Context awareness

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

Advanced User Assistance Systems

Abstract: Information technology (IT) capabilities are increasing at an impressive pace, but users’ cognitive abilities are not developing at the same speed. Thus, there is a gap between users’ abilities and available IT. Handbooks or online help functions such as ‘‘F1 help’’ try to close this gap by providing explanatory information for the IT capabilities at hand. However, there is strong empirical evidence that traditional support structures are not as effective as intended (Sykes 2015); on the contrary, they distract users from their work (Barrett et al. 2004), which results in decreased efficiency and effectiveness as well as lower job satisfaction. Initial attempts to support users with more comprehensive integrated assistance functions failed miserably. A well-known example of such a dismal failure is ‘‘Clippy, the paperclip’’, a cartoon character developed by Microsoft that automatically popped up to assist users of Microsoft Office. However, instead of supporting the user with clear and precise guidance, studies show that Clippy ‘‘was considered to be annoying, impolite, and disruptive of a user’s workflow’’ (Veletsianos 2007, p. 374). In the end, Clippy, the ‘‘non-intelligent artificial intelligence assistant’’, was so despised that even Microsoft made fun of it. However, more recent attempts to support users, primarily in the private-life context (on mobile devices), are becoming more sophisticated and have been met with a more favorable response (e.g., Apple’s Siri and Google’s Google Now). Moreover, Microsoft has integrated its personal assistant, Cortana, into the latest version of the operating system Windows 10, which is available for private and business environments. One domain that is far more mature with regard to ‘‘user’’ support is the automotive sector. For more than 30 years there has been research into assistance systems that proactively support drivers (Bengler et al. 2014). Early driver assistance systems (DAS) only measured the parameters inside the car, for example with regard to vehicle stabilization (electronic stability control). Later on, sensors also captured the car’s external environment. The use of the collected data, navigation systems, adaptive cruise control, and parking assistance can assist drivers in avoiding hazardous situations and increasing driver comfort. Advanced DAS, considered to be the third phase of DAS evolution, are about to become commercialized as Accepted after three revisions by Prof. Dr. Sinz.

Which App? A recommender system of applications in markets

Abstract: Highlights? We propose a recommender system of applications in Markets. ? It uses five recommendations techniques, more than similar actual recommenders. ? The main input for the recommender is the actual usage of each application made by each user. ? We describe the implemented service for monitoring the users interaction. Users face the information overload problem when downloading applications in markets. This is mainly due to (i) the increasing unmanageable number of applications and (ii) the lack of an accurate and fine-grained categorization of the applications in the markets. To address this issue, we present an integrated solution which recommends to the users applications by considering a big amount of information: that is, according to their previously consumed applications, use pattern, tags used to annotate resources and history of ratings. We focus this paper on the service for monitoring users' interaction.

DYNAMICO: A Reference Model for Governing Control Objectives and Context Relevance in Self-Adaptive Software Systems

Abstract: Despite the valuable contributions on self-adaptation, most implemented approaches assume adaptation goals and monitoring infrastructures as non-mutable, thus constraining their applicability to systems whose context awareness is restricted to static monitors. Therefore, separation of concerns, dynamic monitoring, and runtime requirements variability are critical for satisfying system goals under highly changing environments. In this chapter we present DYNAMICO, a reference model for engineering adaptive software that helps guaranteeing the coherence of (i) adaptation mechanisms with respect to changes in adaptation goals; and (ii) monitoring mechanisms with respect to changes in both adaptation goals and adaptation mechanisms. DYNAMICO improves the engineering of self-adaptive systems by addressing (i) the management of adaptation properties and goals as control objectives; (ii) the separation of concerns among feedback loops required to address control objectives over time; and (iii) the management of dynamic context as an independent control function to preserve context-awareness in the adaptation mechanism.

Smart tourism: State of the art and literature review for the last six years

Abstract: In the modern era, the tourism sector has grown to be one of the dominant sectors globally while technology continues to evolve. These facts have given birth to the “Smart Tourism” concept which can be characterized as a progression from traditional tourism. In order to realize an actual Smart Tourism experience, the proper services need to be delivered to the right user at the right time with the best possible way. During the last six years, there has been a significant amount of research in the Smart Tourism field which, to the best of our knowledge, have not yet been presented in a thorough literature review. In this paper, after carefully reviewing a wide number of papers, we have managed to identify the most commonly used approaches and basic concepts in the Smart Tourism sector and present them in detail along with the papers that focus on them. In this study, “key concepts” include: Privacy Preserving, Context Awareness, Cultural Heritage, Recommender Systems, Social Media, Internet of Things, User Experience, Real Time, User Modeling, Augmented Reality and Big Data. At the same time, major Smart Tourism challenges are presented so as to lay the foundations for future researches in the field.