Taskforce on Context-Aware Computing

Funded by ARC Research Network on Enterprise Information Infrastructure (EII)

Taskforce Aims & Scope:

The principal aims and objectives of this taskforce are as follows:

• provide a focal point for bringing together research and researchers in Australia working in the area of context-awareness in pervasive computing;

• provide a bridge to foster and enable collaboration between international research groups, Australian researchers and potential industry partners;

• promote Australian research in this area through publications, focused workshops and web presence;

• facilitate research collaboration through the identification of research synergies;

• develop materials that will be a useful resource for teaching/learning in this area for postgraduate and PhD? scholars as well as researchers who want to begin work in context-awareness;

• identify and publish a comprehensive enumeration of open research issues and future directions for the area - which will be a definitive roadmap for future research.

Context-Aware Computing: An Overview:

Recent developments in computer hardware, software, networking and sensor technologies are making possible a class of systems called context-aware pervasive systems, or in short, context-aware systems. These systems are aware of not only the computational environment, but also, importantly, of the physical environment, of human users, places, locations and things, can respond intelligently to such context information, and might be ubiquitous (not only on users but situated in the environment).

Tremendous opportunities and challenges reside in implementing and organizing such context aware systems on different scales, distribution, and intelligence, ranging from context-aware mobile phones that know what to do with incoming calls, context-aware printing, context aware enterprises that respond with agility to an understanding of physical circumstances, context-aware toys that interacts with children with understanding, context-aware bookshops that interact with personalised interested users, context-aware parking areas that tell drivers where to go, to context-aware road intersections that warn drivers of dangerous situations. We can envision a proliferation of such systems in different walks of life.

The semantics and definition of what constitutes “context” has been widely discussed in the literature. The question that faces the pervasive computing community is no longer “what is context awareness”, but rather the challenge of enabling smart, proactive applications, which are indeed aware of their context and are capable of verifying and validating that context. This awareness is recognized as essential underpinning for realizing the true potential of pervasive computing. While the general need for context-awareness has been widely accepted, there are many open issues and challenges that need to be addressed in the move towards enabling the next generation of “smart” pervasive computing applications:

• general principles and paradigms that govern the assembly of such systems;

• techniques and models of the information, structure and run-time behaviour of such systems;

• an identification of the classes of such systems, each with their specific design patterns, models, applicable techniques, and design;

• principles and tailored methodologies for engineering context-awareness;

• general methods for acquiring, modeling, querying [12] and making sense of context information for such systems, with an involvement (and possible interaction) of data analysis techniques and ontologies;

• the reliability of such systems given that they need to take action proactively;

• the performance of such systems given that they need to be timely in acting;

• effective models of user interaction with such systems, including their update, improvements over time, and maintenance and the development of query languages;

• enabling proactivity in such systems through learning and reasoning;

• integration with the services computing paradigm for the provision of context as a service to a wide range of applications.