The present historical moment may seem a particularly inopportune time to review Bowling Alone, Robert Putnam's latest exploration of civic decline in America. After all, the outpouring of volunteerism, solidarity, patriotism, and self-sacrifice displayed by Americans in the wake of the September 11 terrorist attacks appears to fly in the face of Putnam's central argument: that \"social capital\" -defined as \"social networks and the norms of reciprocity and trustworthiness that arise from them\" (p. 19)'has declined to dangerously low levels in America over the last three decades. However, Putnam is not fazed in the least by the recent effusion of solidarity. Quite the contrary, he sees in it the potential to \"reverse what has been a 30to 40-year steady decline in most measures of connectedness or community.\"' As an example of how the current \"war on terrorism\" could generate a durable civic renewal, Putnam points to the burst in civic practices that occurred during and after World War II, which he says \"permanently marked\" the generation that lived through it and had a \"terrific effect on American public life over the last half-century.\" 3 If Americans can follow this example and channel their current civic

Bowling alone: The collapse and revival of American community

Context is a poorly used source of information in our computing environments. As a result, we have an impoverished understanding of what context is and how it can be used. In this paper, we provide an operational definition of context and discuss the different ways in which context can be used by context-aware applications. We also present the Context Toolkit, an architecture that supports the building of these context-aware applications. We discuss the features and abstractions in the toolkit that make the task of building applications easier. Finally, we introduce a new abstraction, a situation which we believe will provide additional support to application designers.

/pdf/understanding-and-using-context-ixmte100q2.pdf

Understanding and Using Context

When humans talk with humans, they are able to use implicit situational information, or context, to increase the conversational bandwidth. Unfortunately, this ability to convey ideas does not transfer well to humans interacting with computers. In traditional interactive computing, users have an impoverished mechanism for providing input to computers. By improving the computer’s access to context, we increase the richness of communication in human-computer interaction and make it possible to produce more useful computational services. The use of context is increasingly important in the fields of handheld and ubiquitous computing, where the user?s context is changing rapidly. In this panel, we want to discuss some of the research challenges in understanding context and in developing context-aware applications.

https://www.cc.gatech.edu/fce/ctk/pubs/HUC99-panel.pdf

Towards a Better Understanding of Context and Context-Awareness

Computing devices and applications are now used beyond the desktop, in diverse environments, and this trend toward ubiquitous computing is accelerating. One challenge that remains in this emerging research field is the ability to enhance the behavior of any application by informing it of the context of its use. By context, we refer to any information that characterizes a situation related to the interaction between humans, applications, and the surrounding environment. Context-aware applications promise richer and easier interaction, but the current state of research in this field is still far removed from that vision. This is due to 3 main problems: (a) the notion of context is still ill defined, (b) there is a lack of conceptual models and methods to help drive the design of context-aware applications, and (c) no tools are available to jump-start the development of context-aware applications. In this anchor article, we address these 3 problems in turn. We first define context, identify categories of contextual information, and characterize context-aware application behavior. Though the full impact of context-aware computing requires understanding very subtle and high-level notions of context, we are focusing our efforts on the pieces of context that can be inferred automatically from sensors in a physical environment. We then present a conceptual framework that separates the acquisition and representation of context from the delivery and reaction to context by a context-aware application. We have built a toolkit, the Context Toolkit, that instantiates this conceptual framework and supports the rapid development of a rich space of context-aware applications. We illustrate the usefulness of the conceptual framework by describing a number of context-aware applications that have been prototyped using the Context Toolkit. We also demonstrate how such a framework can support the investigation of important research challenges in the area of context-aware computing.

/pdf/a-conceptual-framework-and-a-toolkit-for-supporting-the-3ct19ji2mn.pdf

A conceptual framework and a toolkit for supporting the rapid prototyping of context-aware applications

As we are moving towards the Internet of Things (IoT), the number of sensors deployed around the world is growing at a rapid pace. Market research has shown a significant growth of sensor deployments over the past decade and has predicted a significant increment of the growth rate in the future. These sensors continuously generate enormous amounts of data. However, in order to add value to raw sensor data we need to understand it. Collection, modelling, reasoning, and distribution of context in relation to sensor data plays critical role in this challenge. Context-aware computing has proven to be successful in understanding sensor data. In this paper, we survey context awareness from an IoT perspective. We present the necessary background by introducing the IoT paradigm and context-aware fundamentals at the beginning. Then we provide an in-depth analysis of context life cycle. We evaluate a subset of projects (50) which represent the majority of research and commercial solutions proposed in the field of context-aware computing conducted over the last decade (2001-2011) based on our own taxonomy. Finally, based on our evaluation, we highlight the lessons to be learnt from the past and some possible directions for future research. The survey addresses a broad range of techniques, methods, models, functionalities, systems, applications, and middleware solutions related to context awareness and IoT. Our goal is not only to analyse, compare and consolidate past research work but also to appreciate their findings and discuss their applicability towards the IoT.

