Welcome to MRC 2010

Ambient intelligent applications do not necessarily have the luxury afforded traditional software applications of "knowing" by design in which situations they are to function. Because of the ever-changing nature of 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 interpret the environment in which they are situated and adapt their behaviour accordingly.

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 knowledge management, 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 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 including cognitive factors such as the knowledge states (of both the application and user) or emotions, and social factors such as networks, relations, roles, and hierarchies. This representation and reasoning problem presents research challenges to which methodologies derived from areas such as artificial intelligence, knowledge management, human-computer interaction, semiotics and psychology can contribute solutions.

Despite the value of diverse approaches to context, integrating findings from the social sciences into the design of context-aware systems and building psychologically plausible knowledge models remains problematic. Furthermore, it is difficult to deal with uncertainty on different levels, from interpretation of uncertain sensor input data through to identification of contexts with fuzzy borders. Moreover, the ability of the system to use explanations, both as a part of its reasoning and as a means of communication with the user requires further consideration.

Background to MRC

MRC was first held at the AI conference KI in 2004. Subsequent workshops were held at IJCAI, AAAI, CONTEXT (2007), and most recently at HCP (2008).

These workshops have been successful in raising awareness about the importance of context as a major issue for future intelligent systems, especially for the use of mobile devices and current research on ubiquitous computing. At the same time, advances in methodologies for modelling and retrieving context have been made and MRC continues to provide a venue for the discussion and furthering of research into issues surrounding context.

MRC 2010 will be held at the 19th European Conference on Artificial Intelligence - ECAI 2010. The main conference website has more information about the location and the registration process as well as other workshops.

For information on upcoming events or general discussion, please join the mailing list for MRC by visiting: tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/mrc-discuss/

Last modified: Friday, 2010-01-15 14:53 UTC.