The connector - Facilitating context-aware communication

We present the Connector, a context-aware service that intelligently connects people. It maintains an awareness of its users' activities, preoccupations and social relationships to mediate a proper connection at the right time between them. In addition to providing users with important contextual cues about the availability of potential callees, the Connector adapts the behavior of the contactee's device automatically in order to avoid inappropriate interruptions. To acquire relevant context information, perceptual components analyze sensor input obtained from a smart mobile phone and - if available -from a variety of audio-visual sensors built into a smart meeting room environment. The Connector also uses any available multimodal interface (e.g. a speech interface to the smart phone, steerable camera-projector, targeted loudspeakers) in the smart meeting room, to deliver information to users in the most unobtrusive way possible.