Towards a multidisciplinary user-centric design framework for context-aware applications

The primary aim of this article is to review and merge theories of context within linguistics, computer science, and psychology, to propose a multidisciplinary model of context that would facilitate application developers in developing richer descriptions or scenarios of how a context-aware device may be used in various dynamic mobile settings. More specifically, the aim is to:1. Investigate different viewpoints of context within linguistics, computer science, and psychology, to develop summary condensed models for each discipline. 2. Investigate the impact of contrasting viewpoints on the usability of context-aware applications. 3. Investigate the extent to which single-discipline models can be merged and the benefits and insightfulness of a merged model for designing mobile computers. 4. Investigate the extent to which a proposed multidisciplinary modelcan be applied to specific applications of context-aware computing

Context Aware Adaptable Applications - A global approach

Actual applications (mostly component based) requirements cannot be expressed without a ubiquitous and mobile part for end-users as well as for M2M applications (Machine to Machine). Such an evolution implies context management in order to evaluate the consequences of the mobility and corresponding mechanisms to adapt or to be adapted to the new environment. Applications are then qualified as context aware applications. This first part of this paper presents an overview of context and its management by application adaptation. This part starts by a definition and proposes a model for the context. It also presents various techniques to adapt applications to the context: from self-adaptation to supervised approached. The second part is an overview of architectures for adaptable applications. It focuses on platforms based solutions and shows information flows between application, platform and context. Finally it makes a synthesis proposition with a platform for adaptable context-aware applications called Kalimucho. Then we present implementations tools for software components and a dataflow models in order to implement the Kalimucho platform

A New Approach for Quality Management in Pervasive Computing Environments

This paper provides an extension of MDA called Context-aware Quality Model Driven Architecture (CQ-MDA) which can be used for quality control in pervasive computing environments. The proposed CQ-MDA approach based on ContextualArchRQMM (Contextual ARCHitecture Quality Requirement MetaModel), being an extension to the MDA, allows for considering quality and resources-awareness while conducting the design process. The contributions of this paper are a meta-model for architecture quality control of context-aware applications and a model driven approach to separate architecture concerns from context and quality concerns and to configure reconfigurable software architectures of distributed systems. To demonstrate the utility of our approach, we use a videoconference system.Comment: 10 pages, 10 Figures, Oral Presentation in ECSA 201

A model for context awareness for mobile applications using multiple-input sources

Context-aware computing enables mobile applications to discover and benefit from valuable context information, such as user location, time of day and current activity. However, determining the users’ context throughout their daily activities is one of the main challenges of context-aware computing. With the increasing number of built-in mobile sensors and other input sources, existing context models do not effectively handle context information related to personal user context. The objective of this research was to develop an improved context-aware model to support the context awareness needs of mobile applications. An existing context-aware model was selected as the most complete model to use as a basis for the proposed model to support context awareness in mobile applications. The existing context-aware model was modified to address the shortcomings of existing models in dealing with context information related to personal user context. The proposed model supports four different context dimensions, namely Physical, User Activity, Health and User Preferences. A prototype, called CoPro was developed, based on the proposed model, to demonstrate the effectiveness of the model. Several experiments were designed and conducted to determine if CoPro was effective, reliable and capable. CoPro was considered effective as it produced low-level context as well as inferred context. The reliability of the model was confirmed by evaluating CoPro using Quality of Context (QoC) metrics such as Accuracy, Freshness, Certainty and Completeness. CoPro was also found to be capable of dealing with the limitations of the mobile computing platform such as limited processing power. The research determined that the proposed context-aware model can be used to successfully support context awareness in mobile applications. Design recommendations were proposed and future work will involve converting the CoPro prototype into middleware in the form of an API to provide easier access to context awareness support in mobile applications

A new business model and architecture for context-aware applications provisioning in the cloud

Context-aware applications are seen as one of the killer application categories of the future, due to their ability to offer personalized services by adapting their behavior according to the users\u27 needs and changing situation. Context-aware applications rely in their operation on a complex set of functionalities (i.e. context-awareness substrates). In order to facilitate the development of novel context-aware applications and achieve efficiency in terms of resource utilization, there is a need for a unified, openly-accessible, scalable context management platform that enables the dynamic discovery, composition, and reuse of context-awareness substrates by various context-aware applications. The lack of such platform is a major impediment to the fast and resource efficient development of context aware applications. In this paper, we propose a novel virtualized context management platform in the cloud, in which a shared pool of virtualized context-awareness substrates can be offered by different providers, and leased on demand. Those substrates can be dynamically discovered and composed to enable fast and cost-effective development of a variety of context-aware applications. The proposed platform relies on a new business model which introduces the sensors substrate provider and the broker as new roles in the traditional cloud business model. A detailed software architecture and preliminary prototype implementation are also presented. © 2014 IEEE

Modeling Adaptive Behaviors in Context UNITY

Context-aware computing refers to a paradigm in which applications sense aspects of the environment and use this information to adjust their behavior in response to changing circumstances. In this paper, we present a formal model and notation (Context UNITY) for expressing quintessential aspects of context-aware computations; existential quantification, for instance, proves to be highly effective in capturing the notion of discovery in open systems. Furthermore, Context UNITY treats context in a manner that is relative to the specific needs of an individual application and promotes an approach to context maintenance that is transparent to the ap-plication. In this paper, we construct the model from first principles, introduce its proof logic, and demonstrate how the model can be used as an effective abstraction tool for context-aware applications and middleware

Algorithms for efficient symbolic detection of faults in context-aware applications.

Context-aware and adaptive applications running on mobile devices pose new challenges for the verification community. Current verification techniques are tailored for different domains (mostly hardware) and the kind of faults that are typical of applications running on mobile devices are difficult (or impossible) to encode using the patterns of ldquotraditionalrdquo verification domains. In this paper we present how techniques similar to the ones used in symbolic model checking can be applied to the verification of context-aware and adaptive applications. More in detail, we show how a model of a context-aware application can be encoded by means of ordered binary decision diagrams and we introduce symbolic algorithms for the verification of a number of properties