Beyond desktop management : scaling task management in space and time

Abstract: "Computers support more and more daily activities for common users, and users increasingly take their activities to different locations. Rather than being bound to a specific device, users would like to take full advantage of the computer systems accessible to them, much like they take advantage of the furniture in each physical space. However, user attention takes a heavy toll when scaling the use of computers to tasks that are constantly interrupted and resumed, and that span many locations and long periods. In this report we describe an infrastructure that provides users with easy access to their tasks as a logical unit, across multiple devices, and over time spans of years. The infrastructure handles platform and application heterogeneity, as well as dynamic adaptation to resource variations. We validate that the infrastructure's overhead is small compared to normal application startup, and that the approach scales."