Advances in pervasive computing infrastructures have the potential to dramatically broaden the role of computing in the everyday lives of people with a greater proliferation of personal wireless devices and with wireless devices starting to be embedded in the urban landscape. The challenges of pervasive computing will not only be about building pervasive environments, they will also be about the omnipresent information which pervasive applications and infrastructures will need to capture, process and distribute behind the scenes. This theme addresses the challenge of designing pervasive applications and services that seamlessly interact with each other across Cityware interaction spaces.
Cityware interaction spaces will be formed dynamically and span body-area, personal-area, local-area, and city-wide networks. They will be based on models of context and trust. Many indicators will be used for context. For example, the location of a device, the time of day, weather conditions, speed and direction of travel, physiological state (e.g. heart rate), patterns of past behaviour, the users current role and preferences, the current network quality of service. Such indicators will allow Cityware services to be tailored for particular contexts and support Cityware applications that are proactive yet minimally intrusive. Cityware context information flows will thus be ephemeral, mobile, fragmented and voluminous with no predictable flows between providers or users of services. Cityware interaction spaces will support both client-server interactions and peer-to-peer interactions.
The theme will develop:
1. Context-based interaction spaces for defining and dynamically capturing Cityware 'life'. Cityware spaces will include computing spaces (e.g. software agents, networks), physical spaces (e.g. rooms, buildings, roads, objects, trees), and social spaces (e.g. users, activities);
2. Techniques for the formation, management and interoperation of context-based interaction spaces, including techniques for sharing and anonymising context information and delegating context management;
3. Approaches for incorporating results from space-syntax analyses into pervasive system design;
4. Context-based discovery services that can dynamically discover, tailor and build services taking into account current, past and future context;
5. Personal context servers that run on wireless devices carried by users, and autonomously manage the personal context of users;
6. Techniques to incorporate uncertainty into context values and for performing computations over uncertain context values;
7. Techniques for defining temporal views of interaction spaces.
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