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Showing papers on "Context awareness published in 2009"


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: A critical analysis of Mobile Learning projects published before the end of 2007 is provided, using a Mobile Learning framework to evaluate and categorize 102 projects, and to briefly introduce exemplary projects for each category.
Abstract: This paper provides a critical analysis of Mobile Learning projects published before the end of 2007. The review uses a Mobile Learning framework to evaluate and categorize 102 Mobile Learning projects, and to briefly introduce exemplary projects for each category. All projects were analysed with the criteria: context, tools, control, communication, subject and objective. Although a significant number of projects have ventured to incorporate the physical context into the learning experience, few projects include a socializing context. Tool support ranges from pure content delivery to content construction by the learners. Although few projects explicitly discuss the Mobile Learning control issues, one can find all approaches from pure teacher control to learner control. Despite the fact that mobile phones initially started as a communication device, communication and collaboration play a surprisingly small role in Mobile Learning projects. Most Mobile Learning projects support novices, although one might argue that the largest potential is supporting advanced learners. All results show the design space and reveal gaps in Mobile Learning research.

386 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: A context-aware u-learning environment is developed for guiding inexperienced researchers to practice single-crystal X-ray diffraction operations and showed that it is ''systematic', ''authentic'', and ''economical'', which implies the potential of applying it to complex science experiments.
Abstract: Context-aware ubiquitous learning (u-learning) is an innovative approach that integrates wireless, mobile, and context-awareness technologies to detect the situation of learners in the real world and provide adaptive support or guidance accordingly. In this paper, a context-aware u-learning environment is developed for guiding inexperienced researchers to practice single-crystal X-ray diffraction operations. Experimental results showed that the benefits of this innovative approach are that it is ''systematic'', ''authentic'', and ''economical'', which implies the potential of applying it to complex science experiments, such as physics, chemistry or biotechnology experiments, for graduate and PhD students in colleges, or research workers in research institutes.

332 citations


Proceedings ArticleDOI
04 Apr 2009
TL;DR: It is suggested that peer opinion and technical savviness contribute most to whether or not participants thought they would continue to use a mobile location technology, and participants' privacy concerns were reduced after using the mobile location sharing system.
Abstract: Feedback is viewed as an essential element of ubiquitous computing systems in the HCI literature for helping people manage their privacy. However, the success of online social networks and existing commercial systems for mobile location sharing which do not incorporate feedback would seem to call the importance of feedback into question. We investigated this issue in the context of a mobile location sharing system. Specifically, we report on the findings of a field de-ployment of Locyoution, a mobile location sharing system. In our study of 56 users, one group was given feedback in the form of a history of location requests, and a second group was given no feedback at all. Our major contribution has been to show that feedback is an important contributing factor towards improving user comfort levels and allaying privacy concerns. Participants' privacy concerns were reduced after using the mobile location sharing system. Additionally,our study suggests that peer opinion and technical savviness contribute most to whether or not participants thought they would continue to use a mobile location technology.

237 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
01 Feb 2009
TL;DR: This paper addresses the problem of learning situation models for providing context-aware services by proposing a framework for acquiring and evolving different layers of a situation model in a smart environment, and presenting different learning methods.
Abstract: This paper addresses the problem of learning situation models for providing context-aware services. Context for modeling human behavior in a smart environment is represented by a situation model describing environment, users, and their activities. A framework for acquiring and evolving different layers of a situation model in a smart environment is proposed. Different learning methods are presented as part of this framework: role detection per entity, unsupervised extraction of situations from multimodal data, supervised learning of situation representations, and evolution of a predefined situation model with feedback. The situation model serves as frame and support for the different methods, permitting to stay in an intuitive declarative framework. The proposed methods have been integrated into a whole system for smart home environment. The implementation is detailed, and two evaluations are conducted in the smart home environment. The obtained results validate the proposed approach.

