Context awareness

About: Context awareness is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 5790 publications have been published within this topic receiving 119944 citations.

Method and apparatus for executing device actions based on context awareness

Abstract: An approach is provided for initiating a device action in response to determining context information associated with a device, a user of the device, or a combination thereof. Activity information on at least one of the device and one or more other devices is monitored by a context processing platform. The context processing platform defines a context based on the activity information. An action is then executed by the device or the one or more other devices based on the determined context.

A Formal Model for Mobile Map Adaptation

Abstract: Computing has become increasingly mobile and pervasive, which implies that services must be aware of and adapt to changing contexts in highly dynamic environments. Services that require a lot of user interaction have less potential of being used, because they tend to be obstructive. Thus, context-awareness and adaptation are important research issues in the area of mobile computing. A major goal is to minimize user interaction through service adaptation, and to provide context-sensitive and personalized information to the user. Adaptations for mobile map applications must consider a wide range of factors – from technical requirements to cognitive abilities and goals of the user. However, specifying contextual facts in an accurate and traceable manner is challenging. Initial approaches have focused on information visualization for mobile map applications through context information. These typically focus on simplifying and generalizing route segments rather than adapting to personal information. In this paper we propose a formal conceptual model for automatic mobile map adaptation that can be employed for different applications, such as pedestrian navigation. This model is composed of three components – a context model, a user model, and a task model. Through specified adaptation operations it aims at a reduction of both the user interactionwith the service and the cognitive load for the user.

TRENDY: an adaptive and context-aware service discovery protocol for 6LoWPANs

Abstract: We propose, trendy, a new registry-based Service Discovery protocol with context awareness. It uses CoAP-based RESTful web services to provide a standard interoperable interface which can be easily translated from HTTP. In addition, trendy introduces an adaptive timer and grouping mechanism to minimise control overhead and energy consumption. trendy's grouping is based on location tags to localise status maintenance traffic and to compose and offer new group based services. Our simulation results show that trendy techniques reduce the control traffic considerably and also reduce the energy consumption, while offering the optimal service selection.

Context-awareness in wireless and mobile computing revisited to embrace social networking

Abstract: The inherent context-awareness properties of pervasive computing and the need for efficient user profiling and location information management quickly made it obvious that context management would become a top priority requirement in telecommunications service platforms. What we now call social networking was "born" around the early-mid `00s, a time when the first context management models and frameworks were being designed for the market. While the world was developing the first context management systems, social networking was growing fast; so fast in fact that no one can afford to ignore it any more. The introduction of smartphones into the global telecommunications market enabled social networking to actually change the way people lived, the way they communicated, and their habits. Information and Communication Technologies research has started taking this new reality very seriously and numerous initiatives have invested in relevant projects, in order to explore all social networking aspects and incorporate its logic in the lowest architectural layers. This article presents a short historical review of the evolution of various aspects of context management in pervasive computing systems, it revisits the earlier models, in order to put community context where it belongs, it presents a context management architecture that is suitable for pervasive services combined with social networking and explores its added value for users all over the world.

Modeling social contexts for pervasive computing environments

Abstract: Empowered smart objects have become a part of people everyday activities due to the evolution of pervasive computing technologies. In such scenario context awareness plays a fundamental role in enabling adaptation and contextual services. Up to now a lot of efforts have been done in representing context information such as location, time and users identity. At the same time not much attention has been dedicated to social contexts description and adaptation. While context-aware infrastructures do not consider social networks structures, we believe physical objects should be social-aware in order to interact with users in a more suitable way. This paper presents So Smart, a framework for modeling social context in a pervasive computing environment and for supporting reasoning of a multi-agent system made of smart objects. We propose a ontology-based context model to address social context representation and classification and to allow automated social context reasoning in a multi-agent system.