DOCSLIB.ORG

A Critical Reading of the Scholarly and ICT Industry's Construction Of

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
A Critical Reading of the Scholarly and ICT Industry's Construction Of A Critical Reading of the Scholarly and ICT Industry’s Construction of Ambient Intelligence for Societal Transformation of Europe By Simon Elias Bibri School of Art, Communication and Culture, Malmö University, Sweden Thesis Submitted for Completion of Master of Communication for Development, Malmö University, Sweden June 2012 Supervisor: Ulrika Sjöberg Examiner: Bo Reimer i Abstract Ambient Intelligence (AmI) refers to a vision of the information society where everyday human environments will be permeated by intelligent technology: people will be surrounded and accompanied by intelligent interfaces supported by computing and wireless networking technology that is ubiquitous, embedded in virtually all kinds of everyday objects. These computationally augmented, smart environments - composed of a myriad of invisible, distributed, networked, connected, interactive, and always-on computing devices - are aware of human context; sensitive to people's needs; adaptive to, and anticipatory of, their behavior; personalized to their requirements; and responsive to their emotion and presence, thereby intelligently supporting their daily and social lives by providing limitless services in a seamless and unobtrusive way. The vision of AmI assumes a paradigmatic shift in both computing and society – far-reaching societal implications. The challenge lies in developing AmI forms that acclimatise to societal change and the diversity of European socio-cultural life. Indeed, one of the most fundamental views in the prevailing AmI vision is a radical and technology-driven change to social environments and people’s lives. Research emphasizes the fundamental role the ISTAG, a group of scholars and ICT industry experts, plays in the reproduction of AmI as a positive force for societal change. Therefore, the objective of this study is to carry out a critical reading of the scholarly and ICT industry’s construction of AmI in relation to societal transformation. To achieve this objective, a discourse analytical approach was employed to examine the selected empirical material: three reports published by the ISTAG in 2001, 2003 and 2006. The approach consists of seven stages: (1) surface elements and organizational structure, (2) discursive constructions, (3) social actors, (4) language and rhetoric, (5) framing as power and operation, (6) positioning and legitimation, and (7) ideological viewpoints. The AmI discourse (vision) construction tends to be deterministic, i.e. it assumes that the ‘amization’ of society will lead to radical social transformations, and has an unsophisticated account of how social change occurs. It is also inclined to be rhetorical - it promises revolutionary social changes without really having a holistic strategy for achieving the goal. Moreover, topicalization is accomplished in correspondence with the preferred mental models and social representations. Furthermore, the discourse is exclusionary: many issues (pertaining to trust, social sustainability, human-centred design, healthcare, and community life) are left out with the intention to advance the idea of the eventual societal acceptance of AmI. It additionally plays a role in wider processes of legitimation of social agents and structures on the basis of normative and political reasons, and it offers different subject positions: between ISTAG and Europe and European citizens, and between citizens and ICT designers and producers. Likewise, it plays a major role in constructing the image of social actors – ISTAG, ICT industry, research community and EU – as well as in defining their relations and identities in ways that reallocate roles and reflect new attributes. A great highlight and space is awarded to represent these actors, and their views dominate the reports. They are the prime definer of the represented reality. As to ideological reproduction, the discourse perpetuates power relations, serves the interest of certain stakeholders in European society, and reconstructs ideological claims. This discursive endeavor provides a valuable reference for social researchers or scientists in related research communities. Until now, there has been, to the best of one’s knowledge, no comprehensive discursive research of AmI in relation to societal transformation, more specifically the potential of AmI in modernizing the European social model and in shaping Europe’s future. Keywords: AmI, ICT, AmI vision, AmI discourse, construction, discourse analysis, power, ideology, social transformation, society, citizens, ISTAG, ICT industry, scholarly, European, social, critical, Foucault ii Acknowledgment I would like to acknowledge and express my gratitude for my supervisor Ulrika Sjöberg, Associate Professor of Media and Communication at Malmö University, for her support and encouragement during the course of the project work. Her feedback was always constructive and her guidance kept me on a sound research path while her good nature made working with her a pleasure. iii Table of Contents Acknowledgment .......................................................................................................................... iii Table of Contents .......................................................................................................................... iv Abbreviations................................................................................................................................ vi 1. Introduction............................................................................................................................... 