Paper Reading #22 - From documents to tasks: deriving user tasks from document usage patterns

Reference:
Oliver Brdiczka

IUI '10 Proceedings of the 15th international conference on Intelligent user interfaces

Summary:
This paper is about a new system to assist users in task switching.  Most workers switch between multiple tasks in a day.  The switches require recovery time in between to get reacquainted with the new task.  Since these switches happen frequently in a typical work day, task management systems were developed to aid workers.  Typical systems, unfortunately, require a lot of investment on the user side, from either learning the system or training the system.  The new system proposed in the paper automates the estimations of users tasks from document interaction.  Instead of looking at the content of the documents, which can violate the users privacy, this system monitors the desktop activities and stores an identifier for each document on the users desktop. 


Discussion:
I think that this system could be useful.  I did like the fact that the system focuses on document switches rather than the information.  This means workers with classified information would still be able to use this system.  I am interested to see how this system gets developed further.