The Kimura project uses peripheral displays to allow users to extend their workspace and better manage context. We are now moving away from merely managing views of a users desktop to supporting the higher level notion of activity.

My masters research project was a medium term user study of task management strategies. This was part of an activity based computing initiative that was associated with Dr. Elizabeth Mynatt and the Kimura:Office of the Future project. I wrote and installed software on the subjects machine that would track their activities (web pages, documents, emails, window activity, etc...) for a period of two weeks. I also used an intelligent, adaptive experience sampling technique to periodically ask the subjects what task they were working on. At the end of the two weeks I conducted a semi structured interview to learn about the tasks that the subjects had been working on as well as their opinions on how activities should be packaged and presented. Our data is currently being analyzed using various data mining algorithms to see if we can find any patterns in the activity.