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

Context-aware computing is a mobile computing paradigm in which applications can discover and take advantage of contextual information (such as user location, time of day, nearby people and devices, and user activity) Since it was proposed about a decade ago, many researchers have studied this topic and built several context-aware applications to demonstrate the usefulness of this new technology Context-aware applications (or the system infrastructure to support them), however, have never been widely available to everyday users In this survey of research on context-aware systems and applications, we looked in depth at the types of context used and models of context information, at systems that support collecting and disseminating context, and at applications that adapt to the changing context Through this survey, it is clear that context-aware research is an old but rich area for research The difficulties and possible solutions we outline serve as guidance for researchers hoping to make context-aware computing a reality

/pdf/a-survey-of-context-aware-mobile-computing-research-1c5wp0noju.pdf

A Survey of Context-Aware Mobile Computing Research

Context-aware systems offer entirely new opportunities for application developers and for end users by gathering context data and adapting systems behaviour accordingly. Especially in combination with mobile devices, these mechanisms are of high value and are used to increase usability tremendously. In this paper, we present common architecture principles of context-aware systems and derive a layered conceptual design framework to explain the different elements common to most context-aware architectures. Based on these design principles, we introduce various existing context-aware systems focusing on context-aware middleware and frameworks, which ease the development of context-aware applications. We discuss various approaches and analyse important aspects in context-aware computing on the basis of the presented systems.

/pdf/a-survey-on-context-aware-systems-47xtrbjsqu.pdf

A survey on context-aware systems

The emergence of ubiquitous computing as a new design paradigm poses significant challenges for human-computer interaction (HCI) and interaction design. Traditionally, HCI has taken place within a constrained and well-understood domain of experience—single users sitting at desks and interacting with conventionally-designed computers employing screens, keyboards and mice for interaction. New opportunities have engendered considerable interest in “context-aware computing”—computational systems that can sense and respond to aspects of the settings in which they are used. However, considerable confusion surrounds the notion of “context”—what it means, what it includes and what role it plays in interactive systems. This paper suggests that the representational stance implied by conventional interpretations of “context” misinterprets the role of context in everyday human activity, and proposes an alternative model that suggests different directions for design.

/pdf/what-we-talk-about-when-we-talk-about-context-28v7hls8bp.pdf

What we talk about when we talk about context

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

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].

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

https://eprints.lancs.ac.uk/11649/1/cheverst%2Dc%26g%2Dimc1998.pdf

Keith Mitchell

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

Using and determining location in a context-sensitive tour guide

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

Design of an Object Model for a Context-Sensitive Tourist Guide