1 1.1. Ambient Intelligence for Societal Transformation of Europe...........................................................1 1.2. Research Problem and Justification......................................................................................................2 1.3. Research Objectives and Questions .....................................................................................................3 1.4. Scope and Limitations .............................................................................................................................4 1.5. Review of Key Concepts.........................................................................................................................5 1.5.1. AmI versus Ubicomp ........................................................................................................ 5 1.5.2. AmI as Discourse and Paradigmatic Shift in Computing and Society.............................. 6 1.5.3. Social Change and Transformation................................................................................. 8 1.5.4. New Technology and Kinds of Society............................................................................ 9 1.6. Structure of the Study .............................................................................................................................9 2. Literature Review.................................................................................................................... 10 2.1. Social Dimensions, Issues and Challenges of AmI (ICT) ...................................................................10 2.1.1. Privacy and Security ..................................................................................................... 10 2.1.2. Technology Invisibility and Autonomy - Loss of Control ................................................ 13 2.1.3. Digital Divide – Technological and Socio-Demographic Gaps ..................................... 14 2.1.4. Design Process as Politics and Philosophy..................................................................... 15 2.1.5. The Social Embeddedness of Technologies ................................................................... 17 2.2. Positioning the Study in Relation to Previous Research...................................................................18 3. Conceptual and Theoretical Framework ................................................................................. 19 3.1. Foucauldian Theory of Discourse and its Relevance to the Study ................................................19 3.2. Discourse and Related Concepts.........................................................................................................19 3.3. The Representation of Knowledge, Episteme and Power/Knowledge........................................20 3.3.1. Socio-Cultural and Historical Situativity of Knowledge................................................. 21 3.3.2. Statements and the Meaningful .................................................................................... 21 3.3.3. Power as Productive, Constraining and Regulating ...................................................... 22 3.4. Power as Control - Mind Control ........................................................................................................23 3.5. The Implication of Power/Knowledge for Truth...............................................................................24 3.6. Subjects and Social Practice................................................................................................................25 3.7. Inter-discursivity......................................................................................................................................26 4. Research Methodology ........................................................................................................... 27 4.1. Discourse Analytical Approach ...........................................................................................................27
Load more

Recommended publications
  • Event and Map Content Personalisation in a Mobile and Context-Aware Environment
    EVENT AND MAP CONTENT PERSONALISATION IN A MOBILE AND CONTEXT-AWARE ENVIRONMENT RALF BIERIG A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements of the Robert Gordon University for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy This research programme was carried out in collaboration with SINTEF Telecom and Informatics April 2008 It takes an awful long time to not write a book. Douglas Adams Abstract Effective methods for information access are of the greatest importance for our modern lives – particularly with respect to handheld devices. Personalisation is one such method which models a user’s characteristics to deliver content more focused to the user’s needs. The emerging area of sophisticated mobile computing devices has started to inspire new forms of personalised systems that include aspects of the person’s contextual environment. This thesis seeks to understand the role of personalisation and context, to evaluate the effectiveness of context for content personalisation and to investigate the event and map content domain for mobile usage. The work presented in this thesis has three parts: The first part is a user experiment on context that investigated the contextual attributes of time, location and interest, with respect to participants’ perception of their usefulness. Results show highly dynamic and interconnected effects of context on participants’ usefulness ratings. In the second part, these results were applied to create a predictive model of context that was related to attribution theory and then combined with an information retrieval score to create a weighted personalisation model. In the third part of this work, the personalisation model was applied in a mobile experiment.
