A survey of context modelling and reasoning techniques

A smart phone senses audio, imagery, and/or other stimulus from a user's environment, and acts autonomously to fulfill inferred or anticipated user desires. In one aspect, the detailed technology concerns phone-based cognition of a scene viewed by the phone's camera. The image processing tasks applied to the scene can be selected from among various alternatives by reference to resource costs, resource constraints, other stimulus information (e.g., audio), task substitutability, etc. The phone can apply more or less resources to an image processing task depending on how successfully the task is proceeding, or based on the user's apparent interest in the task. In some arrangements, data may be referred to the cloud for analysis, or for gleaning. Cognition, and identification of appropriate device response(s), can be aided by collateral information, such as context. A great number of other features and arrangements are also detailed.

Intuitive computing methods and systems

In recent years, we have witnessed a rapid surge in assisted living technologies due to a rapidly aging society. The aging population, the increasing cost of formal health care, the caregiver burden, and the importance that the individuals place on living independently, all motivate development of innovative-assisted living technologies for safe and independent aging. In this survey, we will summarize the emergence of `ambient-assisted living” (AAL) tools for older adults based on ambient intelligence paradigm. We will summarize the state-of-the-art AAL technologies, tools, and techniques, and we will look at current and future challenges.

A Survey on Ambient-Assisted Living Tools for Older Adults

http://iihm.imag.fr/publs/2003/Calvary-IwC2003.pdf

A Unifying Reference Framework for multi-target user interfaces

Privacy is the most often-cited criticism of ubiquitous computing, and may be the greatest barrier to its long-term success. However, developers currently have little support in designing software architectures and in creating interactions that are effective in helping end-users manage their privacy. To address this problem, we present Confab, a toolkit for facilitating the development of privacy-sensitive ubiquitous computing applications. The requirements for Confab were gathered through an analysis of privacy needs for both end-users and application developers. Confab provides basic support for building ubiquitous computing applications, providing a framework as well as several customizable privacy mechanisms. Confab also comes with extensions for managing location privacy. Combined, these features allow application developers and end-users to support a spectrum of trust levels and privacy needs.

/pdf/an-architecture-for-privacy-sensitive-ubiquitous-computing-1l9023gohw.pdf

An architecture for privacy-sensitive ubiquitous computing

In this paper we propose a software architecture for observing and modeling human activity. This architecture is derived from an ontology for context awareness. We propose a model in which a user's context is described by a set of roles and relations. Different configurations of roles and relations correspond to situations within the context. The components of a context model are used to specify processes for observing activity. The ontology for context modeling is derived from both a bottom up system's perspective and a topdown users' perspective. As we define each element, we describe the corresponding components of a process-based software architecture. Using these components, a context is translated into a federation of observational processes. This model leads to an architecture in which reflexive elements are dynamically composed to form federations of processes for observing and predicting the situations that make up a context.

http://users.polytech.unice.fr/~rey/papiers/Crowley-2.pdf

Gaeten Rey

Papers

Perceptual Components for Context Aware Computing