The Context-Aware Computing Scenario

David Willis looks at a concept which has been in laboratories for quite a long time and begins to get adopted. The presentation still refers mostly to academic research...

Context is about bringing additional information (device, location, "presence", social attributes…) to applications, to help make better decisions and bring better service - to anticipate an end-user needs. "It is time to know the 'digital me'".

The mobile device can be seen as essential in the context-aware applications, because it is attached to an individual, always on, linked to an invoice...

Prediction for the context world, 2015: personal search, personnel commerce, sensors, socialization (manage identity, reputation), personal services, knowledge work and collaboration. All this may requires "context brokers" to have it work together.

How to assess context-aware approaches? Based on examples:

• Early commitment (create smart product & services), very costly;
• Incremental improvement on a CRM system (improve customer care), not so expensive;
• Aggressive implementation of UCC (faster innovation and time to market), expensive;
• UCC (unified communication & collaboration) platforms & incremental improvement (reduced cross-process latency), cheap.

Challenges:

• Shared trust
• Information federation
• Context switching
• Cross-endpoint experience
• Cross-personna experience
• Cross-session experience
• Cross-application experience
• …
• Sensors

Roadmap of 5 to 10 years (Hype Cycle), but some components are mainstream (e.g. presence).

Layers of architecture: technology infrastructure (rationalized, multichannel, communication-enabled, context delivery architecture), context-enriched services (process, environment, community, identity), quality of context (services will be only as good as the inputs), 7 different styles (client-side, server-side mixed with federation & broker and hybrids), various business views.

There is a virtuous ecosystem with context: the more the users share their "status", the more value they get.

Examples: Digby (client, application), Locative Art (client, device), Nokia / Plazes (client, federation), Xora (server), Fire Eagle / Yahoo! (server, broker), Cisco on a raiologist application (server, federation).

70 vendors are identified by Gartner in wireless, location, web, unified communications, social software (mySpace, Facebook not yet on the enterprise market, but…). There is an interesting battle going on between Microsoft and Cisco. The main vendors are MS & Cisco (enterprise), Nokia, Google & Yahoo! on the consumer side.

Recommendations for business:

• Find an application / business case (location-based is probably easier)
• Trial

Technology recommendations:

• Prepare a standardized architecture

Identify informations sources then create a provisioning model.

This presentation was quite unlike the others: it tended to appear quite disconnected from the current issues that banks are trying to resolve. There still may be some ideas in context and the domain should probably be monitored...