Context awareness

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

Interacting in desktop and mobile context : emotion, trust and task performance

Abstract: The Personal Assistant for onLine Services (PALS) project aims at attuning the interaction with mobile services to the momentary usage context. Among other thing, PALS should adequately address emotional states of the user and support users building up an adequate trust level during service interactions. In an experiment, participants performed interaction tasks with mobile services, on a small handheld device or a laptop. Before each task session, they watched film clips with different emotional impact (i.e. valence and arousal). In addition to performance measures, we measured trust and heart rate. In the handheld condition, task performance was substantially worse and showed a more extensive navigation path (i.e. more ‘wrong’ hyperlinks) to find the target information. Furthermore, during the experiment trust in the web services hardly increased in the handheld condition whereas trust substantially improved in the laptop condition. Device and service proved to be the major factors that determine the user experience. There is a clear need to improve the mobile interaction with web services in order to establish an adequate performance and trust level (e.g. by attentive interactive displays).

Improving understanding and trust with intelligibility in context-aware applications

Abstract: To facilitate everyday activities, context-aware applications use sensors to detect what is happening and use increasingly complex mechanisms ( eg, by using big rule-sets or machine learning) to infer the user's context and intent For example, a mobile application can recognize that the user is in a conversation and suppress any incoming calls When the application works well, this implicit sensing and complex inference remain invisible However, when it behaves inappropriately or unexpectedly, users may not understand its behavior This can lead users to mistrust, misuse, or even abandon it To counter this lack of understanding and loss of trust, context-aware applications should be intelligible, capable of explaining their behavior We investigate providing intelligibility in context-aware applications and evaluate its usefulness to improve user understanding and trust in context-aware applications Specifically, this thesis supports intelligibility in context-aware applications through the provision of explanations that answer different question types, such as: Why did it do X? Why did it not do Y? What if I did W, What will it do? How can I get the application to do Y? This thesis takes a three-pronged approach to investigating intelligibility by (i) eliciting the user requirements for intelligibility, to identify what explanation types end-users are interested in asking context-aware applications, (ii) supporting the development of intelligible context-aware applications with a software toolkit and the design of these applications with design and usability recommendations, and (iii) evaluating the impact of intelligibility on user understanding and trust under various situations and application reliability, and measuring how users use an interactive intelligible prototype We show that users are willing to use well-designed intelligibility features, and this can improve user understanding and trust in the adaptive behavior of context-aware applications

A middleware for supporting context-aware services in mobile and ubiquitous environment

Abstract: Ubiquitous computing has developed with mobile computing technology. With the recent advances in mobile computer technology and wireless network, the nature of the services proposed to the users is moving towards mobile and context-aware services. On account of such moving, applications and services in mobile and ubiquitous environment must be aware of their changing environments and adapt according to changing contexts. However, developing such systems providing context-aware applications or services is still a complex and time-consuming task. Therefore, we introduce architecture of context-aware service middleware (CASM) that will provide a middleware-level support for building and rapid prototyping of context-aware services and describe interactions based on the architecture.

Ontology-driven slope modeling for disaster management service

Abstract: These days, with the development of information technology, new paradigms have been created through academical and technological convergence in various areas. The IT convergence draws much attention as the next generation technology for disaster prevention and management in the construction and transportation area. Along with global warming, global climate changes and unusual weather occur around the world, and consequently disasters become more huge. IT convergence based disaster management service makes it possible to quickly respond to unexpected disasters in the ubiquitous environment and mitigate the disasters. Although research on disaster prevention and management has constantly been conducted, it is relatively slow to develop the technology for disaster prediction and prevention. For efficient safety and disaster prevention and management in the next generation IT convergence, it is essential to establish a systematic disaster prevention technology and a disaster prevention information system. In this paper, we proposed ontology-driven slope modeling for disaster management service through the convergence of construction, transportation technology and IT. User profile, environment information, location information, weather index, slope stability, disaster, statistics and analysis of disasters, and forest fire disaster index are used to build internal context information, external context information, and service context information. Ontology-based context awareness modeling of the landslides and disasters generated is constructed, and relevant rules are generated by inference engine. Based on the ontology of external and internal context awareness, the rules of service inference derived by inference engine are produced using protege 5.0. According to the service inference rules, disaster control services best fitting for users' environment is provided. By addressing the social issues related to disaster prevention and response and judging the potential risk of disasters, the proposed method can contribute to improving the safety of the public and the quality of their life. Social consensus on the necessity of prevention of urban climate disasters can be formed easily, and a ripple effect is expected on the situational response to natural disaster.

Understanding context-awareness in business process design

Abstract: In recent years, flexibility has emerged as an important guiding principle in the design of business processes. However, research on process flexibility has traditionally been solely focused on ways of how the demand for process flexibility can be satisfied by advanced process modelling techniques, i.e., issues intrinsic to the process. This paper proposes to extent existing research by studying the extrinsic drivers for process flexibility, i.e. an analysis of the root causes that drive the demand for flexible processes. These drivers can be found in the context of the process, which may include among others time, location, weather, legislation, culture or performance requirements. We argue for a stronger and more explicit consideration of these contextual factors in the design and modelling of business processes. Based on a real case study, we discuss how context can be conceptualized and integrated with existing approaches to business process design. These extensions are an essential foundation for the definition and implementation of agile processes and as such of high practical and theoretical value.