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Context-Aware Privacy and Sharing Control in Collaborative Mobile Applications
Design, Implementation, and Emergent Applications
Mobile applications are being used in every field of life. Latest advances in mobile computing technology and applications make it a new level of communication proxy for its users. Despite their power as personalized service provider and an internet connected computing device, mobile systems have their inherent limitations, like small display area and limited power and memory, which must be handled in mobile-based applications. Context-awareness is being used to cope with the limitations of mobile systems and is an important area of recent research on mobile and ubiquitous system. Context plays a fundamental role in awareness applications. Activities of mobile users can be monitored by the context provided through sensors connected with user and her environment. One of the basic requirements in context-aware mobile applications is privacy and sharing control in Collaborative Working Environment (CWE). Sharing control, in the authors' system, is the distributed and dynamic control of sharing policies and information being shared. Dynamic nature of context is helpful in making automated decisions based on the current situation, for example, dynamic adaptation of level of context information being shared among collaborating users, dynamic adaptation of sharing control decisions, and dynamic adaptation of rules for sharing control.
Sharing of context information in pervasive computing
Provision of services that suit the setting of a pervasive user and the reduction of user side input (less obtrusiveness) are two main goals of a context aware computing. To attain these goals, applications should be able to seamlessly interact with a large number of wireless sensor nodes in order to gather relevant information regarding the user and his environment. Since, either nodes or the user or both can be mobile, applications must identify relevant sensor nodes at runtime, possibly to share them with other applications. However, the pervasive user faces two challenges: mobile devices and wireless sensors are resourceconstrained, on one hand; and on the other hand, the mobile user requires timely context information. Therefore, fast and efficient search for sensor nodes is essential. In this paper we advocate dynamic context information sharing; and introduce an architecture that supports it. We will compare our approach with previously suggested protocols to show that our approach conserves processing time by introducing context dependent, hierarchical, and semantic-based search.
International journal of engineering research and technology, 2018
Mobile devices allow access to cloud services anywhere and anytime. Mobile cloud services can give information about a user’s location, status, recent posts, state of mind and information about other required services to improve user experience. Most of the decisions are mainly based on access to real-time data or information that can support the decision-making process. In this paper we study the various services that can be provided through the context aware mobile applications using mobile cloud computing. Keywords— Context, Cloud, Real-time
Context-aware mobile computing
2007
Context-aware computing in mobile collaborative working scenarios fosters collaboration by establishing team awareness and thus supports users in their team interactions regardless of device type. In the past, research in context-aware mobile computing and applications mainly focused on location-based systems. While location is a crucial and vital part of context information, it's only a subset thereof. Mobile context systems need to utilize more than just spatial information. Any information on the environment relevant to the user's task can serve as context data. This information covers not only nearby people, people in the same project, their activities, and their availability in terms of communication capabilities but also includes technology related facts such as wireless link quality, remaining battery lifetime, installed software, and services within a distributed workflow. A widespread definition of context in the area of computer science is by Dey and Abowd [1]: "Context is any information that can be used to characterize the situation of an entity. An entity is a person, place, or object that is considered relevant to the interaction between a user and an application, including the user and applications themselves." While this definition is rather generic, any more detailed specification would be domain or application dependent. Mobile Context-aware computing has to deal with the same challenges as traditional context support systems. However, in addition to context modeling, processing, storing, privacy, uncertainty, or information aging issues, in mobile environment device constraints such as battery lifetime, processing power, available memory, or bandwidth as well as disconnections between nodes need to be at the center of attention. These requirements are matched with existing distributed systems technology such as peer-to-peer networks, agent systems, sensor networks, and regular client-server models. So far, most mobile context-aware applications have focused solely on a number of independent users interacting with the system [2]. Also mobile context frameworks such as by Costa et al. [3], Sørensen et al. [4], or Biegel and Cahill [5] lack this support. However, context information is of even greater benefit if we extend the scope of such applications to groups, especially collaborative working teams, as we will discuss in the following sections. Context in Distributed Teams We observe a trend towards new emerging team forms [6] where team members are increasingly engaged in ad-hoc collaboration and