Many of today's networks include mobile devices, users, and their applications operating in wirelessly connected situations, where expressive and extensive knowledge about the intrinsically dynamic operating context can significantly enhance and enable new forms of behavior. As our capabilities to locally sense, compute, and communicate increase, we must reexamine traditional notions of context and context-awareness in these increasingly connected environments, which are defined by coordination and cooperation among distributed entities. In this light, this project addresses the following fundamental research questions: how do we expressively identify groups of entities based on predicates over individual entities' and groups' contexts, and how do we define, assess, and share the context of both individuals and groups?
This project diverges from existing work in its perspective on context and context-awareness. Existing work is largely ego-centric, focusing on how to use knowledge of a single entity's situation to impact its own personal, local behavior. As groups become a defining force of applications in domains as diverse as the Internet of Things, delay-tolerant networks, and intelligent transportation systems, the notion of a shared view of the context will be of primary importance. A second key differentiator is the project's focus on the quality of distributed knowledge about both context and group membership. Making these quality metrics available to applications is essential to enabling effective decision-making based on context information.
The project addresses issues surrounding context-awareness that pervade our everyday lives. In addition, the project includes an integrated impact plan that uses technology transfer to engage the public and evaluate the research. To broaden participation, the project includes design opportunities for undergraduate students, K-12 participants, and graduate students and researchers to participate in focused related activities.
