Semester Plan

When you are working in a distributed work group, a general problem is maintaining awareness of what others are doing and in terms co-ordinating everyone effectively. The traditional approach to this problem is by having more meetings and more active communication within the group. However, when people are working, it would be quite distracting if they are required to communicate frequently about their status.

My thesis is going to address this problem and my proposed solution is to have a software agent called Boswell that will keep track of what you are working on and broadcast activities of interest to your group to enhance communication.

Boswell was started last semester with the main framework written in Java. My plan for this semester is to spend the rest of this month on integrating IM into Boswell. Currently, Boswell supports communication with Twitter and Facebook. From the last CSDL meeting, general feedback was that IM is likely more efficient for communication within a group. The API I am currently trying out is the Smack API. It is an API for Jabber written in Java. The goal is to have the system ready for evaluation in October. In mid-October, ICS 413 students will be invited to try out Boswell for a week and provide feedback.

From now until November, I will continue with writing up the paper and doing literature reviews. For literature reviews, my plan is to read and analyze at least 4 papers a week. A blog entry will be written for every paper that I read. The goal is to have the final draft of the thesis completed by mid-November and everything done by December for the presentation at the Fall Forum.