A software development framework for context-aware systems

The beginning of the new century has been characterised by the miniaturisation and accessibility of electronics, which has enabled its widespread usage around the world. This technological background is progressively materialising the future of the remainder of the century, where industry-based societies have been moving towards information-based societies. Information from users and their environment is now pervasively available, and many new research areas have born in order to shape the potential of such advancements. Particularly, context-aware computing is at the core of many areas such as Intelligent Environments, Ambient Intelligence, Ambient Assisted Living or Pervasive Computing. Embedding contextual awareness into computers promises a fundamental enhancement in the interaction between computers and humans. While traditional computers require explicit commands in order to operate, contextually aware computers could also use information from the background and the users to provide services according to the situation. But embedding this contextual awareness has many unresolved challenges. The area of context-aware computing has attracted the interest of many researchers that have presented different approaches to solve particular aspects on the implementation of this technology. The great corpus of research in this direction indicates that context-aware systems have different requirements than those of traditional computing. Approaches for developing context-aware systems are typically scattered or do not present compatibility with other approaches. Existing techniques for creating context-aware systems also do not focus on covering all the different stages of a typical software development life-cycle. The contribution of this thesis is towards the foundation layers of a more holistic approach, that tries to facilitate further research on the best techniques for developing these kinds of systems. The approach presents a framework to support the development not only with methodologies, but with open-source tools that facilitate the implementation of context-aware systems in mobile and stationary platforms

