This page is an entrance point to the Licentiate thesis of Martin Jonsson, Presented at the Dept. of Computer and Systems Sciences, Stockholm University/KTH, May 2002.

 

 

 

 

Supporting Context Awareness
in
Ubiquitous Service Environments

 

 

Licentiate Thesis

 

By

 

Martin Jonsson

The FUSE research group

Department of Computer and Systems Sciences

Stockholm University and Royal Institute of Technology

Forum 100, 164 40 Kista

 

martinj@dsv.su.se

 

 

Abstract

Computing devices are becoming wireless, increasingly smaller and embedded into other artefacts. Some of them are mobile while others are built into the environment. The novel technologies are also becoming more dependent of communication with other computing devices over different kinds of networks. These interconnected devices constitute locally distributed computing environments that will set new requirements on the design of software systems.  

A framework, which provides means to model and design this kind of computing environments, is introduced under the notion of Ubiquitous Service Environments, describing locally distributed systems with interconnected software services.

Two specific problems are addressed for this kind of computing environments: Firstly how to acquire and distribute information about a user’s context in order to enable new kinds of application behaviours. The other problem that is being addressed concerns how to create means for context aware service discovery, e.g. how a mobile computing device can discover computational resources in the vicinity. 

The Context Shadow system is presented, which makes it possible for services to ask questions about a person’s current context, and specifically about the computational services that are relevant to that context. The system has also been extended with a sensor platform in order to support the deployment of sensors used to collect context information.

 

 

 

Thesis Documents

Main document: Supporting Context Awareness in Ubiquitous Service Environments.

 

 

List of papers included in the thesis

 

Paper A: Context Shadow: An Infrastructure for Context Aware Computing
Submitted for review based on invitation to the journal Applied Artificial Intelligence.
A shorter version of this paper was presented at the workshop Artificial Intelligence in Mobile Systems (AIMS) in conjunction with ECAI 2002, July 22nd, 2002. Lyon, France.

 

Paper B: Building extendable sensor infrastructures for pervasive computing environments
Technical Report 2002-019, Dept. of Computer and Systems Sciences, Stockholm University/KTH.

 

Paper C: A Ubiquitous Service Environment with Active Documents for Teamwork Support
Presented at the Ubicomp 2001 Conference, Atlanta, Georgia, September 2001.