187 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The SPETA system is presented, which uses knowledge of the user's current location, preferences, as well as a history of past locations, in order to provide the type of recommender services that tourists expect from a real tour guide.

149 citations


Proceedings ArticleDOI
01 Apr 2009
TL;DR: The design of a persuasive virtual coach that encourages seniors to walk more is described, which combines a pedometer with wireless connectivity with a touch-screen photo frame and a range of persuasive principles and interaction metaphors.
Abstract: The use of context-aware technology in the home enables new ways to stimulate elderly in increasing their exercise levels, and consequently prevent age-related health issues amongst an increasing elderly population. This paper describes the design of a persuasive virtual coach that encourages seniors to walk more. In order to incorporate the user values and needs in the design concept, a user panel of elderly people was actively involved in the design process. A range of persuasive principles and interaction metaphors were evaluated with the user panel, resulting in a design concept that was approved and appreciated by the user panel. The design concept combines a pedometer with wireless connectivity with a touch-screen photo frame. As a first step towards a longer evaluation, an experimental prototype was tested in the field with two participants for 11 days each. Whereas the participants of the exploratory intervention did appreciate the virtual coach and they did feel more motivated to exercise, the quantitative figures did not yet show an increase in physical activity in time; a possible explanation could be the limited activity-sensing capabilities of the prototype in combination with the changing weather conditions in the course of the user study. Furthermore, the participants would like to see a system with a better awareness of the context of use, such that the system can better select the right timing for motivational cues. These findings will be used to improve the design concept and perform a longitudinal user study in the field.

134 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: This paper enumerates all context management categories, but focuses on the most appropriate for service engineering, namely source code level, model-driven and message interception, taking also into account the fact that these have not been dealt with in detail in other surveys.

121 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The work presents a survey of recent developments in sport and leisure with emphasis on technology and computational techniques, and concludes that the emphasis in future will shift from technologies to intelligent systems that allow for enhanced social interaction.
Abstract: Ubiquitous (pervasive) computing is a term for a synergetic use of sensing, communication and computing. Pervasive use of computing has seen a rapid increase in the current decade. This development has propagated in applied sport science and everyday life. The work presents a survey of recent developments in sport and leisure with emphasis on technology and computational techniques. A detailed analysis on new technological developments is performed. Sensors for position and motion detection, and such for equipment and physiological monitoring are discussed. Aspects of novel trends in communication technologies and data processing are outlined. Computational advancements have started a new trend - development of smart and intelligent systems for a wide range of applications - from model-based posture recognition to context awareness algorithms for nutrition monitoring. Examples particular to coaching and training are discussed. Selected tools for monitoring rules' compliance and automatic decision-making are outlined. Finally, applications in leisure and entertainment are presented, from systems supporting physical activity to systems providing motivation. It is concluded that the emphasis in future will shift from technologies to intelligent systems that allow for enhanced social interaction as efforts need to be made to improve user-friendliness and standardisation of measurement and transmission protocols.

115 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: This paper presents a Context-aware Decision Support (CaDS) system, which consists of a situation model for shared situation awareness modelling and a group of entity agents, one for each individual user, for focused and customized decision support.
Abstract: Situation awareness modelling is popularly used in the command and control domain for situation assessment and decision support. However, situation models in real-world applications are typically complex and not easy to use. This paper presents a Context-aware Decision Support (CaDS) system, which consists of a situation model for shared situation awareness modelling and a group of entity agents, one for each individual user, for focused and customized decision support. By incorporating a rule-based inference engine, the entity agents provide functions including event classification, action recommendation, and proactive decision making. The implementation and the performance of the proposed system are demonstrated through a case study on a simulated command and control application.

