How About a MATe for Awareness in Teams?

While guests in the office or a phone call can be pleasant surprises, in the wrong moment they may be disrupting a time of focused work and concentration. A lack of coordination between colleagues at the work place can lead to unwanted interruptions and result in an inefficient and unpleasant workplace. MATe (Mate for Awareness in Teams) is a pervasive, ambient intelligent computing framework charged with the task of preventing unwanted interruptions and improving social interaction at the workplace of knowledge workers. We present a survey of employees at a university in order to identify the attitudes of knowledge workers towards interruptions as well as their opinions on a pervasive system surveying and analyzing their behavior. Based on the results of this survey a prototype has been developed using an ontology written in OWL as a knowledge representation and logic-based reasoning to infer the users’ status and interruptibility.