Self-adaptive unobtrusive interactions of mobile computing systems

[EN] In Pervasive Computing environments, people are surrounded by a lot of embedded services. Since pervasive devices, such as mobile devices, have become a key part of our everyday life, they enable users to always be connected to the environment, making demands on one of the most valuable resources of users: human attention. A challenge of the mobile computing systems is regulating the request for users¿ attention. In other words, service interactions should behave in a considerate manner by taking into account the degree to which each service intrudes on the user¿s mind (i.e., the degree of obtrusiveness). The main goal of this paper is to introduce self-adaptive capabilities in mobile computing systems in order to provide non-disturbing interactions. We achieve this by means of an software infrastructure that automatically adapts the service interaction obtrusiveness according to the user¿s context. This infrastructure works from a set of high-level models that define the unobtrusive adaptation behavior and its implication with the interaction resources in a technology-independent way. Our infrastructure has been validated through several experiments to assess its correctness, performance, and the achieved user experience through a user study.This work has been developed with the support of MINECO under the project SMART-ADAPT TIN2013-42981-P, and co-financed by the Generalitat Valenciana under the postdoctoral fellowship APOSTD/2016/042.Gil Pascual, M.; Pelechano Ferragud, V. (2017). Self-adaptive unobtrusive interactions of mobile computing systems. Journal of Ambient Intelligence and Smart Environments. 9(6):659-688. https://doi.org/10.3233/AIS-170463S65968896Aleksy, M., Butter, T., & Schader, M. (2008). Context-Aware Loading for Mobile Applications. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 12-20. doi:10.1007/978-3-540-85693-1_3Y. Bachvarova, B. van Dijk and A. Nijholt, Towards a unified knowledge-based approach to modality choice, in: Proc. Workshop on Multimodal Output Generation (MOG), 2007, pp. 5–15.Barkhuus, L., & Dey, A. (2003). Is Context-Aware Computing Taking Control away from the User? Three Levels of Interactivity Examined. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 149-156. doi:10.1007/978-3-540-39653-6_12Bellotti, V., & Edwards, K. (2001). Intelligibility and Accountability: Human Considerations in Context-Aware Systems. Human–Computer Interaction, 16(2-4), 193-212. doi:10.1207/s15327051hci16234_05D. Benavides, P. Trinidad and A. Ruiz-Cortés, Automated reasoning on feature models, in: Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Advanced Information Systems Engineering, CAiSE’05, Springer-Verlag, Berlin, 2005, pp. 491–503.Bernsen, N. O. (1994). Foundations of multimodal representations: a taxonomy of representational modalities. Interacting with Computers, 6(4), 347-371. doi:10.1016/0953-5438(94)90008-6Bettini, C., Brdiczka, O., Henricksen, K., Indulska, J., Nicklas, D., Ranganathan, A., & Riboni, D. (2010). A survey of context modelling and reasoning techniques. Pervasive and Mobile Computing, 6(2), 161-180. doi:10.1016/j.pmcj.2009.06.002Blumendorf, M., Lehmann, G., & Albayrak, S. (2010). Bridging models and systems at runtime to build adaptive user interfaces. Proceedings of the 2nd ACM SIGCHI symposium on Engineering interactive computing systems - EICS ’10. doi:10.1145/1822018.1822022D.M. Brown, Communicating Design: Developing Web Site Documentation for Design and Planning, 2nd edn, New Riders Press, 2010.J. Bruin, Statistical Analyses Using SPSS, 2011, http://www.ats.ucla.edu/stat/spss/whatstat/whatstat.htm#1sampt.J. Cámara, G. Moreno and D. Garlan, Reasoning about human participation in self-adaptive systems, in: SEAMS 2015, 2015, pp. 146–156.Campbell, A., & Choudhury, T. (2012). From Smart to Cognitive Phones. IEEE Pervasive Computing, 11(3), 7-11. doi:10.1109/mprv.2012.41Y. Cao, M. Theune and A. Nijholt, Modality effects on cognitive load and performance in high-load information presentation, in: Proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces, IUI’09, ACM, New York, 2009, pp. 335–344.Chang, F., & Ren, J. (2007). Validating system properties exhibited in execution traces. Proceedings of the twenty-second IEEE/ACM international conference on Automated software engineering - ASE ’07. doi:10.1145/1321631.1321723H. Chen and J.P. Black, A quantitative approach to non-intrusive computing, in: Mobiquitous’08: Proceedings of the 5th Annual International Conference on Mobile and Ubiquitous Systems, ICST (Institute for Computer Sciences, Social-Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering), ICST, Brussels, 2008, pp. 1–10.Chittaro, L. (2010). Distinctive aspects of mobile interaction and their implications for the design of multimodal interfaces. Journal on Multimodal User Interfaces, 3(3), 157-165. doi:10.1007/s12193-010-0036-2Clerckx, T., Vandervelpen, C., & Coninx, K. (2008). Task-Based Design and Runtime Support for Multimodal User Interface Distribution. