Its a modem problem: youre too busy to be disturbed by incessant phone calls so you turn y

our cell phone off. But if you dont remember to turn it back on when youre less busy, you could miss some important calls. If only the phone knew when it was wise to interrupt you, you wouldnt have to turn it off at all. Instead, it could let calls through when you are not too busy. A bunch of behavior. sensors and a clever piece of software could do just that, by analyzing your behavior. to determine if its a good time to interrupt you. If built into a phone, the system may decide youre too busy and ask the caller to leave a message or ring back later. James Fogarty and Scott Hudson at Carnegie Mellon University in Pennsylvania based their system on tiny microphones, cameras and touch sensors that reveal body language and activity. First they had to study different behaviors to find out which ones strongly predict whether your mind is interrupted. The potential "busyness" signals they focused on included whether the office doors were left open or closed, the time of day, if other people were with the person in question, how close they were to each other, and whether or not the computer was in use. The sensors monitored these and many factors while four subjects were at work. At intervals, the subjects rated how interruptible they were on a scale ranging from "highly inter-tuptible" to "highly not-interruptible". Their ratings were then correlated with the various behaviors. "It is a shotgun approach: we used all the indicators we could think of and then let statistics find out which were important," says Hudson. The model showed that using the keyboard, and talking on a landline or to someone else in the office correlated most strongly with how interruptible the subjects judged themselves to be. The computer was actually better than people at predicting when someone was too busy to be interrupted. Fogarty speculates that this might be because people doing the interrupting are inevitably biased towards delivering their message, whereas computers dont care. The first application for Hudson and Fogartys system is likely to be in an instant messaging system, followed by office phones and cellphones. "There is no technological roadblock to it being deployed in a couple of years," says Hudson.

A big problem facing people today is that______.

A．they must tolerate phone disturbances or miss important calls

B．they must turn off their phones to keep their homes quiet

C．they have to switch from a desktop phone to a cellphone

D．they are too busy to make phone calls