histories of distributed groups. In Proc. CSCW'02, ACM Press (2002). Google ScholarDigital Library
- Cerulean Studios - Trillian Pro http://www.trillian.ccGoogle Scholar
- Cutrell, E., Czerwinski, M. and Horvitz, E. Notification, Disruption, and Memory: Effects of Messaging Interruptions on Memory and Performance. In Proc. INTERACT'01, IOS Press (2001), 263--269.Google Scholar
- Dabbish L. and Kraut R. Controlling interruptions: Awareness displays and social motivation for coordination. In Proc. CSCW'04, ACM Press (2004). Google ScholarDigital Library
- Fogarty J., Hudson S. E. & Lai J. Examining the robustness of sensor-based statistical models of human interruptibility. In Proc. CHI'04, ACM Press (2004). Google ScholarDigital Library
- Fogarty J., Ko A. J., Aung H. H., Golden E., Tang K. P. & Hudson S. E. Examining task engagement in sensor-based statistical models of human interruptibility. In Proc. CHI'05, ACM Press (2005), 331--340. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Fogarty J., Lai J. & Christensen J. Presence versus availability: The design and evaluation of a context-aware communication client. IJHCS, 61, 3, (2004). Google ScholarDigital Library
- Freund, Y., and Schapire, R.E. Experiments with a new boosting algorithm. In Proc. ICML'96, Morgan Kaufmann (1996), 148--156.Google Scholar
- Gillie, T., and Broadbent, D. What makes interruptions disruptive? A study of length, similarity and complexity. Psychological Research, 50, 1 (1989), 243--250.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Grinter, R. and Palen, L. Instant Messaging in Teen Live, In Proc. CSCW'02, ACM Press (2002), 21--30. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Horvitz E. & Apacible J. Learning and reasoning about interruption. In Proc. ICMI'03, ACM Press (2003). Google ScholarDigital Library
- Horvitz E., Koch P., Kadie C. M. & Jacobs A. Coordinate: Probabilistic forecasting of presence and availability. In Proc. UAI'02, Morgan Kaufmann (2002). Google ScholarDigital Library
- Horvitz E., Koch P. & Apacible J. BusyBody: Creating and fielding personalized models of the cost of interruption. In Proc. CSCW'04, ACM Press (2004). Google ScholarDigital Library
- Hudson, J.M., Christensen, J., Kellogg, W.A., and Erickson, T. "I'd be overwhelmed, but it's just one more thing to do": Availability and interruption in research management. In Proc. CHI'02, ACM Press (2002), 97--104. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Hudson S., Fogarty J., Atkeson C., Avrahami D., Forlizzi J., Kiesler S., Lee J. & Yang J. Predicting human interruptibility with sensors: A Wizard of Oz feasibility study. In Proc. CHI'03, ACM Press (2003). Google ScholarDigital Library
- Isaacs, E., Walendowski, A., Whittaker, S., Schiano, D.J. and Kamm, C. The Character, Functions, and Styles of Instant Messaging in the Workplace. In Proc. CSCW'02, ACM Press (2002), 11--20. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Kohavi, R. and John, G.H. Wrappers for Feature Subset Selection. Artificial Intelligence, 97, 1-2, ACM Press (1997), 273--324. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Lotus Sametime http://www.lotus.com/sametimeGoogle Scholar
- Milewski, A.E. and Smith, T.M. Providing Presence Cues to Telephone Users. In Proc. CSCW'00, ACM Press (2000). Google ScholarDigital Library
- Nagel K. S., Hudson J. M. & Abowd G. D. Predictors of availability in home life context-mediated communication. In Proc. CSCW'04, ACM Press (2004). Google ScholarDigital Library
- Nardi, B., Whittaker, S. and Bradner, E. Interaction and Outeraction: Instant Messaging in Action. In Proc. CSCW'00. ACM Press (2000), 79--88. Google ScholarDigital Library
- O'Conaill, B., and Frohlich, D. Timespace in the workplace: dealing with interruptions. In Conference companion CHI'95, ACM Press (1995), 262--263. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Voida, A., Newstetter, W. C., and Mynatt, E. D. When conventions collide: the tensions of instant messaging attributed. In Proc. CHI'02, ACM Press (2002). Google ScholarDigital Library
- Witten, I.H. and Frank, E. Data Mining: Practical machine learning tools and techniques, 2nd Edition, Morgan Kaufmann (2005). Google ScholarDigital Library
Index Terms
- Responsiveness in instant messaging: predictive models supporting inter-personal communication
Recommendations
IM waiting: timing and responsiveness in semi-synchronous communication
CSCW '08: Proceedings of the 2008 ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative workResponsiveness, or the time until a person responds to communication, can affect the dynamics of a conversation as well as participants' perceptions of one another. In this paper, we present a careful examination of responsiveness to instant messaging ...
Communication characteristics of instant messaging: effects and predictions of interpersonal relationships
CSCW '06: Proceedings of the 2006 20th anniversary conference on Computer supported cooperative workInstant Messaging is a popular medium for both social and work-related communication. In this paper we report an investigation of the effect of interpersonal relationship on underlying basic communication characteristics (such as messaging rate and ...
Interviewing over instant messaging
CHI EA '04: CHI '04 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing SystemsInterviews often serve as the cornerstone of human-computer interaction research. As a research method, they can both be deeply valuable and distinctly challenging. Pragmatic challenges of interviews include the travel that may be required to meet face-...
Comments