100 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The design and implementation of a context-aware middleware for pervasive homecare (CAMPH) is presented and the concept of providing a continuing-care to an elderly with the collaborative interactions spanning multiple physical spaces: person, home, office and clinic is demonstrated.
Abstract: The growing aging population faces a number of challenges, including rising medical cost, inadequate number of medical doctors and healthcare professionals, as well as higher incidence of misdiagnosis. There is an increasing demand for a better healthcare support for the elderly and one promising solution is the development of a context-aware middleware infrastructure for pervasive health/wellness-care. This allows the accurate and timely delivery of health/medical information among the patients, doctors and healthcare workers through a widespread deployment of wireless sensor networks and mobile devices. In this paper, we present our design and implementation of such a context-aware middleware for pervasive homecare (CAMPH). The middleware offers several key-enabling system services that consist of P2P-based context query processing, context reasoning for activity recognition and context-aware service management. It can be used to support the development and deployment of various homecare services for the elderly such as patient monitoring, location-based emergency response, anomalous daily activity detection, pervasive access to medical data and social networking. We have developed a prototype of the middleware and demonstrated the concept of providing a continuing-care to an elderly with the collaborative interactions spanning multiple physical spaces: person, home, office and clinic. The results of the prototype show that our middleware approach achieves good efficiency of context query processing and good accuracy of activity recognition.

92 citations


Proceedings ArticleDOI
24 Aug 2009
TL;DR: A Context-Aware Dynamic Software Product Line (DSPL) for building service oriented applications and adapting them at runtime in accordance with their using context, based on two different processes for product derivation.
Abstract: This paper presents a Context-Aware Dynamic Software Product Line (DSPL) for building service oriented applications and adapting them at runtime in accordance with their using context. This DSPL, named CAPucine for Context-Aware Service-Oriented Product Line is based on two different processes for product derivation. The first process uses assets that represent features of the product family. The assets, represented as models, get composed and transformed in order to generate the product. The second process relates to dynamic adaptation. This process introduces context-aware assets that operate at runtime. These context-aware assets contain three kinds of data: the context when the assets can be modified, the place where the assets must be applied and the change that must be performed. The realization of these context-aware assets combines two runtime platforms. On the one hand,COSMOS is a context-aware framework connected to the environment by the use of sensors. On the other hand FraSCAti is a Service Component Architecture (SCA) platform with dynamic properties that enables to bind and unbind components at runtime. CAPucine allows designing and processing context-aware applications based on an SCA platform which is dynamic, introspectable, and reconfigurable in accordance with the context environment.

Proceedings ArticleDOI
13 Jul 2009
TL;DR: A spatial context model is proposed, which deals with the location prediction of mobile users and is used for the classification of the users' trajectories through Machine Learning (ML) algorithms.
Abstract: Mobile context-aware applications experience a constantly changing environment with increased dynamicity. In order to work efficiently, the location of mobile users needs to be predicted and properly exploited by mobile applications. We propose a spatial context model, which deals with the location prediction of mobile users. Such model is used for the classification of the users' trajectories through Machine Learning (ML) algorithms. Predicting spatial context is treated through supervised learning. We evaluate our model in terms of prediction accuracy w.r.t. specific prediction parameters. The proposed model is also compared with other ML algorithms for location prediction. Our findings are very promising for the efficient operation of mobile context-aware applications.

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The purpose is to use the constructed theory and practice in order to enable anywhere and anytime adaptive e-learning environments and to integrate and extend fundamental and promising theoretical and technical aspects found in the literature.
Abstract: In this article we present a review of selected literature of context-aware pervasive computing while integrating theory and practice from various disciplines in order to construct a theoretical grounding and a technical follow-up path for our future research. This paper is not meant to provide an extensive review of the literature, but rather to integrate and extend fundamental and promising theoretical and technical aspects found in the literature. Our purpose is to use the constructed theory and practice in order to enable anywhere and anytime adaptive e-learning environments. We particularly elaborate on context, adaptivity, context-aware systems, ontologies and software development issues. Furthermore, we represent our view point for context-aware pervasive application development particularly based on higher abstraction where ontologies and semantic web activities, also web itself, are of crucial.

