The proliferation of Internet of Things (IoT) and the success of rich cloud services have pushed the horizon of a new computing paradigm, edge computing, which calls for processing the data at the edge of the network. Edge computing has the potential to address the concerns of response time requirement, battery life constraint, bandwidth cost saving, as well as data safety and privacy. In this paper, we introduce the definition of edge computing, followed by several case studies, ranging from cloud offloading to smart home and city, as well as collaborative edge to materialize the concept of edge computing. Finally, we present several challenges and opportunities in the field of edge computing, and hope this paper will gain attention from the community and inspire more research in this direction.

Edge Computing: Vision and Challenges

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

NUDGE: IMPROVING DECISIONS ABOUT HEALTH, WEALTH, AND HAPPINESS by Richard H. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein Penguin Books, 2009, 312 pp, ISBN 978-0-14-311526-7This book is best described formally as a general explanation of and advocacy for libertarian paternalism, a term coined by the authors in earlier publications. Informally, it is about how leaders, systems, organizations, and governments can nudge people to do the things the nudgers want and need done for the betterment of the nudgees, or of society. It is paternalism in the sense that "it is legitimate for choice architects to try to influence people's behavior in order to make their lives longer, healthier, and better", (p. 5) It is libertarian in that "people should be free to do what they like - and to opt out of undesirable arrangements if they want to do so", (p. 5) The built-in possibility of opting out or making a different choice preserves freedom of choice even though people's behavior has been influenced by the nature of the presentation of the information or by the structure of the decisionmaking system. I had never heard of libertarian paternalism before reading this book, and I now find it fascinating.Written for a general audience, this book contains mostly social and behavioral science theory and models, but there is considerable discussion of structure and process that has roots in mathematical and quantitative modeling. One of the main applications of this social system is economic choice in investing, selecting and purchasing products and services, systems of taxes, banking (mortgages, borrowing, savings), and retirement systems. Other quantitative social choice systems discussed include environmental effects, health care plans, gambling, and organ donations. Softer issues that are also subject to a nudge-based approach are marriage, education, eating, drinking, smoking, influence, spread of information, and politics. There is something in this book for everyone.The basis for this libertarian paternalism concept is in the social theory called "science of choice", the study of the design and implementation of influence systems on various kinds of people. The terms Econs and Humans, are used to refer to people with either considerable or little rational decision-making talent, respectively. The various libertarian paternalism concepts and systems presented are tested and compared in light of these two types of people. Two foundational issues that this book has in common with another book, Network of Echoes: Imitation, Innovation and Invisible Leaders, that was also reviewed for this issue of the Journal are that 1 ) there are two modes of thinking (or components of the brain) - an automatic (intuitive) process and a reflective (rational) process and 2) the need for conformity and the desire for imitation are powerful forces in human behavior. …

Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness

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

This paper explores the need for mobile-awareness in groupware designed for use in a mobile environment. The motivation for providing this additional form of awareness is that current groupware tends to assume a reliable and constant quality of communications that does not exist in a mobile environemt. The implications of making this false assumption are twofold: first, systems that enforce certain ordering and reliability semantics across all operations can suffer drastic performance penalties; second, users are given insufficient awareness of (and control over) the effect of the unreliable communications environment on their collaboration. The support of mobile-awareness implies providing users with appropriate and sufficient information to adapt their behaviour (and the behaviour of the system) in response to changes in the quality of group communications available. To support the development of mobile-aware groupware we have built a flexible Quality of Service (QoS)-based group service capable of providing group-oriented feedback to application level services.

The Support of Mobile-Awareness in Collaborative Groupware

Mobile applications are required to operate in environments that change. Specifically, the availability of resources and services may change significantly during typical system operation. As a consequence, mobile applications need to be capable of adapting to these changes to ensure they offer the best possible level of service to the user. Our experiences of developing adaptive applications have led us to believe that existing middleware fails to provide the necessary support for such applications. Moreover, we believe that current research in this area is also failing to address the core requirements of adaptive mobile systems. In this paper we present a set of requirements for future mobile middleware which have been derived by considering the shortcomings of existing approaches and the needs of application developers. Key among these requirements is the need to support coordinated action between application and system components and the resolution of conflicts caused by the need to adapt to multiple contextual triggers. The paper concludes with the presentation of an architectural framework within which middleware researchers can deploy solutions to the problems identified.

/pdf/architectural-requirements-for-the-effective-support-of-5as320g69d.pdf

Architectural Requirements for the Effective Support of Adaptive Mobile Applications

The articles in this special issue focus on context-aware systems designed to recognize activities. They present underlying technologies for developing activity-aware systems and report on experiences with activity recognition in real-world applications.

Activity-Based Computing

In order to support multimedia applications in mobile environments, it will be necessary for applications to be aware of the underlying network conditions and also to be able to adapt their behaviour and that of the underlying platform. This paper focuses on the role of middleware in supporting such adaptation. In particular, we investigate the role of open implementation and reflection in the design of middleware platforms such as CORBA. The paper initially extends CORBA with the concept of explicit binding, where path of communication between objects is represented as first class objects. We then introduce the concept of open bindings which support inspection and adaptation of the path of communications. An implementation of open bindings is described, based on the Ensemble protocol suite from Cornell University.

Supporting adaptive multimedia applications through open bindings

Despite much interest over recent years in the area of context-aware computing, there are still a number of significant gaps in our understanding of the HCI issues associated with such systems. One particular issue that remains relatively unexplored is how to design around the apparently conflicting goals of adapting to changes in context while at the same time adhering to the principle of predictability. In this paper, we describe our exploration into this issue through two alternative designs of an interactive context-aware tourist guide. One original design was based around information pull, i.e. the emphasis is on the user to decide when context-aware information is presented. Our second design incorporates the notion of information push whereby the actual presentation of context-aware information is triggered by contextual events, e.g. changes in the user’s location or changes to the opening times of attractions. Through the evaluation of these alternative designs we hope to gain a better understanding of the usability implications relating to push vs. pull in both this specific domain and in interactive context-aware systems in general.

Nigel Davies

Papers

The Support of Mobile-Awareness in Collaborative Groupware

Architectural Requirements for the Effective Support of Adaptive Mobile Applications

Activity-Based Computing

Supporting adaptive multimedia applications through open bindings

Exploring Context-aware Information Push