This paper presents the context-aware deployment of user-assistant services in public spaces, e.g., museums. Using location-sensing systems, it detects the locations of users and deploys user-assistant services, e.g., visitor guides, at computers near to the their current locations. When users move between exhibits in a museum, it enables agents to follow users to annotate the exhibits in perso...

Limitations of sensors and the situation of a specific measurement can affect the quality of context information that is implicitly collected in pervasive environments. The lack of information about Quality of Context (QoC) can result in degraded performance of context-aware systems in pervasive environments, without knowing the actual problem. Context-aware systems can take advantage of QoC if...

Ubiquitous environments facilitate the collection of information pieces from sensors, databases, or mobile devices in order to compose the context of entities like users, places, or things. The context obtained in this way can be used to automatically adapt the behavior of services, which results in the new paradigm of context-aware services (CASs). In recent years, a lot of research has covere...

Since smart phones with diverse functionalities become the general trend, many context-aware services have been studied and launched. The services exploit a variety of contextual information in the mobile environment. Even though it has attempted to infer activities using a mobile device, it is difficult to infer human activities from uncertain, incomplete and insufficient mobile contextual inf...

Often context-aware systems consider the environment a defined element. Meanwhile reality is full of vagueness and uncertainty. Taking into account these aspects we can provide a more grounded and precise picture of the environment, creating context-aware systems that are more flexible and reliable. It also provides a more accurate inference process, making possible to consider the quality of t...

This deliverable reviews the state of the art of research related to the support of attention in systems for collaboration and learning. It presents the most relevant results in attention-related research in cognitive psychology. It introduces systems that have been designed with the explicit aim of supporting some attentional processes. It provides an overview of the specific issues related to...

This paper concerns personal privacy and privacy protection in context-aware ubiquitous computing environments. It proposes a privacy ontology solution to facilitate automated processes in privacy control. The development of the privacy ontology is an integrated part of our ongoing effort towards a privacy-respecting middleware solution for context-aware systems.

Based on an ethnographic study of community road signs, we argue that mobile location aware systems fit somewhat with an abundant practice where private persons make and post signs along the roads. People who live along roads have various reasons, and investigate in various ways, to communicate with passing drivers. Even though these road signs are mostly used for interaction outside of the nei...

This paper proposes a novel approach for identifying risks in executable business processes and detecting them at run-time. The approach considers risks in all phases of the business process management lifecycle, and is realized via a distributed, sensor-based architecture. At design-time, sensors are defined to specify risk conditions which when fulfilled, are a likely indicator of faults to o...

Theauthors have built the first three-dimensional, kneed, two-legged, passive-dynamic walking machine. Since the work of Tad McGeer in the late 1980s, the concept of passive dynamics has added insight into animal locomotion and the design of anthropomorphic robots. Various analyses and machines that demonstrate efficient humanlike walking have been developed using this strategy. Human-like pass...