IUI 2009 - Discovering Frequent Work Procedures From Resource Connections

Discovering Frequent Work Procedures from Resource Connections
By Jianqiang Shen, Erin Fitzhenry, & Thomas Dietterich (Oregon State University)

Summary:
The goal of this paper is to design an intelligent office assistant to aid users in the workplace. Their approach consisted of identifying desktop workflows and placing the data into a graph. The information gathering was handled by the TaskTracer system. It would observe the user’s desktop activity and look for repeated actions.
First, the system gathered information flow actions or provenance links. These information flow actions were defined as copy/paste, attach file to email, save email attachment, download file, upload file, and copy/rename a file. Next, a work procedure was identified as a directed graph with its arcs being the information flow links. Lastly, the researchers modeled two workflow examples: comments on a document and preparing a quarterly report. The overall system goal was to be able to aid the user in the automation of common tasks and status tracking on a task.

Results
TaskTracer was used on real users in December 2007. It was successful in identifying and tracking workflow procedures. However, the article does not offer any information on how it benefited the user or the user’s opinions on the system.

Discussion:
This article described in great detail workflow procedures and it made me realize that we lead complicated lives. Any small assignment involves many resources and steps. I don’t think this application could be applied to the tasks for a college student since our assignments are quite varied. However, this could be beneficial in the workplace if there are many repeated tasks with very similar procedures.