/pdf/context-aware-computing-for-the-internet-of-things-a-survey-3nibvvc921.pdf

Context Aware Computing for The Internet of Things: A Survey

In this paper, we describe our experiences of developing and evaluating GUIDE, an intelligent electronic tourist guide. The GUIDE system has been built to overcome many of the limitations of the traditional information and navigation tools available to city visitors. For example, group-based tours are inherently inflexible with fixed starting times and fixed durations and (like most guidebooks) are constrained by the need to satisfy the interests of the majority rather than the specific interests of individuals. Following a period of requirements capture, involving experts in the field of tourism, we developed and installed a system for use by visitors to Lancaster. The system combines mobile computing technologies with a wireless infrastructure to present city visitors with information tailored to both their personal and environmental contexts. In this paper we present an evaluation of GUIDE, focusing on the quality of the visitor's experience when using the system.

/pdf/developing-a-context-aware-electronic-tourist-guide-some-4nelqf5zc6.pdf

Developing a context-aware electronic tourist guide: some issues and experiences

The GUIDE system has been developed to provide city visitors with a hand-held context-aware tourist guide. The system has been successfully deployed in a major tourist destination and is currently at the stage where it is publicly available to visitors who wish to explore the city. Reaching this stage has been the culmination of a number of distinct research efforts. In more detail, the development of GUIDE has involved: capturing a real set of application requirements, investigating the properties of a cell-based wireless communications technology in a built-up environment and deploying a network based on this technology around the city, designing and populating an information model to represent attractions and key buildings within the city, prototyping the development of a distributed application running across portable GUIDE units and stationary cell-servers and finally, evaluating the entire system during an extensive field-trial study. This paper reports on our results in each of these areas. We believe that through our work on the GUIDE project we have produced a blueprint for the development of interactive context-aware systems that should be of real value to those in the community who wish to develop such systems in a practical environment.

/pdf/experiences-of-developing-and-deploying-a-context-aware-1d7vanrirf.pdf

Experiences of developing and deploying a context-aware tourist guide: the GUIDE project

The last five years has seen a shift in the nature of mobile computers. The development of increasingly powerful laptop computer systems has been mirrored by the production of a range of small computational devices. The increased prominence of these devices outlined a number of distinct research challenges. These challenges have tended to focus on extending the utility of these devices using new forms of interaction; techniques to overcome display limitations or improvements in the general ergonomics of these devices. The merging of these devices with existing telecommunication services and the production of devices that offer connections to other systems presents yet another set of research challenges in terms of the development of cooperative multi-user applications.

Exploiting Context in HCI Design for Mobile Systems

In a study that provided unique insights into the challenges associated with developing location-based applications, the Lancaster Guide project used members of the general public to test a network-centric electronic tourist guide. We discuss two main topics. The first is our choice of positioning technology - beacons that broadcast using an IEEE 802.11 wireless network combined with user input. The second topic concerns techniques for generating custom tours for electronic city-guide systems. Guide generates these custom tours by taking into account multiple contextual triggers and user preferences. In practice, producing good tours and, indeed, assessing the quality of a tour are difficult tasks. While our analysis of techniques for producing custom tours is somewhat specific to the city-guide domain we believe that the majority of our work is relevant to location-based systems in general.

Using and determining location in a context-sensitive tour guide

47 The GUIDE project [4, 6] has been developed to provide city visitors with up-to-date and context-aware hypermedia information while they explore the city of Lan-caster in England. Visitors view this information via a handheld GUIDE unit based on the Fujitsu TeamPad 7600 tablet PC, which measures 213x153x15mm, weighs 850g, and is powered by a Pentium 166MHz processor. In GUIDE, the adaptive hypermedia presented to visitors is tailored to both environmental context (the major attractions in the city) and the visitor's personal context. Examples of the personal context used to drive the adaptation process include the visitor's current location , the visitor's profile (that is, the visitor's interests), and the set of attractions already visited. This latter piece of context enables pages of information to reflect those attractions the visitor has already seen. For example, if visitors make a return visit to Lancaster Castle, they are welcomed back. Oberlander [8] uses the term \" coherence \" to describe the tailoring of information in this way. A field trial-based evaluation of the GUIDE system [4] found the response of visitors to such anthropomorphic behavior [9] to be reasonably positive, with some visitors expressing that they felt \" reassured \" Adaptive Hypermedia Context-Aware Tourist GUIDE the role of in a W W here to go and what to do, in the limited amount of time available , are common problems encountered by tourists when visiting a city for the first time. In effect, cities are large information spaces, and in order to navigate these spaces visitors often require numerous guidebooks and maps. However, because guidebooks are general-purpose references, they tend to contain a significant amount of information of little relevance to the interests of a particular individual. When considering the design of a hypermedia system for supporting the information needs of city visitors, the use of \" adaptive hypermedia \" appears the obvious choice for tailoring the information to the interests of the visitor. However, to meet the requirements of this particular application domain, the traditional approach of using a user model as the sole means for driving adaptation is not sufficient. Indeed, GUIDE represents an example of a visible application stream in adaptive hypermedia research, one in which applications are context-aware [3, 10] and able to use context, such as the user's current location, to adapt the presentation of hyperme-dia. Examples of other applications in this stream include [5] and [7].

Keith Cheverst

Papers

Developing a context-aware electronic tourist guide: some issues and experiences

Experiences of developing and deploying a context-aware tourist guide: the GUIDE project

Exploiting Context in HCI Design for Mobile Systems

Using and determining location in a context-sensitive tour guide

The role of adaptive hypermedia in a context-aware tourist GUIDE