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: This paper surveys the most relevant approaches to modeling context for ubiquitous computing and evaluates how the existing works utilize contextual information, with respect to the query processing approaches used to access and manage that information.
Abstract: Context-awareness is emerging as a central issue in ubiquitous computing research. Context-aware computing refers to the idea that computing devices can sense and react to the physical environment where they are deployed. A great deal of research on context-awareness has been conducted to explore and address the various challenges related to context acquisition, representation, distribution, and abstraction. This paper surveys the most relevant approaches to modeling context for ubiquitous computing. It also evaluates how the existing works utilize contextual information, with respect to the query processing approaches used to access and manage that information. We also discuss typical problems, shortcomings, and challenges posed by context modeling at large, and highlight some proposals to address some of them.

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In pervasive and ubiquitous learning, a learner should be able to freely perform an educational activity possibly cooperating and/or collaborating with others using multiple devices and networks as he moves in an environment.
Abstract: In pervasive and ubiquitous learning, a learner should be able to freely perform an educational activity possibly cooperating and/or collaborating with others using multiple devices and networks as he moves in an environment. The educational activity should be able to be performed by various types of learners and to operate on various devices, networks and environments. Correspondingly, the devices and the networks should be able to support various types of learners and to operate various educational activities in any environment. In order to provide adaptive context-aware pervasive and ubiquitous learning, an adaptation engine senses the context and produces adapted educational activity and infrastructure. This paper defines the context to consist of the learner state, the educational activity state, the infrastructure state and the environment state. Furthermore, it comprehensively describes each one of the states.

01 Jan 2009
TL;DR: This paper presents a novel approach of Context-aware Mobile Augmented Reality (CAMAR) combining context awareness and mobile augmented reality, and confirmed possibilities for CAMAR as a personalized AR interface in smart space.
Abstract: In this paper, we present a novel approach of Context-aware Mobile Augmented Reality (CAMAR) combining context awareness and mobile augmented reality. CAMAR is aware of a user’s context through the user-centric integration of contextual information in smart space. Based on the user’s context, it enables a user to experience augmented entities and to share them with other mobile users selectively in a customized way. We review technical challenges for realizing the proposed CAMAR and describe our approaches to meet these challenges. To show the effectiveness of our work, we have developed CAMAR-enabled applications for smart home environments. Ultimately, we have confirmed possibilities for CAMAR as a personalized AR interface in smart space. *

Journal Article
TL;DR: A Ubiquitous Performance-support System (UPSS) that can facilitate the seamless use of powerful new technologies in the school setting and suggestions and implications for future research and system development are presented.
Abstract: * Corresponding author ABSTRACT Researchers have conducted various studies on applying wireless communication and ubiquitous computing technologies to education, so that the technologies can provide learners and educators with more active and adaptive support. This study proposes a Ubiquitous Performance-support System (UPSS) that can facilitate the seamless use of powerful new technologies in the school setting. In order to help the readers visualize these novel technologies in practice, we present one case study of a butterfly-ecology training course facilitated by the UPSS. The aim behind the case study is to inform the design and the development of context-aware ubiquitous computing system and its learning materials. The research inquiry centers around three themes: (1) the critical features to the data-driven decision making of teachers, (2) the perceptions of teachers and students to the UPSS, and (3) implementation issues. The results of the two rounds of formative evaluation indicate positive effects of the UPSS regarding motivation, interactivity, and effectiveness. In addition, teachers' attitudes and teachers' pedagogical approaches toward UPSS use are two key factors in the successful implementation of teaching with such innovative technology. This study can be a useful reference for those who are interested in conducting studies applying context-aware ubiquitous computing to educational contexts. Finally, this study presents suggestions and implications for future research and system development.

