Thank You

The workshop has been a full success. In addition to the interesting talks given we had some lively discussions in a friendly, cooperative environment. The panels acted as kick-offs for general discussions, and we had to litterally stop the open discussion at the end of the workshop because we ran out of allocated time.

The summary slides of this year's MRC can be found here.

There are a couple of future work items we agreed upon, which will be discussed in a workshop summary the organisers are planing to write. The most important results are probably that we are starting a collaborative effort to write a MRC manifesto which explores shared functional similarities and making explicit the differences in our notion of context. We are also looking into a special journal issue to which we will invite extended versions of papers presented at the workshop. Last, but not least, there will be another MRC next year.

A Yahoo! Group has been set up yo make it possible for you to keep in touch with the newest developments on MRC. Invitations to this list have been sent out to all registered participants, and you can join in if you are interested in issues of modelling and reasoning [of|in] context.

Thomas R. Roth-Berghofer has put up a couple of pictures at flickr tagged with mrc2007. If you are a flickr user and have pictures to share, please tag them with mrc2007 as well.

We would like to say a big thank you to all of you who made MRC 2007 such a success. We particularly enjoyed the friendly, social atmosphere which made it possible to discuss different topics in a motivating manner.

Welcome to MRC 2007

Where traditional software applications "know" by design in which situations they are to function, applications in pervasive computing and ambient intelligence do not necessarily have this luxury. Due to the very nature of the dynamism in the world with which these systems interact, they have to dynamically adapt their behaviour in run time. To do this, they must be able to somehow interpret the environment in which they are situated. This ability is often referred to as being context aware, or even situation aware. Being aware of the environment facilitates the ability to adapt behaviour by being context sensitive.

Context sensitive processing plays a key role in many modern IT applications, with context-awareness and context-based reasoning essential not only for mobile and ubiquitous computing, but also for a wide range of other areas such as collaborative software, web engineering, personal digital assistants, information sharing, health care workflow and patient control, adaptive games, and e-Learning solutions.

From an intelligent systems perspective, one of the challenges is to integrate context with other types of knowledge as an additional major source for reasoning, decision-making, and adaptation and to form a coherent and versatile architecture. There is a common understanding that achieving desired behaviour from intelligent systems will depend on the ability to represent and manipulate information about a rich range of contextual factors.

These factors may include not only physical characteristics of the task environment, but many other aspects such as the knowledge states (of both the application and user), emotions, etc. This representation and reasoning problem present research challenges to which methodologies derived amongst others from artificial intelligence, knowledge management, human-computer interaction, and psychology can contribute solutions.

One specific problem is to deal with uncertainty on different levels, from interpretation of uncertain sensor input data up to identification of contexts with fuzzy borders. Another issue is how to integrate findings from the social sciences and psychology into the design of context aware systems and how to build psychologically plausible knowledge models.

A third aspect is the ability of the system to use explanations, both as a part of its reasoning and as a means of communication with the user.

CHUT-07

Papers accepted for the workshop Role of Contextualization in Human Tasks (CHUT-07) will be presented in a special session at MRC 2007.

Note: MRC and CHUT have published joined proceedings, so you need only to order the MRC proceedings when you want to have a hard copy.

Last modified: Friday, 2007-09-07 10:25 UTC.