Context-dependent services have the potential to bring more comfort in everyday life, supporting and enhancing human ability in executing application specific actions: by adapting their behaviour to shared contextual information, context- dependent applications may provide information and services tailored to their users' immediate needs, bringing in new behavioural models.
Context is a multidimensional space, significant components of which may be abstracted by local and distributed sensors through specific algorithms as well as through reasoning capabilities within smart environments.
Location is a key context ingredient and many potential applications will rely on the aggregation of location sensing techniques to provide real time precise tracking information that can also be exploited to infer human activity information.
In order to enable future systems to provide context support across multiple application domains, this research line investigates novel location techniques based on the combination of local sensors and stereovision that can be integrated within distributed context management systems.
At the same time, the research team works on the definition of an interoperable and yet extendable context ontology. The use of semantic languages for context description is explored and an experimental context service layer to abstract the context management issue from the application programmer is being codeveloped.
RL-2.3 is a medium term research line with an expected potential impact on industry practice in the next two to four years periods and it is carried out within the framework of inter-Arces, inter-university, national, european and international cooperations, involving both academic and industrial institutions.
Current main partners of joint research are: Prof. Luigi Di Stefano within Arces, Prof. Claudio Lamberti, (DEIS) and Prof. Daniela Scagliarini (Department of Archaeology) within Alma Mater, Prof. Franca Garzotto (Politecnico di Milano), prof. Nick Ryan (University of Kent) and Dr. Maria Pia Guermandi (Istituto Beni Culturali of Emilia Romagna) within the framework of EPOCH, a 2004-08 Network of Excellence, Dr. L. Nachman and R. Nagaraj (Intel Corporation Hillsboro), Dr. Carlo Alberto Licciardi (Telecom Italia Lab), Dr. Carlo Orsi (Elettronica GF) and Ing. Fabio Sforza (Ducati Sistemi S.p.A.) within the framework of one-to-one industrial co-operations.
Together with the above mentioned partners work is in progress to evaluate the potential impact of context management architectures in the following application domains: cultural heritage, tourism and digital health.