Seminar on notifications in AmI environments

I was invited to give a seminar at the CEID social hour series (University of Patras). The topic was on Notifications for Ambient Intelligence Environments. An abstract of the seminar follows (in English) and you can also download the slides (in Greek)!

Notifications in connected Ambient Intelligence Environments

We receive dozens of notifications from our computing devices daily – some useful, some annoying, some are welcome and some cause embarrassment. Despite living with notifications for decades now, little (and by large, incomplete) research has been made in how users manage these interruptions.

We are gradually moving towards an age where notifications will arise not just from our computers and mobiles, but from almost any object surrounding us, connected and part of the Internet of Things. We are already surrounded by smart fridges, televisions, lighting systems, thermostats, cars etc. Thus, the problem of notifications will only worsen, becoming a literal headache for users, impacting their productivity, independence and well-being.

Can we understand why notifications came to be a curse of the modern age, by approaching the issue from a human-centered perspective? Can we improve support for users in managing notifications, through machine learning techniques? Can such services be implemented without placing users’ privacy at risk, all the while minimizing computational complexity and reducing computing resource demands at the cloud or edge level? Finally, what new perspectives arise for exploring the richness of information offered by spatiotemporal analyses of interactions with notifications, at both the personal and collective or collaborative level, using web-based context-aware services?