Ten views to context awareness

Summary form only given. Context awareness has been central to ubiquitous computing since the beginning. Thousands of systems with context aware features have been realized in the labs world wide. The influx of mobile devices and the domestication of the WWW have given us great platforms to take context aware systems into the wild. However, commercial systems have so far been mostly limited to basic types of context, such as location. Higher level context awareness (e.g. socially aware software that can gracefully coexist with humans) still seems an elusive goal. Why is this so? By definition, context aware systems try to make sense of the situations around them. In pervasive computing, these situations take place among people. To successfully participate in human lives, context aware systems should develop at least rudimentary understanding of the world. Otherwise, they are doomed to fail, in rich and varied ways. Fortunately partial successes are attainable in more limited domains. This talk explores the quest for pervasive context awareness from multiple viewpoints, drawing examples from existing and upcoming research and commercial offerings. It proposes some principles for successful solutions and tried and true recipes for failure.