    [Show full text]
  • Human-Computer Interaction 10Th International Conference Jointly With
    Human-Computer Interaction th 10 International Conference jointly with: Symposium on Human Interface (Japan) 2003 5th International Conference on Engineering Psychology and Cognitive Ergonomics 2nd International Conference on Universal Access in Human-Computer Interaction 2003 Final Program 22-27 June 2003 • Crete, Greece In cooperation with: Conference Centre, Creta Maris Hotel Chinese Academy of Sciences Japan Management Association Japan Ergonomics Society Human Interface Society (Japan) Swedish Interdisciplinary Interest Group for Human-Computer Interaction - STIMDI Associación Interacción Persona Ordenador - AIPO (Spain) InternationalGesellschaft für Informatik e.V. - GI (Germany) European Research Consortium for Information and Mathematics - ERCIM HCI www.hcii2003.gr Under the auspices of a distinguished international board of 114 members from 24 countries Conference Sponsors Contacts Table of Contents HCI International 2003 HCI International 2003 HCI International 2003 Welcome Note 2 Institute of Computer Science (ICS) Foundation for Research and Technology - Hellas (FORTH) Conference Registration - Secretariat Foundation for Research Thematic Areas & Program Boards 3 Science and Technology Park of Crete Conference Registration takes place at the Conference Secretariat, located at and Technology - Hellas Heraklion, Crete, GR-71110 the Olympus Hall, Conference Centre Level 0, during the following hours: GREECE Institute of Computer Science Saturday, June 21 14:00 – 20:00 http://www.ics.forth.gr Opening Plenary Session FORTH Tel.:
    [Show full text]
  • City Research Online
    CORE Metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk Provided by City Research Online Goker, A.S., Myrhaug, H., Whitehead, N., Faegri, T.E. & Lech, T.C. (2004). AmbieSense: a system and reference architecture for personalised and context-sensitive information services for mobile users. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 3295, 327 - 338. doi: 10.1007/978-3-540-30473-9_31 <http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-30473-9_31> City Research Online Original citation: Goker, A.S., Myrhaug, H., Whitehead, N., Faegri, T.E. & Lech, T.C. (2004). AmbieSense: a system and reference architecture for personalised and context-sensitive information services for mobile users. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 3295, 327 - 338. doi: 10.1007/978-3- 540-30473-9_31 <http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-30473-9_31> Permanent City Research Online URL: http://openaccess.city.ac.uk/608/ Copyright & reuse City University London has developed City Research Online so that its users may access the research outputs of City University London's staff. Copyright © and Moral Rights for this paper are retained by the individual author(s) and/ or other copyright holders. Users may download and/ or print one copy of any article(s) in City Research Online to facilitate their private study or for non- commercial research. Users may not engage in further distribution of the material or use it for any profit-making activities or any commercial gain. All material in City Research Online is checked for eligibility for copyright before being made available in the live archive. URLs from City Research Online may be freely distributed and linked to from other web pages.
    [Show full text]
  • Jamie Walters
    Distributed Immersive Participation { Realising Multi-Criteria Context- Centric Relationships on an Internet of Things Jamie Walters Distributed Immersive Participation Realising Multi-Criteria Context-Centric Relationships on an Inter- net of Things Jamie Walters Abstract Advances in Internet-of-Things integrate sensors and actuators in every- day items or even people transforming our society at an accelerated pace. This occurs in areas such as agriculture, logistics, transport, healthcare, and smart cities and has created new ways to interact with and experi- ence entertainment, (serious) games, education, etc. Common to these domains is the challenge to realize and maintain complex relations with any object or individual globally, with the requirement for immediacy in maintaining relations of varying complexity. Existing architectures for maintaining relations on the Internet, e.g., DNS and search engines are insufficient in meeting these challenges. Their deficiencies mandate the research presented in this dissertation enabling the maintenance of dynamic and multi-criteria relationships among entities in real-time in an Internet-of-Things while minimizing the overall cost for maintaining such context-centric relationships. A second challenge is the need to represent nearness in context-centric relationships, since solutions need to build on what is closely related. This dissertation shows that the proximity on relations can be used to bring about the scalability of maintaining relationships across the IoT. It successfully demonstrates the concept and feasibility of self-organizing context-centric overlay networks for maintaining scalable and real-time relationships between endpoints co-located with associated physical en- tities. This is complemented by an object model for annotating objects and their relationships as derived and defined over the underpinning context interactions.
