QtMobility contacts scoring

[Fania Jöck]

Hi Ivan,

thanks for sharing your ideas.

Am 16.07.2011 19:16, schrieb Ivan Čukić:
> So, there are a few problems regarding scoring contacts from QtMobility
>
> 1. How to assign them to activities
>
> As you already know, scoring is saved for a triple (application,
> activity, resource).
> This is done via desktop events, that are being registered as they
> happen. Thanks to that, we know which application did access the
> resource in question and in which activity the user was.
>
> For the contacts, since we don't have the ability to alter the
> messaging applications of the device, we can only generate the scores
> from existing sent and received messages. So we *can't* have the info
> about the application nor the current activity.
>
> Solution 1:
> - Score the contacts globally, and do the connections between a
> contact and an activity manually. Forget about the application.
>    This is (for me) bad for one big reason - the whole point of the
> scoring mechanism is so that the user doesn't need to do things
> manually most of the time. And while the user would get contacts
> sorted by 'how much I was in contact with' it wouldn't be per-activity
> unless the contact was manually assigned to an activity.
>
> Solution 2:
> - Store the events about when an activity was turned on and off. This
> would work similarly to the desktop events where we track when a
> document was opened/closed.
> - Forget about the received mail (the user doesn't choose when
> somebody else sends an email to her),
good point, incoming emails could be not at all linked to the current 
activity

> and score only based on the sent
> ones. We know the timestamps for the sent mail, and we'll know which
> activity was active at that moment.
yes, but even here... if I look at my business day I am getting often 
interupted by Emails that are not at all linked to my current task, but 
are somehow
urgent, so I just answer them. I am opening documents and websites just 
to quickly solve the questions and then get back to the work
I was normally doing. Its just tricky with us humans doing lots of stuff 
in parallel.

> Solution 3: (aka 2++ :) )
> - Store the events about when an activity was turned on and off. This
> would work similarly to the desktop events where we track when a
> document was opened/closed.
> - Calculate the main score only based on the sent messages like in S2.
> This score will be tied to an activity.
> - Calculate a secondary score based on received mail. This score will be global.
> - Make a combination of these two scores when sorting the
> recommendations. The way we combine the scores would need to be
> thoroughly thought about.
>
> ----
>
> Lets discuss.
>
> For me, S1 is bad and shouldn't be considered at all.
>
> S2 and S3 have an interesting side-effect - we'll be able to predict /
> score the activities (something we talked about before), and we'll be
> able to link them to location, time-of-day, etc.
>
> S3 adds a layer of complexity for which I'm not sure that it gets
> scores better by an order of magnitude to justify the complexity.
>
> While S3 looks like it would provide better results (more statistical
> data used) it might not be the case
>
> Just imagine the user Alice which dumped Bob - Bob sends a lot of mail
> to get back together. S3 would put Bob on the top of the list, while
> Alice didn't send him a single e-mail since the break-up. She probably
> doesn't want Bob to get a high score. :)
Nice usecase :) But yeah, this is a global problem. Even if somebody 
calls me all the time, I get spam emails everyday etc, this is not 
automatically of higher priority to the user.
Like even the usecase with the break-up: this might be a person that I 
was calling daily, night and day, writing emails, sharing images etc and 
then, oups, this behavior just changes very rapidly
and abrupt. In the initial concept we thought about taking these "big" 
changes into account and consider them as important as well. I mean, 
just imagine to change your employer. That
could change a lot, at least for your working devices. But then people 
go for vacation. And change their usage patterns for 3 weeks completly.

This also reminds me of ratings, that we discarded in the early concept 
stage... There was the idea of letting the user choose if this person or 
mail etc is important to him. So in this case
Alice could just rate Bob (or his recommendations) really low, so he 
wouldnt be listed in the recommendations. But I dont know if any user 
takes the time to do that. I sometimes to it, like with amazons 
recommendations, just to see if they ameliorate (they dont ;)...)

Mhh, maybe I couldnt help you at all and just made up more complexity ;) 
We can maybe discuss that further in our telco on thursday, what is 
achievable and technically feasable...

>   So, for me S2 is the best solution.
>
> Any thoughts from the rest of the team. (we can discuss this in a
> telco if needed)
Yes, sure.

Greets.
Fania