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: An approach for vehicular ad-hoc networks (VANETs) that recommends gas stations based on driver preferences, ratings of other users and context information such as the current location and fuel level of a car is presented.
Abstract: In this article, we give an overview of ideas for integrating context in recommender systems in general and specifically in various mobile application domains. Our main case study is an approach for vehicular ad-hoc networks (VANETs). The system recommends gas stations based on driver preferences, ratings of other users and context information such as the current location and fuel level of a car. We explain the main design issues behind our recommender. Our approach first filters items based on preferences and context, and then takes ratings of other users and additional information into account, which can be relayed from car to car in a VANET. We also outline other mobile scenarios for contextualized recommender systems: a system for recommending mobile applications based on user context, an approach to find relevant resources in mobile semantic personal information management and a decentralized recommender system for personal digital assistants (PDAs).

Book
05 Oct 2009
TL;DR: Autonomic communication explores conceptual models and associated technologies that will uphold the vision of autonomic communication where devices and applications blur the boundaries between virtual and real worlds as they seamlessly interconnect, intelligently cooperate, and autonomously manage themselves as mentioned in this paper.
Abstract: New paradigms for communication/networking systems are needed in order to tackle such emerging issues as heterogeneity, complexity and management of evolvable infrastructures, thus requiring approaches that are both task- and knowledge-driven. The networking and seamless integration of concepts, technologies and devices in a dynamically changing environment poses many challenges to the research community, including interoperability, programmability, management, openness, reliability, performance, context awareness, intelligence, autonomy, security, privacy, safety, and semantics. Inspired by biological systems, autonomic communication envisions communication systems that can organize, configure, optimize, protect, and heal themselves with minimal involvement of human administrators. Autonomic Communication explores conceptual models and associated technologies that will uphold the vision of autonomic communication where devices and applications blur the boundaries between virtual and real worlds as they seamlessly interconnect, intelligently cooperate, and autonomously manage themselves. Written by leading international researchers, the contributions give testimony to the challenges and prospects of this rapidly growing area. The volume is composed of chapters covering a wide range of issues related to autonomic communication. Part I Autonomic Communication Infrastructure Social-based autonomic routing in opportunistic networks A Collaborative Knowledge Plane for Autonomic Networks A Rate Feedback Predictive Control Scheme Based on Neural Network and Control Theory for Autonomic Communication Part II Autonomic Communication Services and Middleware Hovering Information Self-Organizing Information that Finds its Own Storage The CASCADAS Framework for Autonomic Communications Autonomic Middleware for Automotive Embedded Systems Social Opportunistic Computing: Design for Autonomic User-Centric Systems Programming and Validation Techniques for Reliable Goal-driven Autonomic Software Part III Applications to Ad-Hoc (Sensor) Networks and Pervasive Systems Autonomic Communication in Pervasive Multimodal Multimedia Computing System Self-healing for Autonomic Pervasive Computing Map-based Design for Autonomic Wireless Sensor Networks An Efficient, Scalable and Robust P2P Overlay for Autonomic Communication Autonomic and Coevolutionary Sensor Networking Autonomic Communication provides a vital reference to both researchers and practitioners, particularly those in networking, future and emerging technologies, mobile systems, autonomous technologies, computational intelligence, and embedded systems. The book is also a useful tool for graduate students and senior undergraduate students in courses on networking, autonomous management web, services, network application modeling, knowledge-based systems, and evolutionary software.

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: This paper presents the context model, called the context dimension tree, which plays a fundamental role in tailoring the information space according to user information needs and proposes exploiting the information usage context within a methodology for context-aware data design.
Abstract: More and more often, we face the necessity of extracting appropriately reshaped knowledge from an integrated representation of the information space. Be such a global representation a central database, a global view of several ones or an ontological representation of an information domain, we face the need to define personalised views for the knowledge stakeholders: single users, companies or applications. We propose exploiting the information usage context within a methodology for context-aware data design, where the notion of context is formally defined together with its role within the process of view building by information tailoring. This paper presents our context model, called the context dimension tree, which plays a fundamental role in tailoring the information space according to user information needs.

