2008.11.12 | Karl Klose

Title: "On Context Awareness in Ubiquitous Computing"

Speaker: Doina Bucur

Abstract:
This talk visits the author's PhD dissertation (available online at www.daimi.au.dk/~doina/), submitted on Sept 1 to the University of Aarhus, and entitled "On Context Awareness in Ubiquitous Computing". The thesis contributes to the field of ubiquitous computing, which 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 surroundings and dynamically adapt their behaviour to this environmental change. The scientific contributions in the thesis are of both a theoretical and a practical nature, and lie within anumber of areas of computing in context: sensing context (specifically, sensing location), discovery of context in large ubiquitous environments (a task known as service discovery), modeling and verification of context-aware systems, and the porting of traditional security techniques (specifically, access-control lists) to work over such mobile,dynamic systems.