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 89-105. doi:10.1007/978-3-540-92698-6_6Cook, D. J., & Das, S. K. (2012). Pervasive computing at scale: Transforming the state of the art. Pervasive and Mobile Computing, 8(1), 22-35. doi:10.1016/j.pmcj.2011.10.004Cornelissen, B., Zaidman, A., van Deursen, A., Moonen, L., & Koschke, R. (2009). A Systematic Survey of Program Comprehension through Dynamic Analysis. IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, 35(5), 684-702. doi:10.1109/tse.2009.28Czarnecki, K. (2004). Generative Software Development. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 321-321. doi:10.1007/978-3-540-28630-1_33M. de Sá, C. Duarte, L. Carriço and T. Reis, Designing mobile multimodal applications, in: Information Science Reference, 2010, pp. 106–136, Chapter 5.C. Duarte and L. Carriço, A conceptual framework for developing adaptive multimodal applications, in: Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces, IUI’06, ACM, New York, 2006, pp. 132–139.Evers, C., Kniewel, R., Geihs, K., & Schmidt, L. (2014). The user in the loop: Enabling user participation for self-adaptive applications. Future Generation Computer Systems, 34, 110-123. doi:10.1016/j.future.2013.12.010Fagin, R., Halpern, J. Y., & Megiddo, N. (1990). A logic for reasoning about probabilities. Information and Computation, 87(1-2), 78-128. doi:10.1016/0890-5401(90)90060-uFerscha, A. (2012). 20 Years Past Weiser: What’s Next? IEEE Pervasive Computing, 11(1), 52-61. doi:10.1109/mprv.2011.78Floch, J., Frà, C., Fricke, R., Geihs, K., Wagner, M., Lorenzo, J., … Scholz, U. (2012). Playing MUSIC - building context-aware and self-adaptive mobile applications. Software: Practice and Experience, 43(3), 359-388. doi:10.1002/spe.2116Gibbs, W. W. (2005). Considerate Computing. Scientific American, 292(1), 54-61. doi:10.1038/scientificamerican0105-54Gil, M., Giner, P., & Pelechano, V. (2011). Personalization for unobtrusive service interaction. Personal and Ubiquitous Computing, 16(5), 543-561. doi:10.1007/s00779-011-0414-0Gil Pascual, M. (s. f.). Adapting Interaction Obtrusiveness: Making Ubiquitous Interactions Less Obnoxious. A Model Driven Engineering approach. doi:10.4995/thesis/10251/31660Haapalainen, E., Kim, S., Forlizzi, J. F., & Dey, A. K. (2010). Psycho-physiological measures for assessing cognitive load. Proceedings of the 12th ACM international conference on Ubiquitous computing - Ubicomp ’10. doi:10.1145/1864349.1864395Hallsteinsen, S., Geihs, K., Paspallis, N., Eliassen, F., Horn, G., Lorenzo, J., … Papadopoulos, G. A. (2012). A development framework and methodology for self-adapting applications in ubiquitous computing environments. Journal of Systems and Software, 85(12), 2840-2859. doi:10.1016/j.jss.2012.07.052Hassenzahl, M. (2004). The Interplay of Beauty, Goodness, and Usability in Interactive Products. Human-Computer Interaction, 19(4), 319-349. doi:10.1207/s15327051hci1904_2Hassenzahl, M., & Tractinsky, N. (2006). User experience - a research agenda. Behaviour & Information Technology, 25(2), 91-97. doi:10.1080/01449290500330331Ho, J., & Intille, S. S. (2005). Using context-aware computing to reduce the perceived burden of interruptions from mobile devices. Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems - CHI ’05. doi:10.1145/1054972.1055100Horvitz, E., Kadie, C., Paek, T., & Hovel, D. (2003). Models of attention in computing and communication. Communications of the ACM, 46(3), 52. doi:10.1145/636772.636798Horvitz, E., Koch, P., Sarin, R., Apacible, J., & Subramani, M. (2005). Bayesphone: Precomputation of Context-Sensitive Policies for Inquiry and Action in Mobile Devices. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 251-260. doi:10.1007/11527886_33Kephart, J. O., & Chess, D. M. (2003). The vision of autonomic computing. Computer, 36(1), 41-50. doi:10.1109/mc.2003.1160055Korpipaa, P., Malm, E.