Balancing autonomy and user control in context-aware systems - a survey

Application autonomy can reduce interactions with users, ease the use of the system, and decrease user distraction. On the other hand, users may feel loss of control over their applications. A further problem is that autonomous applications may not always behave in the way desired by the user. To mitigate these problems, autonomous context-aware systems must provide mechanisms to strike a suitable balance between user control and software autonomy. In this paper, we present a survey of research on balancing user control and system autonomy in context-aware systems. We address various issues that are related to the control-autonomy trade-off, including issues in context modelling, programming models and tools, and user interface design.