Relescope: An Experiment in Accelerating Relationships

Reading Summary

To help people to digest the information is always an interesting research question. In this paper, the author tried to produce a 1-2 page short report to the conference attendees based on their previous works. This report provided a meaningful relationship network of the conference and aim to better determine the suitable social activity during the conference, for example, to recognize and talked to people. The author sends out the questionnaire to examine the validity of the report. The survey showed the effeteness of this application. Moreover, the newcomer of the conference is benefited more than the senior participants.

This implication reminds a fundamental way of human to digest information: the "device" to provide personalized information to users. The paper is published in the year 2005. At that time, since the cell phone is not popular with the public yet, the author sends out the application result by paper. Sometimes, the small piece of paper might be useful and convenient for people to access and carry the information during the conference. This is the reason, until today, the paper handout is still the most necessity in an academic conference.

The paper-based approach is with the natural limitation - update the information and interaction. Besides, it is also hard to collect user behavior or feedback based on this approach. With the most popular on mobile and wireless technology, it is possible for people to stay online all day. The social media, e.g. Facebook, Twitter and Linkedin, start to grab the attention of participants of the physical environment. People are now interacting in physical and virtual. The exploration of social community behavior is a popular research topic today. For instance, the human behavior/interaction on Twitter during a conference.

The future study might be focused on the personalized recommendation, e.g. Conference Navigator, tried to provide a personalized application interface for conference participants. However, there is still an unanswered question about how to help the newcomer of the conference to better into the environment and to their future academic career. More precisely, to promote a meaningful social connections. The way to evaluate the effectiveness of social connections is a challenge here.

Reference:

1. Farrell, S., Campbell, C., and Myagmar, S. (2005) Relescope: an experiment in accelerating relationships. In:  Proceedings of CHI '05 extended abstracts on Human factors in computing systems, Portland, OR, USA, ACM, pp. 1363-1366, also available athttp://dx.doi.org/10.1145/1056808.1056917.