Advance Program - Workshop

11. The What, Who, Where, When, Why and How of Context-Awareness

Monday, 08:30 - 17:00

Organizers
David R. Morse, The Open University, UK
Anind Dey, Georgia Institute of Technology, USA

Context-awareness is widely thought to be an important enabling technology for developing ubiquitous, handheld and wearable computer applications. It describes the ability of a computing device or program to sense, react to, or adapt to the environment in which it is running. In order to understand better how we can use context and facilitate the building of context-aware applications, we need to understand more fully what constitutes a context-aware application and what context is. This workshop will attempt to address these issues by asking the six "W" questions of context-awareness: what, who, where, when, and why? These five questions underpin the sixth meta-question of how?

For example:

• What is context?
• Whose context is important to whom, or what?
• Where can an awareness of context be exploited?
• When is context useful?
• Why are context-aware applications useful?
• How do we implement a generic supporting infrastructure for context-aware applications?

Potential participants are encouraged to place their own interpretation on the six questions of context-awareness. Please submit a short position statement giving your viewpoint on these questions, focusing particularly on one of the questions in your submission. This focus will be used to allocate selected participants to small discussion groups that form part of the workshop. Participants will be selected on the basis of their interest in, and familiarity with the problem area. See mcs.open.ac.uk/drm48.

Contact
David R. Morse
The Open University
Computing Department
Faculty of Mathematics and Computing, Walton Hall
Milton Keynes, MK7 6AA, UK
Tel: +44 1908 658463
Fax: +44 1908 652140
Email: D.R.Morse@open.ac.uk