Proceedings ArticleDOI
20 Jul 2009
TL;DR: The results of several experiments show that the context-aware approach, which takes into account not only user preferences, but also context information, is more precise than the traditional recommendation approaches.
Abstract: Traditional recommendation approaches do not consider the changes of user preferences according to context. As a result, these approaches consider the user’s overall preferences, although the user preferences on items varies according to his/her context. However, in our context-aware approach, we take into account not only user preferences, but also context information. Our approach can be easily adopted for content-based and collaborative filtering based recommendations. To exploit raw context information in recommendation, we abstract the raw context information to a concept level. Moreover, by aggregating the context information, we can improve the quality of recommendation. The results of several experiments show that our method is more precise than the traditional recommendation approaches.

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: An integrated vehicular system for the collection, management, and provision of context-aware information on traffic and driver location enriched with an information management system that resembles the concept of a smart road.
Abstract: We present an integrated vehicular system for the collection, management, and provision of context-aware information on traffic and driver location. This system uses an integrated vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) and vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) communication paradigm enriched with an information management system. The infrastructure manages vehicle-detected safety hazards and other relevant information, adapting them to the vehicle's context and driver's preferences. This vehicular integrated system resembles the concept of a smart road.

Book ChapterDOI
10 Jun 2009
TL;DR: A harmonized view on context and service properties is provided, bridging the syntactical and semantic differences through an ontology, and related aspects like semantic service discovery and service level agreements are considered.
Abstract: Mobile computing in ubiquitous environments has to cope with both predictable and unpredictable changes in the execution context, which introduces the need for context-aware adaptive applications. Such environments are also characterized by dynamically discoverable services that can be utilized by applications to improve their functionality and quality of service (QoS). Thus, application adaptation decisions not only depend on context properties, but also on service availability and QoS-properties. In this chapter we present a novel comprehensive modeling approach that facilitates the model-driven development of such applications. Our focus is on modeling concepts which align the description of services and their QoS-properties with the context modeling approach. We provide a harmonized view on context and service properties, bridging the syntactical and semantic differences through an ontology. We also consider related aspects like semantic service discovery and service level agreements.

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: This article investigates an innovative model, based on the IWW services, for a typical mobile real-time supply chain coordination system which has been developed and tested in a real operational environment and has passed the evaluation processes successfully.

31 Aug 2009
TL;DR: A survey that defines the service composition as a sequence of four steps: the translation, the generation, the evaluation, and finally the execution is proposed.
Abstract: The development of pervasive computing has put the light on a challenging problem: how to dynamically compose services in heterogeneous and highly changing environments? We propose a survey that defines the service composition as a sequence of four steps: the translation, the generation, the evaluation, and finally the execution. With this powerful and simple model we describe the major service composition middleware. Then, a classification of these service composition middleware according to pervasive requirements - interoperability, discoverability, adaptability, context awareness, QoS management, security, spontaneous management, and autonomous management - is given. The classification highlights what has been done and what remains to do to develop the service composition in pervasive environments.

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: This paper proposes an architecture for data integration within an electronic health care network based on extending the traditional SOA approach with support for complex event processing and context awareness and facilitates integrated business performance management against quality of care targets.
Abstract: The emergence of biomedical wireless sensors, the wide spread use of smartphones, and advanced data stream mining techniques have enabled a new generation of personal health monitoring systems. These health monitoring systems are mostly stand-alone and are not yet integrated with existing e-Health systems, which could seriously limit their large scale deployment. In this paper, we propose an architecture for data integration within an electronic health care network based on extending the traditional SOA approach with support for complex event processing and context awareness. This architecture also facilitates integrated business performance management against quality of care targets. A detailed health monitoring scenario for the care of cardiac patients is used to illustrate system requirements and to validate the proposed architecture. The expected benefits of our approach include a higher quality of care, reduced costs for health service providers and a higher quality of life for the patients.

