Context awareness for collaborative learning with uncertainty management

Postprint (published version

Handling Location Uncertainty in Event Driven Experimentation

Singapore National Research Foundation under International Research Centre @ Singapore Funding Initiativ

Context awareness and uncertainty in collocated collaborative systems

Context awareness is a necessary feature for mobile collocated collaborative learning. In this paper we describe how requirements for contextaware cooperative learning activities are derived from the jigsaw technique augmented with the use of mobile devices, applications to support the activities of groups, and tools to provide context-awareness to detect group formation. The emergence of groups is detected based on the location of the students within the classroom, but this information has to be careful filtered to evaluate the degree of uncertainty and protect from erroneous estimations. A three-phase strategy to manage uncertainty by identifying possible sources of uncertainty, representing uncertain information, and determining how to proceed under the presence of uncertainty is used for this propose. These requirements are validated and confirmed in experiments with students working together in the classroom, measuring neutral or positive effects on learning and the usefulness of introducing mobile devices, group support applications, and context awareness. The ratio of unwanted interruptions to users made by the system is used to evaluate the utility of the system. Results show that by managing uncertainty, location estimation becomes more reliable, thus increasing the usefulness of the learning application.Postprint (published version

Investigation of a hierarchical context-aware architecture for rule-based customisation of mobile computing service

The continuous technical progress in mobile device built-in modules and embedded sensing techniques creates opportunities for context-aware mobile applications. The context-aware computing paradigm exploits the relevant context as implicit input to characterise the user and physical environment and provide a computing service customised to the contextual situation. However, heterogeneity in techniques, complexity of contextual situation, and gap between raw sensor data and usable context keep the techniques from truly integration for extensive use. Studies in this area mainly focus on feasibility demonstration of the emerging techniques, and they lack general architecture support and appropriate service customisation strategy. This investigation aims to provide general system architecture and technical approaches to deal with the heterogeneity problem and efficiently utilise the dynamic context towards proactive computing service that is customised to the contextual situation. The main efforts of this investigation are the approaches to gathering, handling, and utilising the dynamic context information in an efficient way and the decision making and optimisation methods for computing service customisation. In brief, the highlights of this thesis cover the following aspects: (1) a hierarchical context-aware computing architecture supporting interoperable distribution and further use of context; (2) an in-depth analysis and classification of context and the corresponding context acquisition methods; (3) context modelling and context data representation for efficient and interoperable use of context; (4) a rule-based service customisation strategy with a rule generation mechanism to supervise the service customisation. In addition, feasibility demonstration of the proposed system and contribution justification of this investigation are conducted through case studies and prototype implementations. One case study uses mobile built-in sensing techniques to improve the usability and efficiency of mobile applications constrained by resource limitation, and the other employs the mobile terminal and embedded sensing techniques to predict users’ expectations for home facility automatic control. Results demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed context handling architecture and service customisation methods. It shows great potential for employing the context of the computing environment for context-aware adaptation in pervasive and mobile applications but also indicates some underlying problems for further study