How Busy Are You?

Abstract

Smartphones frequently notify users about newly available messages or other notifications. It can be very disruptive when these notifications interrupt users while they are busy. Our work here is based on the observation that people usually exhibit different levels of busyness at different contexts. This means that classifying users' interruptibility as a binary status, interruptible or not interruptible, is not sufficient to accurately measure their availability towards smartphone interruptions. In this paper, we propose, implement and evaluate a two-stage hierarchical model to predict people's interruptibility intensity. Our work is the first to introduce personality traits into interruptibility prediction model, and we found that personality data improves the prediction significantly. Our model bootstraps the prediction with similar people's data, and provides a good initial prediction for users whose individual models have not been trained on their own data yet. Overall prediction accuracy of our model can reach 66.1%.