Miss our DEVIEW talk on anticipatory computing? See the full video of our Research Director’s lecture above, which includes a dissection of both anticipatory and contextual search, along with ideas for ways developers can integrate this technology into their own work.
TRANSCRIPT:
Good afternoon, everyone. My name is Marsal Gavaldà and I’m the Director of Research at Expect Labs, which is a startup based in San Francisco. First, I want to give my thanks to Naver Labs for inviting me to present at this great conference. I see a lot of energy, a lot of young people. It also allowed me to visit Korea for the first time and see for myself the epicenter, this Korean wave of culture, and K-pop and drama and video games that is basically emanating from Korea all throughout the world, including my own household. Even though my daughter doesn’t speak Korean, she still likes to sing along to the songs.
Besides this cultural trend, what I want to talk about is a technology trend that is actually quite important. If you think about it, the way that we find information is changing. Instead of having to explicitly search for some piece of information by finding a search box in a browser and entering a query, the most advanced systems are aware of your context and are able to provide you with much more targeted information without you ever having to explicitly search for it. Here’s an example: You want to make sure you don’t miss your flight, so when you book a flight you go into your calendar app and enter some reminder that you are actually flying on that day, the flight information, and some other details. Then, on the day of the flight, you get some type of reminder, you go to a browser and enter your flight number, see if it’s on time, and then you need to see where you are and check the traffic. All of this is very useful but it has some very cumbersome steps. Compare that to a service like Google Now, where if you allow it to read your email it can know that you’ve booked a flight, and then it will do all these searches on your behalf. It’s this “on your behalf” part that is automated on the server side, and then it can proactively give you an alert just when you need it; when it’s a good time to leave for the airport so you don’t miss your flight. Instead of we finding information, the notion is that information finds us when it’s the right time. I’m going to be talking about this notion of anticipatory computing and the related idea of contextual awareness.