-J., Rantakokko, T., Kyllonen, V., Kela, J., Mantyjarvi, J., … Kansala, I. (2006). Customizing User Interaction in Smart Phones. IEEE Pervasive Computing, 5(3), 82-90. doi:10.1109/mprv.2006.49S. Lemmelä, A. Vetek, K. Mäkelä and D. Trendafilov, Designing and evaluating multimodal interaction for mobile contexts, in: Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Multimodal Interfaces, ICMI’08, ACM, New York, 2008, pp. 265–272.Lim, B. Y. (2010). Improving trust in context-aware applications with intelligibility. Proceedings of the 12th ACM international conference adjunct papers on Ubiquitous computing - Ubicomp ’10. doi:10.1145/1864431.1864491J.-Y. Mao, K. Vredenburg, P.W. Smith and T. Carey, User-centered design methods in practice: A survey of the state of the art, in: Proceedings of the 2001 Conference of the Centre for Advanced Studies on Collaborative Research, CASCON’01, IBM Press, 2001, p. 12.Maoz, S. (2009). Using Model-Based Traces as Runtime Models. Computer, 42(10), 28-36. doi:10.1109/mc.2009.336Mayer, R. E., & Moreno, R. (2003). Nine Ways to Reduce Cognitive Load in Multimedia Learning. Educational Psychologist, 38(1), 43-52. doi:10.1207/s15326985ep3801_6Motti, V. G., & Vanderdonckt, J. (2013). A computational framework for context-aware adaptation of user interfaces. IEEE 7th International Conference on Research Challenges in Information Science (RCIS). doi:10.1109/rcis.2013.6577709R. Murch, Autonomic Computing, IBM Press, 2004.Obrenovic, Z., Abascal, J., & Starcevic, D. (2007). Universal accessibility as a multimodal design issue. Communications of the ACM, 50(5), 83-88. doi:10.1145/1230819.1241668Patterson, D. J., Baker, C., Ding, X., Kaufman, S. J., Liu, K., & Zaldivar, A. (2008). Online everywhere. Proceedings of the 10th international conference on Ubiquitous computing - UbiComp ’08. doi:10.1145/1409635.1409645Pielot, M., de Oliveira, R., Kwak, H., & Oliver, N. (2014). Didn’t you see my message? Proceedings of the 32nd annual ACM conference on Human factors in computing systems - CHI ’14. doi:10.1145/2556288.2556973Poppinga, B., Heuten, W., & Boll, S. (2014). Sensor-Based Identification of Opportune Moments for Triggering Notifications. IEEE Pervasive Computing, 13(1), 22-29. doi:10.1109/mprv.2014.15S. Ramchurn, B. Deitch, M. Thompson, D. De Roure, N. Jennings and M. Luck, Minimising intrusiveness in pervasive computing environments using multi-agent negotiation, in: Mobile and Ubiquitous Systems: Networking and Services, MOBIQUITOUS 2004. The First Annual International Conference on, 2004, pp. 364–371.C. Roda, Human Attention and Its Implications for Human-Computer Interaction, Cambridge University Press, 2011.S. Rosenthal, A.K. Dey and M. Veloso, Using decision-theoretic experience sampling to build personalized mobile phone interruption models, in: Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Pervasive Computing, Pervasive 2011, Springer-Verlag, Berlin, 2011, pp. 170–187.E. Rukzio, K. Leichtenstern and V. Callaghan, An experimental comparison of physical mobile interaction techniques: Touching, pointing and scanning, in: 8th International Conference on Ubiquitous Computing, UbiComp 2006, Orange County, California, 2006.Serral, E., Valderas, P., & Pelechano, V. (2010). Towards the Model Driven Development of context-aware pervasive systems. Pervasive and Mobile Computing, 6(2), 254-280. doi:10.1016/j.pmcj.2009.07.006D. Siewiorek, A. Smailagic, J. Furukawa, A. Krause, N. Moraveji, K. Reiger, J. Shaffer and F.L. Wong, Sensay: A context-aware mobile phone, in: Proceedings of the 7th IEEE International Symposium on Wearable Computers, ISWC’03, IEEE Computer Society, Washington, 2003, p. 248.Tedre, M. (2006). What should be automated? Proceedings of the 1st ACM international workshop on Human-centered multimedia - HCM ’06. doi:10.1145/1178745.1178753M. Valtonen, A.-M. Vainio and J. Vanhala, Proactive and adaptive fuzzy profile control for mobile phones, in: IEEE International Conference on Pervasive Computing and Communications, 2009, PerCom, 2009, pp. 1–3.Vastenburg, M. H., Keyson, D. V., & de Ridder, H. (2007). Considerate home notification systems: a field study of acceptability of notifications in the home. Personal and Ubiquitous Computing, 12(8), 555-566. doi:10.1007/s00779-007-0176-xWarnock, D., McGee-Lennon, M., & Brewster, S. (2011). The Role of Modality in Notification Performance. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 572-588. doi:10.1007/978-3-642-23771-3_43Weiser, M., & Brown, J. S. (1997). The Coming Age of Calm Technology. Beyond Calculation, 75-85. doi:10.1007/978-1-4612-0685-9_6Van Woensel, W., Gil, M., Casteleyn, S., Serral, E., & Pelechano, V. (2013). Adapting the Obtrusiveness of Service Interactions in Dynamically Discovered Environments. Mobile and Ubiquitous Systems: Computing, Networking, and Services, 250-262. doi:10.1007/978-3-642-40238-8_2

