56,480 research outputs found
Context-awareness for mobile sensing: a survey and future directions
The evolution of smartphones together with increasing computational power have empowered developers to create innovative context-aware applications for recognizing user related social and cognitive activities in any situation and at any location. The existence and awareness of the context provides the capability of being conscious of physical environments or situations around mobile device users. This allows network services to respond proactively and intelligently based on such awareness. The key idea behind context-aware applications is to encourage users to collect, analyze and share local sensory knowledge in the purpose for a large scale community use by creating a smart network. The desired network is capable of making autonomous logical decisions to actuate environmental objects, and also assist individuals. However, many open challenges remain, which are mostly arisen due to the middleware services provided in mobile devices have limited resources in terms of power, memory and bandwidth. Thus, it becomes critically important to study how the drawbacks can be elaborated and resolved, and at the same time better understand the opportunities for the research community to contribute to the context-awareness. To this end, this paper surveys the literature over the period of 1991-2014 from the emerging concepts to applications of context-awareness in mobile platforms by providing up-to-date research and future research directions. Moreover, it points out the challenges faced in this regard and enlighten them by proposing possible solutions
Stigmergy-based modeling to discover urban activity patterns from positioning data
Positioning data offer a remarkable source of information to analyze crowds
urban dynamics. However, discovering urban activity patterns from the emergent
behavior of crowds involves complex system modeling. An alternative approach is
to adopt computational techniques belonging to the emergent paradigm, which
enables self-organization of data and allows adaptive analysis. Specifically,
our approach is based on stigmergy. By using stigmergy each sample position is
associated with a digital pheromone deposit, which progressively evaporates and
aggregates with other deposits according to their spatiotemporal proximity.
Based on this principle, we exploit positioning data to identify high density
areas (hotspots) and characterize their activity over time. This
characterization allows the comparison of dynamics occurring in different days,
providing a similarity measure exploitable by clustering techniques. Thus, we
cluster days according to their activity behavior, discovering unexpected urban
activity patterns. As a case study, we analyze taxi traces in New York City
during 2015
Tourism and the smartphone app: capabilities, emerging practice and scope in the travel domain.
Based on its advanced computing capabilities and ubiquity, the smartphone has rapidly been adopted as a tourism travel tool.With a growing number of users and a wide varietyof applications emerging, the smartphone is fundamentally altering our current use and understanding of the transport network and tourism travel. Based on a review of smartphone apps, this article evaluates the current functionalities used in the domestic tourism travel domain and highlights where the next major developments lie. Then, at a more conceptual level, the article analyses how the smartphone mediates tourism travel and the role it might play in more collaborative and dynamic travel decisions to facilitate sustainable travel. Some emerging research challenges are discussed
Context Trees: Augmenting Geospatial Trajectories with Context
Exposing latent knowledge in geospatial trajectories has the potential to
provide a better understanding of the movements of individuals and groups.
Motivated by such a desire, this work presents the context tree, a new
hierarchical data structure that summarises the context behind user actions in
a single model. We propose a method for context tree construction that augments
geospatial trajectories with land usage data to identify such contexts. Through
evaluation of the construction method and analysis of the properties of
generated context trees, we demonstrate the foundation for understanding and
modelling behaviour afforded. Summarising user contexts into a single data
structure gives easy access to information that would otherwise remain latent,
providing the basis for better understanding and predicting the actions and
behaviours of individuals and groups. Finally, we also present a method for
pruning context trees, for use in applications where it is desirable to reduce
the size of the tree while retaining useful information
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