    [Show full text]
  • D2.1 Requirements Specification and State of the Art V1.2
    Do-it-Yourself Smart Experiences ITEA 2 project 08005 Requirements specification and state-of-the-art D2.1 Editor: Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, Spain Contributors: Vicente Hernández Díaz, UPM Mario Lopez-Ramos, Thales Guillermo Miranda Álamo, I&IMS Diego Cansado Mansilla, UAH María Ángeles Sanguino González, ATOS Origin Yacine Gharmi-Doudane, ENSIIE Claudio Forliviesi, ALU Marisa Escalante, ESI Security: Public Version: 1.2 Date: December 22, 2009 Number of pages: 81 D2.1 Requirements specification & state of the art V1.2 History Version Date Person, Partner Comment 0.1 07.10.2009 Vicente Hernandez, UPM TOC for WSN. 0.2 12.11.2009 Mario Lopez-Ramos, Thales Global TOC, first iteration. 0.3 13.11.2009 Marisa Escalante, ESI TOC Modification 0.4 13.11.2009 Miguel S. Familiar, UPM TOC Modification and Abstract 0.5 16.11.2009 Diego Casado Mansilla, UAH TOC Modification and UAH contributions 0.6 26.11.2009 Yacine Gharmi-Doudane, ENSIIE TOC Modification 1.0 22.12.2009 Vicente Hernández, UPM 1st Draft for reviewing 1.1 24.04.2010 Vicente Hernández, UPM 2nd Draft for reviewing 1.2 03.06.2010 Mario Lopez-Ramos, Thales Formatting updates Abstract This is the SoA of devices and actuators technologies, capabilities, drawbacks, innovative approaches and challenges that are closely related to DiYSE. Smart environment systems, for achieving its goals, must gather information about objects surroundings by means of sensors and must also be able to make such surroundings evolve to the desired conditions by means of actuators. This document shows present sensors and actuators technologies capabilities related to DiYSE as well as the challenges and requirement specification that DiYSE must meet.
    [Show full text]
  • Ubiquitous Attentiveness – Enabling Context-Aware Mobile Applications and Services
    Ubiquitous Attentiveness – Enabling Context-Aware Mobile Applications and Services Herma van Kranenburg, Alfons Salden, Henk Eertink, Ronald van Eijk, and Johan de Heer Telematica Instituut, Drienerlolaan 5, Enschede, The Netherlands ^+HUPDYDQ.UDQHQEXUJ$OIRQV6DOGHQ+HQN(HUWLQN 5RQDOGYDQ(LMN-RKDQGH+HHU`#WHOLQQO Abstract. We present a concept called ‘ubiquitous attentiveness’: Context in- formation concerning the user and his environment is aggregated, exchanged and constitutes triggers that allow mobile applications and services to react on them and adapt accordingly. Ubiquitous attentiveness is particularly relevant for mobile applications due to the use of positional user context information, such as location and movement. Key aspects foreseen in the realization of ubiq- uitously attentive (wearable) systems are acquiring, interpreting, managing, re- taining and exchanging contextual information. Because various players own this contextual information, we claim in this paper that a federated service con- trol architecture is needed to facilitate ubiquitous attentive services. Such a control architecture must support the necessary intelligent sharing of resources and information, and ensure trust. 1 Introduction Nowadays, our everyday world offers us a heterogeneous environment with multiple network providers, several mobile and wireless technologies, numerous terminals, manifold administrative domains and various application providers. On the other hand millions of users co-exist that all have different interests and priorities. Provid- ers may want to tailor their services to the end-user preferences and available re- sources. In addition, knowledge about situational contexts, such as location, nearby facilities, available resources, and preferences of (other) parties, can be quite benefi- cial in tailoring as well. Hence, there is a clear need for open service architectures that enable these ubiquitous attentive services.
    [Show full text]
  • Establishing Multi-Criteria Contextrelationssupporting Ubiquitous Immersiveparticipation
    International Journal of Ad hoc, Sensor & Ubiquitous Computing (IJASUC) Vol.4, No.2, April 2013 ESTABLISHING MULTI-CRITERIA CONTEXTRELATIONSSUPPORTING UBIQUITOUS IMMERSIVEPARTICIPATION Jamie Waltersand Theo Kanter and Rahim Rahmani Department of Computer and System Sciences Stockholm University, Forum 100Kista, Sweden [email protected], [email protected], [email protected] ABSTRACT Immersive Participationentails massive participatory activities in the Internetengaging people, places and objects. This ispremised on the existence of an Internet of Things infrastructure supporting applications and services with the same richness of experience as the World Wide Web. This in turn presupposes the existence of models for establishing and maintaining context relations. Where these models do exist, they impose a limited interpretation of context relations in the presence of the inherent heterogeneous and dynamic characteristics of the supporting information. In this paper we introduce an approach towards establishing context relations through the use of an improved context relational model permitting a wider, more complete range of application specific scenarios. Additionally, wederive a measure of context proximity that considers the situation, attributes, relations, accuracy and heterogeneity of both the underlying information and the vast array of requirements for metrics supporting application problem domains. KEYWORDS Context-Awareness, Immersive Participation, Context, Context Models, Internet Of Things, Context Proximity, Sensor Information, P2p Context 1 INTRODUCTION Ubiquitous and pervasive driven participatory environments advance the notion of immersion into a dynamic fusion of people, places and things. Rich context information drives the interactions among the underlying collection of connected things. The addition of context information enhances the experience of immersion in, e.g., online gaming and role-playing solutions, social media, virtual learning environments, and geo-caching, etc.