a growing number of people are equipped with mobile devices. New team configuration require accelerated responsiveness, fast software configuration, and a flexible communication infrastructure that changes according to their work activities. In our research we consider three team forms: a) nimble teams (N-teams), which collaborate in short timeframes, engage in work activities, and then dissolve again, as the circumstances require. Virtual teams (V-teams) require and enable people to collaborate across geographically disparate locations, organizational boundaries and have a somewhat stable team configuration. Finally, nomadic teams (M-teams) allow people to work from home, while on the move, or in flexible office environments. These new team forms and collaboration among them ultimately leads to challenging and new requirements with respect to the software infrastructure. This is especially true in a mobile team context, where issues such as presence awareness, location awareness, and knowledge sharing may
A Privacy Service for Context-aware Mobile Computing
2005
Privacy issues related to the access of context information are becoming increasingly important as we move toward ubiquitous and mobile computing environments. In this article, we describe the design and implementation of a privacy service, called Context Privacy Service (CoPS), to control how, when and to whom disclose a user's context information. Based on the results of an end-user survey and experience reported by other research groups, we identified the main service requirements and designed CoPS aiming flexibility, generality, simplicity and fine-grained privacy control. CoPS is an optional service of our context-provisioning middleware MoCA and allows users of context-and location-aware applications to define and manage their privacy policies regarding disclosure of their context information. The main features supported by CoPS are group-based access control, pessimistic and optimistic approaches for access control, hierarchical privacy rules, mixed-initiative interaction, and rule specificity analysis.
2005
Acontextuality of the mobile phone often leads to a caller’s uncertainty over a callee’s current state, which in turn often hampers mobile collaboration. We are interested in re-designing a Smartphone’s contact book to provide cues of the current situations of others. ContextContacts presents several meaningful, automatically communicated situation cues of trusted others. Its interaction design follows social psychological findings on how people make social attributions based on impoverished cues, on how self-disclosure of cues is progressively and interactionally managed, and on how mobility affects interaction through cues. We argue how our design choices support mobile communication decisions and group coordinations by promoting awareness. As a result, the design is very minimal and integrated, in an “unremarkable ” manner, to previously learned usage patterns with the phone. First laboratory and field evaluations indicate important boundary conditions for and promising avenues t...
A Context-Aware Platform to Support Mobile Users with Personalized Services
Proceedings of the International Conference on Wireless Information Networks and Systems, 2009
The emergence of ubiquitous computing, enabled by the availability of portable devices and advances in (wireless) networking technologies, has increased the need for personalized and adaptive services in mobile environments. Users are not anymore only using computing facilities on their desktop machines in a relatively predefined office environment, but they require having access to various services as they move from one location to another, from one device to another and from one network to another. This paper presents a context-aware platform for supporting mobile users with personalized services. The platform is capable of handling different types of context sources (e.g. sensors, readers, agents), offers sophisticated mechanisms in matching the mobile user's preferences with services that are available at the visited location, and provides these services in personalized and adaptive manner to the user conditions. As a proof of concept, we deployed an e-tourism prototype on top of the platform that assists tourists during their travels by providing them with context sensitive services about nearby points of interests.
Providing user context for mobile and social networking applications
2010
The processing capabilities of mobile devices coupled with portable and wearable sensors provide the basis for new context-aware services and applications tailored to the user environment and daily activities. In this article, we describe the approach developed within the UPCASE project, which makes use of sensors available in the mobile device as well as sensors externally connected via Bluetooth to provide user contexts.
Use of social paradigms in mobile context-aware computing
Resorting to mobile devices and their use for Internet access, for georeferentiation and services consumption had a huge increase. Today, these devices ability to establish cooperation networks and to interact intelligently and cooperatively with the surrounding environment has growing importance. In this article we present a model where a minimum set of features and information could be embedded in mobile devices to dynamically enable their integration into computer systems with pre-defined formal structure. It is argued that if a device is only partially competent to perform a particular role in a given context, may yet play this role in collaboration with other devices also partly responsible for the performance of this role in this context. This model is inspired by concepts originating in organization theory and sociology as they are typical, the notions of "social role", "ownership" and "responsibility."