Context awareness

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

Digital libraries' support for the user's 'information journey'

Abstract: The temporal elements of users' information requirements are a continually confounding aspect of digital library design. No sooner have users' needs been identified and supported than they change. This paper evaluates the changing information requirements of users through their 'information journey' in two different domains (health and academia). In-depth analysis of findings from interviews, focus groups and observations of 150 users have identified three stages to this journey: information initiation, facilitation (or gathering) and interpretation. The study shows that, although digital libraries are supporting aspects of users' information facilitation, there are still requirements for them to better support users' overall information work in context. Users are poorly supported in the initiation phase, as they recognize their information needs, especially with regard to resource awareness; in this context, interactive press-alerts are discussed. Some users (especially clinicians and patients) also require support in the interpretation of information, both satisfying themselves that the information is trustworthy and understanding what it means for a particular individual.

The context fabric: an infrastructure for context-aware computing

Abstract: Despite many sensor, hardware, networking, and software advances, it is still quite difficult to build effective and reliable context-aware applications. We propose to build a context infrastructure that provides three things to simplify the task of building context-aware applications: a context data store for modeling, storing, and distributing context data; a context specification language for declaratively stating and processing context needs; and protection mechanisms for safeguarding privacy needs.

Method to enhance user interface and target applications based on context awareness

Abstract: A method ( 100 ) to enhance user interface and target applications based on context awareness can include tracking ( 102 ) the number of times an event occurs during a given time, tracking ( 104 ) the time between user initiated events, generating ( 112 ) a pattern from the tracking steps, associating ( 113 ) the pattern with a user profile, and configuring ( 116 ) the user interface and the operation of an application based on the user profile. The tracking steps can track usage of the user interface at different times, dates, locations or in different environments or contexts as detected by changes in time of day, date, location, environmental input, user habit, or user application. The pattern can optionally be generated ( 114 ) dynamically corresponding with changes in the user profile. In this regard, the method can dynamically adapt ( 118 ) configurable options based on a detected change in context.

Social temporal collaborative ranking for context aware movie recommendation

Abstract: Most existing collaborative filtering models only consider the use of user feedback (e.g., ratings) and meta data (e.g., content, demographics). However, in most real world recommender systems, context information, such as time and social networks, are also very important factors that could be considered in order to produce more accurate recommendations. In this work, we address several challenges for the context aware movie recommendation tasks in CAMRa 2010: (1) how to combine multiple heterogeneous forms of user feedbackq (2) how to cope with dynamic user and item characteristicsq (3) how to capture and utilize social connections among usersq For the first challenge, we propose a novel ranking based matrix factorization model to aggregate explicit and implicit user feedback. For the second challenge, we extend this model to a sequential matrix factorization model to enable time-aware parametrization. Finally, we introduce a network regularization function to constrain user parameters based on social connections. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study that investigates the collective modeling of social and temporal dynamics. Experiments on the CAMRa 2010 dataset demonstrated clear improvements over many baselines.

Using Annotation Services in a Ubiquitous Jigsaw Cooperative Learning Environment.

Abstract: This study describes the development of a ubiquitous cooperative learning environment using proposed annotation services, wireless communication devices, and the Jigsaw method of cooperative learning. The purpose of the study is to investigate the potential benefits of studying digital course materials with embedded annotations. The SQ3R study method is introduced during the individual study phase of a series of Jigsaw learning activities, enabling students to access and familiarize themselves with course content. In this phase, learners use the SQ3R method to enhance the quality of their annotations. It is noted that during this phase, individual students worked in separate locations. After the individual study phase, an expert group meeting process refines the annotations made by student experts and then the annotations discussed are provided to all members of the Jigsaw group during the group meeting phase. Importantly, annotations from different levels of literal meaning and connotation are assigned to different learners to help the group members develop a greater sense of context awareness of the different aspects of the topics under study. Analysis of data collected from questionnaires given to participants at the end of the study indicates that the proposed annotation services using handheld devices can enhance students' learning potential. The results also indicate the suitability and practicality of annotation services in an ubiquitous Jigsaw cooperative learning environment.