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Year Three
TASK 2:
Framework for
Context-Following in the SmartHome
2.1 Summary
This research looks at
producing the infrastructure necessary for providing a truly seamless
information environment supporting the notion of context. Context can be
thought of as the combination of information about:
1. The environment (e.g. the home),
2. The person,
3. "Stationary" devices (e.g. the lights, A/V equip., etc.), and
4. Interfaces (e.g. voice, tablet, cell phone, etc.).
2.2 Background
This Task will research one
of the most fundamental issues in Ubiquitous (Pervasive) Computing:
context following. In a truly pervasive environment, a mobile user should
not have to move an application between devices as the user moves between
them. Today, not only is it impossible to achieve such seamless
"application movement", devices themselves do not cooperate in achieving
continuity of experience.
2.3 Objective
This Task will create a
context-following platform consisting of a back-end database, a
context-following engine and a rule-system for maintaining applications
across multiple devices.
Specifically:
• The context manager will
integrate a device database, a user-profile and application
characteristics.
• A mobile user will simply move between two different device-clusters and
have the current application move seamlessly between. For example, a user
might be receiving multimedia content while also monitoring a child via a
video-monitor. If the user moves from her desktop to the kitchen, which
happens to have a speaker and a web-tablet, then the entire application
moves along.
One outcome will be a development kit that programmers can use to build
such applications.