    [Show full text]
  • Feasibility Study and Porting of the Damped Least Square Algorithm on FPGA
    Received August 3, 2020, accepted September 14, 2020, date of publication September 21, 2020, date of current version October 6, 2020. Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/ACCESS.2020.3025367 Feasibility Study and Porting of the Damped Least Square Algorithm on FPGA CARLO SAU 1, (Member, IEEE), TIZIANA FANNI 2, CLAUDIO RUBATTU 2,3, (Member, IEEE), LUCA FANNI2, LUIGI RAFFO1, (Member, IEEE), AND FRANCESCA PALUMBO 2, (Member, IEEE) 1Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering (DIEE), University of Cagliari, 09123 Cagliari, Italy 2Department of Chemistry and Pharmacy, University of Sassari, 07100 Sassari, Italy 3IETR UMR CNRS 6164, INSA Rennes, University of Rennes 1, 35700 Rennes, France Corresponding author: Carlo Sau ([email protected]) This work was supported by the European Union's Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme under Grant 732105. The work of Francesca Palumbo was supported by the University of Sassari through the Fondo di Ateneo per la Ricerca 2019. ABSTRACT Modern embedded computing platforms used within Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) are nowadays leveraging more and more often on heterogeneous computing substrates, such as newest Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) devices. Compared to general purpose platforms, which have a fixed datapath, FPGAs provide designers the possibility of customizing part of the computing infrastructure, to better shape the execution on the application needs/features, and offer high efficiency in terms of timing and power performance, while naturally featuring parallelism. In the context of FPGA-based CPSs, this article has a two fold mission. On the one hand, it presents an analysis of the Damped Least Square (DLS) algorithm for a perspective hardware implementation.
    [Show full text]
  • Introduction Computing
    Required Reading Contextualised & Ambient Introduction Computing Tutorial Research Jörg Cassens Systems Literatur SoSe 2018 Contextualized Computing and Ambient Intelligent Systems SoSe 2018 Jörg Cassens – Introduction 1 / 128 Outline Required Reading Week 1 Academic Literacy: Reading 1 Required Reading Contextualised Week 1 & Ambient Computing Academic Literacy: Reading Tutorial Research 2 Contextualised & Ambient Computing Systems Literatur 3 Tutorial 4 Research Systems SoSe 2018 Jörg Cassens – Introduction 2 / 128 Assignment 2.1: M. Weiser Required Reading Required Reading Week 1 Academic Literacy: Reading Required reading for week 1 Contextualised & Ambient Weiser, M. (1991). The computer for the 21st century. Computing Scientific American, pages 94–104. Tutorial Research The text will be discussed in the tutorial 23.04.2018 Systems Literatur Course readings can be downloaded in the learnweb Every text has a wiki-page in the learnweb Use it to describe the text Use it to link the text to the course Results of the discussion may also be written up SoSe 2018 Jörg Cassens – Introduction 3 / 128 Required Reading Week 1 Academic Literacy: Reading Contextualised & Ambient Computing Academic Literacy: Reading Tutorial ...if needed Research Systems Literatur SoSe 2018 Jörg Cassens – Introduction 4 / 128 General Structure Required Title Reading Week 1 Abstract Academic Literacy: Reading Introduction Contextualised & Ambient Computing Methods Tutorial Analysis Research Design Systems Implementation Literatur Results Evaluation Discussion/Conclusions
    [Show full text]
  • Full Text in DIVA
    Ripples Across The Internet of Things Context Metrics as Vehicles for Relational Self-Organization Jamie Walters Department of Information Technology and Media Mid Sweden University Licentiate Thesis No. 59 Sundsvall, Sweden 2011 Mittuniversitetet Informationsteknologi och medier ISBN 978-91-86694-37-1 SE-851 70 Sundsvall ISNN 1652-8948 SWEDEN Akademisk avhandling som med tillst˚and av Mittuniversitetet framl¨agges till offentlig granskning f¨or avll¨aggande av teknologie licentiatexamen tisdagen den 26 april 2011 i L111, Mittuniversitetet, Holmgatan 10, Sundsvall. c Jamie Walters, March 2011 Tryck: Tryckeriet Mittuniversitetet For Mummy Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning. - Sir Winston Churchill, Nov 10, 1942 iv Abstract The current paradigm shift in computing has placed mobile computation at the cen- tre of focus. Users are now even more connected; demanding everything everywhere services. These services, such as social networking and media, benefit from the avail- ability of context information seamlessly gathered and shared; providing customized and user-centric experiences. The distribution of context information no longer con- forms to the paradigms of the existing Internet with regards to heterogeneity, connec- tivity and availability. This mandates new approaches towards its organization and provisioning in support of dependent applications and services. In response to these developments, the work summarized in this thesis addresses the fundamental problem of presenting context information in organized models as relevant subsets of global information. In approaching this problem, I introduced a dis- tributed collection of context objects that can be arranged into simple relevant subsets called context schemata and presented to applications and services in supporting the realization of context based user experiences.
