Portrait: Generating Personal Presentations

The rise of email and instant messaging as important tools in the professional workplace has created changes in how we communicate. One such change is that these media tend to reduce the presentation of an individual to a username, impacting the quality of communication. With current technology, including rich personal presentations in messages is still cumbersome. This problem is compounded by the fact that many of the potential benefits are realized by the recipient, though the sender incurs the costs. This paper discusses the Portrait system, which demonstrates an automated approach to generating personal presentations for use in computer-mediated communication and other systems, such as awareness and ambient information displays. The Portrait system works by searching the web for photos or logos that represent individuals and organizations. It then combines these images to create personal presentations. By using the existing web presences of individuals and organizations, Portrait reduces the human costs of using pictures of people in communication and in information displays. In a small evaluation of this system, we found that it performed nearly as well as human searchers at the task of finding images for personal presentations.