Fifth International Workshop
Held at HCP 08, Delft, The Netherlands, 8-12 June 2008
The MRC 2008 proceedings have been published:
Anders Kofod-Petersen, Jörg Cassens, David Leake, and Marielba Zacarias, editors. HCP-2008 Proceedings, Part II, MRC 2008 - Fifth International Workshop on Modelling and Reasoning in Context. TELECOM Bretagne, June 2008.
Slides with the summary of the workshop are also available.
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.
The Modeling and Reasoning in Context workshop series, established in 2004, provides a forum for scientists and practitioners addressing the above issues to exchange and discuss issues and ideas in a friendly, cooperative environment.
Last modified: Monday, 2008-06-16 15:54 UTC.