Mixed-initiative conflict resolution for context-aware applications

Abstract

A number of technologies have contributed to automatically resolving resource conflicts between multiple users in a smart space. However, such systems eliminate the users' ability to perform this conflict resolution by themselves, which they actually prefer to do in certain circumstances. Since both resolution approaches have their merits, we propose a mixed-initiative conflict resolution system, which combines automatic conflict resolution with mediated, or user-driven, resolution by exploiting contextual information in context-aware applications. An evaluation of our system found that users prefer to use a mediated resolution approach when their preferences about outcome are very different from others', but have no preferred method when their preferences about outcome are similar to others'.