2008.10.07 | Dorthe Haagen Nielsen

Title: On Context Awareness in Ubiquitous Computing

Abstract
This dissertation contributes to the young ?eld of ubiquitous computing, a so-called third wave of computing expected to succeed the current Internet era. Theparadigm of ubiquitous computing calls for distributing the computation power among the people and objects in the human environment by embedding tiny, sometimes invisible, networked computers into the items of everyday life, so that(i) some of the interactions we engage in on a quotidian basis get redesigned as interactions with networked data-processing systems available everywhere, and (ii) the resulting networks of computers autonomously monitor and control themselves and the environment.

In particular, the concept unifying the contributions of this dissertation is one of the central aspects in ubiquitous computing, context awareness —a paradigm calling for the tiny ubiquitous computers to sense the change in their computational surroundingsand dynamically adapt their behaviour to this environmental change. The scienti?c contributions of this dissertation are of both a theoretical and a practical nature, and lie within a number of areas of computing in context: sensing context (speci?cally, sensing location), discovery of context in large ubiquitous environments (a task known as service discovery), modelling and veri?cation of context-aware systems, and the porting of traditional security techniques (speci?cally, access-control
lists) to work over such mobile, dynamic systems.