Reasoning About Context-Awareness in the Presence of Mobility

Context-awareness is emerging as an important computing paradigm designed to address the special needs of applications that must accommodate or exploit the highly dynamic environments that occur in the presence of physical or logical mobility. A number of formal models are available for reasoning about concurrency. Models designed to capture the specifics of mobility are fewer but still well represented (e.g., Mobile Ambients, π-Calculus, and Mobile UNITY). These models do not, however, provide constructs necessary for explicit modeling of context-aware interactions. This paper builds upon earlier efforts on state-based formal reasoning about mobility and explores the process by which a model such as Mobile UNITY can be transformed to explicitly capture context-awareness. Starting with an ex-amination of the essential features of context-aware systems, this paper explores a range of constructs designed to facilitate a highly decoupled style of programming among context-aware components. The result of this exploration is a model called Context UNITY

Reasoning About Context-Awareness in the Presence of Mobility

Context-awareness is emerging as an important computing paradigm designed to address the special needs of applications that must accommodate or exploit the highly dynamic environments that occur in the presence of physical or logical mobility. A number of formal models are available for reasoning about concurrency. Models designed to capture the specifics of mobility are fewer but still well represented (e.g., Mobile Ambients, π-Calculus, and Mobile UNITY). These models do not, however, provide constructs necessary for explicit modeling of context-aware interactions. This paper builds upon earlier efforts on state-based formal reasoning about mobility and explores the process by which a model such as Mobile UNITY can be transformed to explicitly capture context-awareness. Starting with an ex-amination of the essential features of context-aware systems, this paper explores a range of constructs designed to facilitate a highly decoupled style of programming among context-aware components. The result of this exploration is a model called Context UNITY

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

Context Aware Computing for The Internet of Things: A Survey

As we are moving towards the Internet of Things (IoT), the number of sensors deployed around the world is growing at a rapid pace. Market research has shown a significant growth of sensor deployments over the past decade and has predicted a significant increment of the growth rate in the future. These sensors continuously generate enormous amounts of data. However, in order to add value to raw sensor data we need to understand it. Collection, modelling, reasoning, and distribution of context in relation to sensor data plays critical role in this challenge. Context-aware computing has proven to be successful in understanding sensor data. In this paper, we survey context awareness from an IoT perspective. We present the necessary background by introducing the IoT paradigm and context-aware fundamentals at the beginning. Then we provide an in-depth analysis of context life cycle. We evaluate a subset of projects (50) which represent the majority of research and commercial solutions proposed in the field of context-aware computing conducted over the last decade (2001-2011) based on our own taxonomy. Finally, based on our evaluation, we highlight the lessons to be learnt from the past and some possible directions for future research. The survey addresses a broad range of techniques, methods, models, functionalities, systems, applications, and middleware solutions related to context awareness and IoT. Our goal is not only to analyse, compare and consolidate past research work but also to appreciate their findings and discuss their applicability towards the IoT.Comment: IEEE Communications Surveys & Tutorials Journal, 201

Towards an Efficient Context-Aware System: Problems and Suggestions to Reduce Energy Consumption in Mobile Devices

Looking for optimizing the battery consumption is an open issue, and we think it is feasible if we analyze the battery consumption behavior of a typical context-aware application to reduce context-aware operations at runtime. This analysis is based on different context sensors configurations. Actually existing context-aware approaches are mainly based on collecting and sending context data to external components, without taking into account how expensive are these operations in terms of energy consumption. As a first result of our work in progress, we are proposing a way for reducing the context data publishing. We have designed a testing battery consumption architecture supported by Nokia Energy Profiler tool to verify consumption in different scenarios

Evidences of lay people’s reasoning related to climate change: per country and cross country results

This deliverable is about lay citizens’ reasoning about sustainability, in particular environmental protection and climate change, in various consumption domains, and the relation of this reasoning to the day-to-day lives of the participants. It presents country and cross-country findings from all 18 STAVE trials conducted between May 2011 and February 2012 in all six PACHELBEL partner countries. Analyses demonstrate that participants in the STAVE trials predominantly display a clear awareness that citizen consumption as demonstrated in their everyday practices of energy use, mobility, waste etc. are strongly connected with issues of environmental sustainablility. The STAVE trials also demonstrated that to live sustainably is a daily challenge, and people are often not able to organize their everyday routines in an environmental-friendly manner. Frequently there is a gap between participants’ aspirations and their practical behaviours. Significantly, the group conversations enabled participants to become aware that the self-assessed soundness of their everyday lives in terms of sustainability was at variance from the actual impact of e.g. their energy use or or mobility practices