Happy New Year!
A few days ago, we celebrated the first toUrCAmI (#tourcami11) workshop in the framework of the V International Symposium (now, Conference) on Ubiquitous Computing and Ambient Intelligence 2011. The workshop took place on December 9th 2011 in the Mexican Riviera Maya.
We had the very interesting presentations we had previously announced in the Workshop Programme. As soon as possible, I would upload and make the presentations available. After the presentation session we had a very interesting discussion about hot topics in Contextual Computing in general. These are the most relevant issues we talked about:
- Real time massive data management:
- It is all about data management and processing
- Travellers profile is also about management of massive amounts of data
- Exploitation vs. Exploration of travellers profile
- Not critical mass as a research group:
- There are some location-based products running on mobile devices.
- Context-Awareness is about going one step further,…, and there are very few context-aware prototypes running on devices… devices
- However, for example Google works and is available to a huge amount of users at all times.
- Is it then something about critical mass of users, and developers? Why is it that context aware applications still don’t exist to the everyday user? And what can we do to solve this?
- Why don’t we have more things like Google?
- How can we co-ordinate an action on context-aware research, with all different disciplines involved
- Apps: The platform for which or in which we develop the famous apps is not a problem anymore, since there are same apps available in different platforms. The hot topic in terms of apps are the following:
- Server vs. local computation? HTML5?
- Not dependant on different operating systems
- We can have iOS or Android, it is more expensive to develop iOS
- This is about critical mass as well
- Challenge Cloud Computing
- How can research help in this innovative and continuously changing world of apps? What can research on context awareness do in the world of apps?
- What is relevant?
- How do we identify relevant information?
- How do we model things? How can we identify relevant information?
- The issue is to filter properly and to deliver services and accurate information, how can context contribute to that?
- What is really structural?
- How can we take advantage of context-based information to perform a local search with a mobile device? We know the theory, but how can we bring this into real practise?
- Different parts of context
- We have:
- The Personal Sphere, i.e. the part of context that is more static and that we take with us when we are travelling, the Environment.
- The Environmental Sphere, i.e. the part of context that is more dynamic and that changes with location. Usually, this also implies a change on the services available in the environment.
- The Tourism Services that are available at a particular environment, and that have to be served to travellers
- We have:
- How do we make all of this interact somehow? Is there a way to model all of this information and have it processed in a way that produces something useful and meaningful to travellers? On real time?
- This is linked to the real time massive data management topic that I referred to earlier.
- Emotions
- Experiences
- Quality of Service measure:
- Try to cover basic expectations on context-aware services.
- Connectivity
- This is also about critical mass? But in this case we have a lot of people connected to sources of information, so it is not about critical mass, we have already a critical mass connected …
- We are tending to an always connected type of device, so, how do we solve the energy consumption problem? What to do with the phone when it’s not doing anything?
- Cloud computing seems to be a trend …
- Autonomy of devices
- Convergence:
- Of disciplines: how to bring together people working on totally different, but related fields? E.g., psychology, neuroscience, tourism, ICT, etc.
- Of technologies, that emerge in a new philosophy of information consumption and production: Social Networking, etc.
- Sustainability:
- Economic footprint of a computation…
- Do we have to look at another type of device that’s capable of deciding how to do the reasoning?
- Another kind of processing or representation languages could help?
This is a summary of my notes,…, please, all participants and readers, fell free to complete the list and follow and actively participate in this discussion. It would be great to have new ideas, projects, papers, and discussion topics coming out of this group for this new year.