User intent to support proactivity in a pervasive system

Abstract. In a pervasive system it is essential to understand the intent of the user in order to predict his/her future behaviour. This in turn will help to minimise the user’s administrative overheads and assist the user to achieve his/her goals. The aim of this paper is to present some aspects of how user intent may be handled. It focuses on the architecture supporting the proactive features of the Persist pervasive platform. A formal definition of the task discovery problem in user intent is provided. The use of the discovered task model to predict the user’s next intended task/action is introduced including the way in which user context can assist in the prediction of the user’s intended task/action. 12