Context Awareness, the Spirit of Pervasive Computing

Summary form only given. The main ideas of pervasive/ubiquitous computing include 1) the fusion of cyberspace and physical space, 2) the distraction-free computing. Context awareness is the effort for computer systems to sense and leverage the rich context information in the dual space. It has been recognized as a promising approach to reach the goal of invisibility, which can provide attentive service for user. As a basic service in the computing environment, context-aware service is with four basic functions of collecting, storing, reasoning and querying. The reasoning and inosculating module are for formal reasoning module; the context base module provides the function of storing data and querying; the querying and subscribing module gives the non-processing interface for upper application to request context service; the raw data acquiring module acquires the raw data from the sensors and profile files. Not only can the computing framework provide context common service, but it has favorable expansibility and adaptability. And, location-aware computing is a representative research area of context-aware computing. For which we proposed 1) a multi-object-tracking, highly-precise indoor positioning system, Cicada, to acquire the objects' location in smart space, 2) an expeditious and active location-aware service model, which not only to provide rapid location-related query service to applications, but also to offer the active spatial event service. As a showcase, based on the framework of context-aware service, the smart camera man module which is one part of the smart classroom project was ameliorated and satisfying result is retrieved. Smart camera man module implements the function that switching to the most convenient camera view in terms of the shift of the vision focus of smart classroom, which embodies the distraction-free characteristic of smart space apparently