Service-oriented Context-aware Framework

Location- and context-aware services are emerging technologies in mobile and desktop environments, however, most of them are difficult to use and do not seem to be beneficial enough. Our research focuses on designing and creating a service-oriented framework that helps location- and context-aware, client-service type application development and use. Location information is combined with other contexts such as the users' history, preferences and disabilities. The framework also handles the spatial model of the environment (e.g. map of a room or a building) as a context. The framework is built on a semantic backend where the ontologies are represented using the OWL description language. The use of ontologies enables the framework to run inference tasks and to easily adapt to new context types. The framework contains a compatibility layer for positioning devices, which hides the technical differences of positioning technologies and enables the combination of location data of various sources

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 a user-centric and multidisciplinary framework for designing context-aware applications

Research into context-aware computing has not sufficiently addressed human and social aspects of design. Existing design frameworks are predominantly software orientated, make little use of cross-disciplinary work, and do not provide an easily transferable structure for cross-application of design principles. To address these problems, this paper proposes a multidisciplinary and user-centred design framework, and two models of context, which derive from conceptualisations within Psychology, Linguistics, and Computer Science. In a study, our framework was found to significantly improve the performance of postgraduate students at identifying the context of the user and application, and the usability issues that arise

AmbieSense: a system and reference architecture for personalised and context-sensitive information services for mobile users

The purpose of AmbieSense is to provide personalised, context-sensitive information to the mobile user. It is about augmenting digital information to physical objects, rooms, and areas. The aim is to provide relevant information to the right user and situation. Digital content is distributed from the surroundings and onto your mobile phone. An ambient information environment is provided by a combination of context tag technology, a software platform to manage and deliver the information, and personal computing devices to which the information is served. This paper describes how the AmbieSense reference architecture has been defined and used in order to deliver information to the mobile citizen at the right time, place and situation. Information is provided via specialist content providers. The application area addresses the information needs of travellers and tourists

CAMMD: Context Aware Mobile Medical Devices

Telemedicine applications on a medical practitioners mobile device should be context-aware. This can vastly improve the effectiveness of mobile applications and is a step towards realising the vision of a ubiquitous telemedicine environment. The nomadic nature of a medical practitioner emphasises location, activity and time as key context-aware elements. An intelligent middleware is needed to effectively interpret and exploit these contextual elements. This paper proposes an agent-based architectural solution called Context-Aware Mobile Medical Devices (CAMMD). This framework can proactively communicate patient records to a portable device based upon the active context of its medical practitioner. An expert system is utilised to cross-reference the context-aware data of location and time against a practitioners work schedule. This proactive distribution of medical data enhances the usability and portability of mobile medical devices. The proposed methodology alleviates constraints on memory storage and enhances user interaction with the handheld device. The framework also improves utilisation of network bandwidth resources. An experimental prototype is presented highlighting the potential of this approach

Integrated context-aware and cloud-based adaptive home screens for android phones

This is the post-print version of this Article. The official published version can be accessed from the link below - Copyright @ 2011 Springer VerlagThe home screen in Android phones is a highly customizable user interface where the users can add and remove widgets and icons for launching applications. This customization is currently done on the mobile device itself and will only create static content. Our work takes the concept of Android home screen [3] one step further and adds flexibility to the user interface by making it context-aware and integrated with the cloud. Overall results indicated that the users have a strong positive bias towards the application and that the adaptation helped them to tailor the device to their needs by using the different context aware mechanisms