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The hybrid reasoning approach adopted by CARE is illustrated and the extensive experimental results on ontology-based context reasoning that support the approach are reported.
Abstract: The Context Aggregation and REasoning (CARE) middleware aims at supporting context-aware adaptation of internet services in a mobile computing environment. Context awareness requires the acquisition, representation and processing of information that goes beyond raw context data – like device features, network status and user location – to include semantically rich data such as the current activity and interests of users. Representing and reasoning with the latter class of data require the use of ontologies and ontological reasoning. It is well known that reasoning with ontologies poses significant performance issues. The CARE hybrid reasoning mechanism is based on a loose interaction between ontological reasoning and efficient reasoning in a restricted logic programming language. In this paper we illustrate the hybrid reasoning approach adopted by CARE and report the extensive experimental results on ontology-based context reasoning that support our approach.

Patent
20 Feb 2009
TL;DR: In this article, a mobile device (102, 202, 302) for enhancing context awareness in social networking comprises a processor (220) for processing data, a memory (222) for storing data, and a wireless transceiver (224, 224B) for wirelessly transmitting and receiving data relative to remote devices.
Abstract: A mobile device (102, 202, 302) for enhancing context awareness in social networking comprises a processor (220) for processing data, a memory (222) for storing data, a wireless transceiver (224, 224B) for wirelessly transmitting and receiving data relative to remote devices, a short-range wireless transceiver (224, 224A), e.g. an NFC transceiver, for wirelessly transmitting and receiving data relative to remote devices equipped with a compatible short-range interface, a social contact registration logic (206, 604) configured to obtain information from a mobile communications device of a social contact via the short-range wireless transceiver, the information identifying the social contact and/or the mobile communications device of the social contact, a context detection logic (206, 608) configured to obtain, via the short-range wireless transceiver, data distinctive to and provided by a tag disposed in a location accessible via the short-range data transfer, said distinctive data being thus indicative of the current location-based context of the mobile communications device and the user thereof, and a context notification logic (206, 606) configured to transmit an indication of the detected location-based context to a remote entity, such as a server, via the wireless transceiver in order to enable providing at least one social contact of the user of the mobile communications device with knowledge of the current context.

Proceedings ArticleDOI
03 Jun 2009
TL;DR: A tag cloud based recommendation system for user-generated content which exploits these social network relations and records all the available context information to determine the influence of the individual context features on the consumption behaviour.
Abstract: The enormous offer of video content on the internet and its continuous growth make the selection process increasingly difficult for end-users. This overabundance of audio-visual material can be handled by a recommendation system that observes user preferences and assists people with finding interesting content. However, present-day recommendation systems focus on the metadata or the previous consumption behaviour to select the content but do not consider contextual information or social network relations.Therefore, we developed a tag cloud based recommendation system for user-generated content which exploits these social network relations. Recommendations based on the user's profile are supplemented with social recommendations: content suggestions from people on the user's contact list. Moreover, since we believe that the consumption context (location, time, etc.) has a significant influence on the content selection process, the system records all the available context information. Our next task is to analyze the obtained dataset and to determine the influence of the individual context features on the consumption behaviour. The system recommendations and social recommendations will be compared on the basis of effectiveness, novelty and user appreciation. Finally, we intend to incorporate the results of this analysis in our personalization algorithm in order to improve the recommendation results.

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The proposed system is based on an ad hoc interaction of mobile body sensor networks with independent wireless sensor networks already deployed within the environments to allow a continuous and context aware health monitoring for patients along their daily life scenarios with an unprecedented precision and flexibility of sensing.
Abstract: This paper deals with a wireless pervasive communication system to support advanced healthcare applications. The proposed system is based on an ad hoc interaction of mobile body sensor networks with independent wireless sensor networks already deployed within the environments in order to allow a continuous and context aware health monitoring for patients along their daily life scenarios with an unprecedented precision and flexibility of sensing. After an accurate protocol characterization, simulation results are provided, underlining remarkable performance with respect to existing solutions, for different mobility models and node density values.