Context awareness

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

A mobile device controlled by context awareness

Abstract: A method for controlling a mobile device on the basis of context awareness comprises: recognizing (101) changes of context related to the mobile device and/or a user of the mobile device, gathering (102) usage data indicative of control actions given by the user and directed to the mobile device during different recognized changes of context, selecting (103), as a response to a change of context, at least one service action from among a pre-determined set of service actions related to services provided with the mobile device at least partly on the basis of the usage data, and controlling (104) the mobile device to perform the selected at least one service action, e.g. adaptation of a user interface of the mobile device. As a consequence of gathering the usage data, the operation of the mobile device in different changes of context can be tailored for the user.

Authoring context-dependent cross-device user interfaces based on trigger/action rules

Abstract: Current authoring environments provide the possibility of developing user interfaces with limited adaptation capacities. The most widely adopted tools follow the responsive design approach and allow developers to obtain user interfaces that can adapt mainly to the screen size and orientation. We present a solution able to support development of user interfaces able to adapt to the various types of contextual events (that can be related to users, devices, environments, and social relationships), with the added possibility of distributing the user interface elements across multiple devices. The context-dependent behavior is modelled through trigger / action rules, and can even be applied to Web applications that were not originally designed to be context-aware. This paper describes the design and main features of the novel authoring environment and reports on a first user study.

System and method for a context-awareness platform

Abstract: An improved system and method for a context-awareness platform that may be used to adapt an execution environment is provided. A framework with interfaces for setting, tracking, and getting context information about the execution environment of a computer system includes a context engine and a unified data store for aggregating context information at a platform level for access by executables running on the platform. The context engine may receive requests to perform context information operations from executables such as setting, tracking and getting context information in the data store. Upon receiving a notification of a change in context information, one or more executables may change the execution environment such as reconfiguring system settings. In this way, an executable may adapt its execution environment using context information.

Enabling Context-Aware Computing for the Nomadic Mobile User: A Service Oriented and Quality Driven Approach

Abstract: Context-awareness (CA) enables the development of personalized applications for highly mobile and demanding users in the pervasive environments. These applications rely on the components responsible for context sensing, processing, storage and inference. Various context-aware computing infrastructures exist to shield the application developers from the complexity of developing these components. However, some additional concerns including the distribution of context sources in the pervasive environments, quality of context (QoC) and user privacy demand that a context-aware computing infrastructure should also handle these aspects. This paper introduces our work in progress on the context distribution framework (CDF) aimed at providing a service oriented infrastructure for the context-aware applications hosted on a mobile device. In the current version of CDF, we focus on three aspects: a) transparent off-loading of resource intensive context manipulation from the mobile device; b) selection of the suitable context sources based on the quality of context (QoC); and c) modeling mobile context sources as services.

Adaptive context data distribution with guaranteed quality for mobile environments

Abstract: The capability to gather and timely deliver any relevant information useful in service-provisioning environments, typically called context data, is increasingly recognized as a core function of modern ubiquitous and mobile systems. However, notwithstanding the large amount of literature on context modeling and representation, much work is to be done in obtaining context data distribution and retrieval with guaranteed quality levels. This paper offers three main contributions along that direction. First, it proposes a simple way to specify context data distribution requirements: these objectives called context data distribution level agreement (CDDLA) focus mainly differentiated priorities, quality metrics, and delivery delay. Second, it presents how to translate CDDLA into a set of system-level parameters to drive the infrastructure configuration. Third, it describes our novel infrastructure for quality-aware context data distribution in mobile and wireless wide-area environments. The paper reports some experimental results to point out how our solution can grant context data dissemination with required quality, while achieving overall system scalability.