Representing and supporting action on buried relationships in smart environments

Mutual relationships can provide springboards for conversations. Such relationships are built on common interests. Our goal is to make shared interests visible in order to support conversation and help build relationships. Our system looks for context common to one or more people present in a public space, and uses an ambient display to expose abstract representations of that context. More specific information can be viewed by users on a PDA, but is not displayed publicly in order to preserve privacy. Our hypothesis is that exposing those relationships will increase either virtual or physical dialogue amongst collocated users. Keywords Ambient displays, context, recommender systems, PDA