Proactive Information Retrieval via Screen Surveillance

We demonstrate proactive information retrieval via screen surveillance. A user's digital activities are continuously monitored by capturing all content on a user's screen using optical character recognition. This includes all applications and services being exploited and relies on each individual user's computer usage, such as their Web browsing, emails, instant messaging, and word processing. Topic modeling is then applied to detect the user's topical activity context to retrieve information. We demonstrate a system that proactively retrieves information from a user's activity history being observed on the screen when the user is performing unseen activities on a personal computer. We report an evaluation with ten participants that shows high user satisfaction and retrieval effectiveness. Our demonstration and experimental results show that surveillance of a user's screen can be used to build an extremely rich model of a user's digital activities across application boundaries and enable effective proactive information retrieval.