    [Show full text]
  • Multi Agents for Context Awareness in Ambient Intelligence: a Survey
    International Journal of Engineering Research & Technology (IJERT) ISSN: 2278-0181 Vol. 4 Issue 07, July-2015 Multi Agents for Context Awareness in Ambient Intelligence: A Survey A. B. Karthick Anand Babu, R. Sivakumar, Department of Computer Science, Department of Computer Science, A.V.V.M. Sri Pushpam College(Autonomous) of Bharathidasan A.V.V.M. Sri Pushpam College(Autonomous) of Bharathidasan University,Trichy. University ,Trichy. Abstract : Ambient Intelligence (AmI) systems need the integration minimum processing capability that act as either actuators or of innovative technology and complex environment for better sensors to acquire information or act upon the environment, thus solutions. In this sense, agents and multi-agent systems have changing it. The implementation of AmI requires the support of characteristics such as reactivity, reasoning, pro-activity, tools and technologies such as middleware, frameworks and autonomy, and social abilities which make them appropriate for Multi agents. This technological consideration should be capable developing distributed systems based on Ambient Intelligence. In addition, the utilization of context-aware technologies is an of collecting and interpreting large quantities of data collected important aspect in these developments in order to perceive stimuli from different sources [3]. The agent-oriented paradigm is from the context and react to it autonomously. To the best of our particularly appropriate for implementing services to support knowledge a very small work has been done in Multi Agent based AmI, because agents offer both functional and non-functional approaches for context awareness in Ambient Intelligence. In this properties such as autonomy, reactive reasoning, proactive paper some of the approaches were surveyed and lists of main reasoning, learning and social abilities originated from the field requirements are identified for future research directions in this of Artificial Intelligence that are vital in AmI applications [4].
    [Show full text]
  • Representing and Reasoning About Context in a Mobile Environment
    Representing and Reasoning about Context in a Mobile Environment Marius Mikalsen1 and Anders Kofod-Petersen2 1 SINTEF Telecom and Informatics, 7465 Trondheim, Norway [email protected] 2 Department of Computer and Information Science, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, 7491 Trondheim, Norway [email protected] Abstract. This paper describes an approach to representing contextual informa- tion through a domain independent solution. It, further more, shows how case- based reasoning can be used to reason about user-situations. The solutions described is implemented within a context-aware system support- ing users in an mobile environment. 1 Introduction The users of mobile computers today are bringing an ever increasing amount of compu- tational power and storage along. Most mobile users today are also equipped to access the Internet via a wide array of different carriers. With this movement of the computer from the desktop to the ubiquitous paradigm described by Weiser [1], the computer system should now adapt to the user’s situation, instead of the user adapting to the computer. Situation adaption, or services and products customisation/personalisation, consists of two major components. Some type of contextual information is required, such as information about the user, the user’s environment, etc. However this is not sufficient; some mechanism to reason about this information is also required. When these two components are present, a context-aware system will be able to deliver context-sensitive services to the users. Even though a lot of research has been conducted within context-aware systems, the core term context is not yet a well defined concept.
    [Show full text]