Context-aware systems

Context awareness aims at adapting the service and application behavior to the user’s current context, such as adapting content delivery to the current location, routing calls based on the availability (expressed in the current presence information), or even news delivery based on the user’s current affective state (e.g., not receiving bad news when in a bad mood). In this, I’ve been working on methods and techniques to discover such information throughout the network and provision the information appropriately. The focus here has been on distributed context provisioning, since I strongly believe that centralized methods do not suffice, in particular for scenarios that consider widely dispersed context information.
The considered techniques involve SIP (events) and Web Services for provisioning of context information. Further, I’ve been working on architectural, technological, and business impacts of context awareness. The work on context awareness has been an orchestrated effort in order to enable a view on the problem space from a networking and application point of view.