April 29, 2009Quub Makes Continuous Status Updates Easy For Everyone
Stories about this research also appeared in Mashable, TechCrunch and Washington Post.
Informatics Professor, Alums and Students launch start-up
Assistant Professor of Informatics Donald J. Patterson has launched the public beta of quub, a new tool designed to make continuous status updates quick and painless. The start-up is a product of Patterson, ICS alumni and current students including George Ruan ’03, Aaron Beauchamp ’09, Mohamad Monibi, Nathan Esquenazi and Sam Kaufman.
Designed to democratize status updates, quub offers useful suggestions for updates on where you are, what you’re doing and how best to reach you in a single concise sentence. quub’s artificial intelligence (AI) learns from your updates and remembers what you’ve written or selected before. quub is currently available in three formats – web-based, Android and Blackberry. iPhone and desktop applications are coming soon.
“We designed quub with the average computer user in mind,” said George Ruan, quub co-founder and CEO. “We wanted a presence management tool that was easy to use and didn’t involve a great deal of creativity to communicate status updates effectively. The pre-existing update options we offer users will help them get started and the AI will continue to learn as they continue to use quub. Of course, we’ve left users the option of creating their own updates as well. quub is as simple as users need and want it to be.”
Unlike other social networking tools – many of which are more about entertainment rather than utility – quub is a micro-presence tool. Micro-presence communicates location, current activity and availability. Whether you’re trying to schedule a meeting with coworkers or talk to friends about dinner plans, quub limits missed connections. With mobile, desktop and web applications available, it makes communicating one’s status simple and immediate at any time from anywhere. The idea behind quub was sparked by research at the Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences at the University of California Irvine.
“The research I’ve done shows that only a small minority of people will keep their status up-to-date if they have to type it out every 30 minutes,” said Don Patterson, quub co-founder and professor of Informatics at UC Irvine. “But it’s a lot more likely the average user will regularly update if all they have to do is choose and click. Using machine learning techniques and the fact that we are creatures of habit, we have been able to achieve up to 90 percent accuracy in reporting people's status from laptops - using their own words.”
Users can connect their quub updates to other social networking sites such as Facebook, microblogging sites such as Twitter or to IM clients such as AIM. To learn more about or sign up for quub, please visit: http://www.quub.com.
Patterson’s areas of research interest lie at the intersection of Artificial Intelligence and Ubiquitous computing and he has applied this work to transportation and activity assistance.
For more about Patterson’s research, visit: http://luci.ics.uci.edu/LUCIinterface.html#bioFaculty.
