Trinity College Dublin

Global smart spaces extend the vision of pervasive computing, in which everyday objects communicate and collaborate to provide information and services to users, to large geographical areas. They extend the notion of objects cooperating in a home or an office to the level of towns, cities, and even countries by integrating a variety of sensor-based and other systems to provide truly pervasive context-aware services. Such global smart environments will be heterogeneous as they likely will comprise a multitude of sensors, networks, and ultimately systems. They will provide access to information and services ranging from pervasive access to personal and professional information, to city-wide information systems, to context-aware traveller assistance, to optimised urban traffic control.

Users moving in such sensor-augmented spaces may use handheld devices, such as mobile phones and Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs), or integrated devices, such as (vehicular) on-board computers, to interact with these spaces and to use the services that they provide. Embedded control systems may likewise exploit these spaces to offer context-aware urban traffic control, such as public service vehicle priority.

Ongoing work in this area within DSG is addressing the development of a platform for building context-aware global smart space and location-based service applications that integrate information from otherwise independent (sensor-based) systems. This work is based on a spatial programming model that allows developers access to distributed context information based on (overlapping) temporal and spatial aspects. Our approach has already been applied to the integration of Intelligent Transportation Systems in collaboration with Dublin City Council in the iTransit project.

We are also interested in the general characteristics of mobile applications and the way they use their context. Mobility has a variety of consequences, and the ability of a mobile application to offer localised information is only the simplest. Another consequence of mobility is that users interact with mobile applications in a significantly more casual and intermittent manner than they do with applications running on fixed platforms. Another more subtle consequence is a change in the the user's (conscious or unconscious) perception of the space that they're in at any given time. Our premise is that a thorough understanding of the way people use mobile devices is required to build truly compelling location-aware applications. As part of our work in this area, we have constructed a series of location-aware multimedia applications that focus on the use of physical space for the purposes of storytelling. The most ambitious of these, the Media Portrait of the Liberties (MPL), centers on the Dublin Liberties community, which despite being somewhat disadvantaged financially, has a rich cultural history and a strong sense of community among its inhabitants. This project is part of a collaboration with the MIT Media Lab Europe (MLE) entitled Context-AwaRe MultimEdia for Narrative (CARMEN).

Contextual reasoning is also central to our work on the development of a software framework to support “trails”-based applications. A trail is a collection of activities with contextual information, a prioritised order for visiting them and a context-sensitive route between locations. Some examples of trails-based applications are courier support/management tools, tourist guides, route planners and games such as treasure hunts. Trails-based applications leverage knowledge from the environment and from a user’s preferences to dynamically adapt recommendations to the user as to the best way to utilise his time. This work, supported by Intel Research in the Hermes project, addresses most of the common issues for general user-based mobile, context-aware applications. Our research is also investigating possibilities for exploiting the increasing pervasiveness of mobile and other next generation ubuquitous components to enhance learning experiences. We have developed an adaptable component platform for the construction of large-scale (ad-hoc) distributed learning environments using heterogeneous devices to augment learning processes and to support lifelong learning activities.