The computer performed better than people in the study because A．the computer worked harder. B．the computer was not busy. C．people tended to be biased. D．people were not good at statistics.
A bunch of behavior sensors (传感器) and a clever piece of software could do just that, by analyzing your behavior to determine if it’s a good time to interrupt you. If built into a phone, the system may decide you’re too busy and ask the caller to leave a message or ring back later.
James Fogarty and Scott Hudson at Camegie Mellon University in Pennsylvania based their system on tiny microphones, cameras and touch sensors that reveal body language and activity. First they had to study different behaviors to find out which ones strongly predict whether your mind is interrupted.
The potential "busyness" signals they focused on included whether the office doors were left open or closed, the time of day, if other people were with the person in question, how close they were to each other, and whether or not the computer was in use.
The sensors monitored these and many other factors while four subjects were at work. At random intervals, the subjects rated how interruptible they were on a scale ranging from "highly interruptible" to "highly not-interruptible". Their ratings were then correlated with the various behaviors. "It is a shotgun (随意的) approach, we used all the indicators we could think of and then let statistics find out which were important," says Hudson.
The model showed that using the keyboard, and talking on a landline or to someone else in the office correlated most strongly with how interruptible the subjects judged themselves to be.
Interestingly, the computer was actually better than people at predicting when someone was too busy to be interrupted. The computer got it right 82 percent of the time, humans 77 percent. Fogarty speculates that this might be because people doing the interrupting are inevitably biased towards delivering their message, whereas computers don’t care.
The first application for Hudson and Fogarty’s system is likely to be in an instant messaging system, followed by office phones and cellphones. "There is no technological roadblock (障碍) to it being deployed in a couple of years," says Hudson.