According to a recent definition by Dey and Abowd, context is any information that can be used to characterize the situation of an entity. An entity is a person, place or object that is considered relevant to the interaction between a user and an application, including the user and the application themselves. A system is context-aware if it uses context to provide relevant information and/or se...

Transportation is considered as one of the main human needs in any country for macro-level planning. Due to increased production of vehicles, problems and issues associated with transportation systems have been taken on wider dimensions. Thanks to rapid technological developments, Vehicular Ad-hoc Networks (VANETs) have been used to provide effective opportunities for enhancing the safety of ro...

Our approach towards context awareness is to retrieve contextual information by augmenting our daily life objects (like a chair, a mirror etc.) with sensing capabilities. We call such artefacts sentient artefacts. To avoid developing dedicated context-aware application integrating these artefacts, there is a need for a generic computing platform that can assist application programmers to develo...

In ubiquitous computing systems it is important for applications to obtain context information and adapt their behavior according to context information. For a ubiquitous application to obtain and use context information, it is necessary to provide basic services to discover proper context providers and exchange/store/infer from context information. Moreover, when providing such services, non-f...

Context-Aware applications adapt their behaviour to the current situation of the user. This information, for instance user location and user availability, is called context information. Context is delivered by distributed context sources that need to be discovered before they can be used to retrieve context. Currently, multiple context discovery mechanisms exist, exhibiting heterogeneous capabi...

John entered his office. John left his office. The order of these updates to a context-aware system is important to reflect the state in the real world. Context information obtained by sensor systems requires consistency concepts which reflect the chronological ordering in which context information has been captured. This paper introduces a consistency concept which allows to express the orderi...

Computer understanding of human social interactions is a challenging topic in the field of human computing due to its multi-party dynamic nature and multimodal characteristics. Context plays an essential role in the understanding of human behaviors during group interactions. This paper presents a novel Event Based Dynamic Context Model to represent hierarchical interaction context and solve the...

This paper presents the GeoSphereSearch engine for contextaware geographic queries on the Web. It facilitates the formulation of geographic queries and the visual presentation of discrete or aggregated query results in an intuitive manner. In contrast to other approaches it does not assign geographic footprints to documents, but considers context-aware geographic information on the fly, allowin...

In order to enable proactiveness in applications and services, inferences about likely future contexts are needed. This task, which is often referred to as context prediction, has not been properly addressed in the literature. We define the different components of context awareness from data acquisition to prediction. Some mathematical principles of making predictions, alongside with technical ...

Context-awareness can greatly enhance the usability of mobile devices by making it possible for users to continue with other activities without having to pay too much attention to the device. At the same time contextaware applications can provide timely support for user activities by responding to changes in the user’s state and acting accordingly. We describe our work on developing a generic c...