Context-driven agents in computer supported cooperative works

This thesis describes a research project that investigates the level of contextualization needed to successfully build context-driven agents that can manage a cooperative project. Many times in industry, collaborators in a large project may be located vast distances from each other. It is for this reason that management of such projects can often be difficult. The purpose of this research is to design an agent that can take on the role of a project manager (PM) to assist the human project manager. Specifically, this thesis looks to give such project management agents full situational awareness. It is hypothesized that only with situational awareness can an agent successfully act in the role of a project manager. This thesis describes the investigation into the use of Context-Based Reasoning and Contextual Graphs to create an agent with such situational awareness. This thesis shows that with enough situational awareness, an agent will have the ability to successfully take on the role of a project manager. In particular, this thesis looks at a PM-agent that can manage a simulated project to design and construct a small sounding rocket

Context Awareness Framework Based on Contextual Graph

Nowadays computing becomes increasingly mobile and pervasive. One of the important steps in pervasive computing is context awareness. Context-aware pervasive systems rely on information about the context and user preferences to adapt their behavior. However, context-aware applications do not always behave as users desire and can cause users to feel dissatisfied with unexpected actions. To solve these problems, context-aware systems must provide mechanisms to adapt automatically when the context changes significantly. The interesting characteristic of context is its own behaviors which depend on various aspects of the surrounding contexts. This paper uses contextual graphs to solve the problem “the mutual relationships among the contexts.” We describe the most relevant work in this area, as well as ongoing research on developing context-aware system for ubiquitous computing based on contextual graph. The usage of contextual graph in context awareness is expected to make it effective for developers to develop various applications with the need of context reasoning