ConPlan: A Context-Aware Ad-hoc Meeting Plan Program

In comparison to people´s normal meetings made by appointments beforehand, ad-hoc meetings refer to the ones which are instantaneously demanded and conducted with no strict plans in advance. Dropping by in one´s office to inquire something, borrow something, or ask for approval, etc. are examples of such ad-hoc meetings. Ad-hoc meetings usually take a short period of time in minutes, and meeting channels could be quite flexible (e.g., face-to-face conversation, phone-call, instant-message, video-conference, or even skype, etc.). Many times people desire such kind of ad-hoc meetings, but have to take efforts to explore meeting opportunities again and again in their daily life. To improve the working efficiency of busy people today, it would be helpful to have a tool which can indicate to the meeting requestor when and where it might be appropriate to have an ad-hoc meeting. ConPlan is a Context-aware ad-hoc meeting Plan program that complements formal appointment-based meeting arrangements to make plans for such ad-hoc meetings. We describe the design and implementation of our ConPlan program in the paper.