Summer term 2007

Seminar Context-Aware and Ambient Applications

Prof. Dr. Armin B. Cremers, Prof. Dr. Albrecht Schmidt,

Holger Mügge, Dagmar Kern, Paul Holleis, Julia Kuck, Alexander Goth, Tobias Rho, Daniel Speicher , Pascal Bihler

What are Context-Aware and Ambient Applications?• Applications and Devices that

– (semi-) automatically adapt to the physical and logical environment

– are sensitive and responsive to nearby people or other devices

– perceive the world via a series of (distributed) sensors

Style of this Seminar

• Run like a scientific conference• Dates:

– 10.4.07 – Topic distribution– 24.4.07 – 90sec. Presentations– 5.6.07 – Paper submission deadline

Review time– 13.7.07 – Conference day

Seminar Registration

• By E-Mail or in person• Registration time starts today• Until 14.04.07

And the topics are in detail…

What is context-awareness?A brief history.

How to model location and context? • Basic sensor technologies• Different modeling approaches

– Context– Location

Architectures and middleware for context-aware systems • Context-aware software architectures

– Support distribution in dynamic network topologies– Support context management and context-dependent

adaptations• Context management

– Standardized way to model and reason about context– Interconnect sensors with the system – Enforce privacy policies– …

• Context-Aware Adaptation ( Actuators )– System reconfiguration based on the context (changes)

Indoor and outdoor location sensing • indoor location system

– ActiveBat– ActiveBadges

• Outdoor location system– GALILEO– GPS– GLONASS

• comparison of different indoor and outdoor location sensing approaches

From Context to Situation - Applying Formal Concept Analysis • Present the approach of formal

concept analysis in combination with cluster techniques. First ideas need to be expressed, how a automatic or semi-automatic identification of situations might be used.

Activity and context recognition • The focus of this topic will be

the recognition in smart environments and in wearable computing.

Context-aware communication • This topic is about

to focus the context and location-awareness for divers mobile devices as for example mobile phones.

Programming context-aware applications • Survey of context-aware programming

languages• Compare a range of approaches

– Languages with different characteristics of dynamic scoping (thread-dependent behaviour)

– Rule engine integrations into common object-oriented and functional languages

• Embedded context reasoning

Location and context-aware user interfaces • Special features of this kind of

user interfaces• Developing process (tools,

prototyping, methods, …)

Context-Specific Retrieval of Services using Ontological Description The emergence of mobile devices has enforced the rapid

evolvement of the Mobile Web. While the WWW offers Web Services for users in nearly all situations of every day life, there is a lack of search engines which support the users in finding adequate services. As the service need of mobile users depends on their actual context situation, the consideration of the user context is promising for mobile service discovery.

Seminar topics:• --Web Services platform architecture and SOA• --ontological representation of user and service context• --Web Service discovery and composition• --context-specific discovery

Context-Aware Applications in Smart Buildings • Smart buildings are regular

buildings providing an embedded computational infrastructure: Sensors, displays etc. are integrated into the building matter and form a Smart Environment.

Group Support with Ambient Applications • Wireless networking capabilities

of mobile devices like PDAs or cellphones can support social groups by forming ad-hoc networks and provide distributed applications.

Flexible User Interfaces for Mobile Devices • Display-Resolution, size and

orientation, input patterns etc. can be different from one device to the other or even change during runtime.

• Flexible User Interfaces are designed to cope with those challenges and adapt itself due to the current working environment or user context.

Security and privacy issues in location and context-aware systems • Usually applications are secured by restricting access

rules for users based on their roles and authentication.

• Here, the topic is the idea to take the current user’s location or further context data into account for securing the system.

• Thus, depending on your current situation you might get different access rights to currently relevant

• This could be relevant for example to support mobility on the job or equip guest in large organizations with suitable access.

Autonomous Computing and Emergent Behavior for Ubiquitous Computing Autonomous Computing covers the emergence of complex global

behavior induced by simple local rules on cooperating simple processing units. A well-known example is the game of life.

Ubiquitous Computing covers scenarios where mobile applications behave differently in different contexts and the user's device adapts itself to its environment. Cooperative scenarios are also covered.

This subject asks:• What can Ubiquitous Computing learn from Autonomic Computing? • Can the co-location or context-driven cooperation of multiple devices

evoke complex behavior that emerges from the mutual cooperations?

• How can the potential of spontaneous cooperation between different devices be described and exploited?

ContextL

ContextL is a CLOS extension to provide context-oriented programming in Lisp. Details can be found at http://p-cos.net/research.html.

This subject will mix theoretical and practical studies:

• The basics of the language ContextL shall be investigated and summarized.

• A simple scenario should be implemented to show the benefits and drawbacks of this approach.

Ubiquitous Computing using AmbientTalk AmbientTalk is an experimental

language specific for ubiquitous computing. Details can be found here: http://prog.vub.ac.be/amop/

Topics are:• AmbientTalk shall be investigated

and summarized. • A simple scenario should be

implemented to show the benefits and drawbacks of this approach.

Thank you for your attention • Any questions left?

• Seminar news online:– http://uie.bit.uni-bonn.de/seminar.php

Hinweis auf ein weiteres Seminar

"Seminar über Methoden Statischer Analyse zur Unterstützung der Software Evolution"

wird in den kommenden beiden Wochen vorgestellt.

http://wob.iai.uni-bonn.de/Wob/de/view/class152_id3640.html

Kontakt: Günter Kniesel, Daniel Speicher