84401 - SISTEMI CONTEXT-AWARE

Learning outcomes

At the end of the course, the student is able to design, deploy and evaluate ubiquitous systems and mobile applications able to adapt their behaviors to the context characteristics and to the current location/activity of the user. At the end of the course, the student: -knows the fundamental concepts of context-aware computing, and the main techniques for the localization of users/devices and the human activity recognition; -knows the fundamental models of context-data representation and managing; - knows the main middleware and software architectures in order to deploy adaptive and ubiquitous applications and services

Course contents

The course addresses the design and deployment of ubiquitous and context-aware services and applications, made possible today by the pervasive diffusion on the market of devices able to sense the environment and to analyze the sensed data. The course program is structured in three main blocks. The first part illustrates the definition of "context" and context-aware systems, focusing on three main application fields, i.e. location-aware, activity-aware and emotion-aware systems. Focusing on location-based services, we will review the main technologies for indoor/outdoor positioning, mapping APIs and geo-data storage and fusion.The second part will illustrate the typical lifecycle of context-aware systems, focusing on methods and technologies for context acquisition, context modeling and context reasoning. Finally, the third part will address the design and deployment of applications and services for mobile environment, both from point of view of software architectures and middleware, and from new application domains (e.g. connected vehicles and autonomous networks composed of drones/ground robots).

In the following, we provide a brief summary of the course program:

Introduction and definition of context and context-awareness

Use case of context-aware systems

• Sistemi location-aware
• Positioning technologies
• Mapping APIs
• Spatial database
• Location-based services
• Activity-aware systems
• Emotion-aware systems

System-aware application components

• Context acquisition via primary and secondary sensors
• Context modeling (context graphs, context languages, web semantic approaches)
• Context reasoning via learning-based or inference-based approaches

Applications and architectures for mobile and ubiquitous services

• Software architecture and middleware: design pattern, service discovery, session management, messaging, data synchronization

• New application scenarios: phone-networks and Device-to-Device (D2D) communication
• New application scenarios: connected vehicles
• New application scenarios: autonomous systems (drones/ground robots)

Readings/Bibliography

Slides are available on the course website:

http://www.cs.unibo.it/~difelice/sm/

Suggested readings:

• Richard Ferraro, Murat Aktihanoglu, Location Aware Applications, Manning Editions
• Stefan Posland, Ubiquitous Computing: Smart Devices, Environments And Interactions, Wiley Edition

Teaching methods

The teaching methods include frontal lectures and classroom exercises.

Assessment methods

The course considers two assessment methods: a student seminar (mandatory) and a group project (mandatory). The seminar is scheduled on the last week of the course calendar, and it consists in a 20-30 minutes presentation, illustrating a specific research topic related to the course program; sources of the seminar can be research papers or software tools. The project consists in the deployment of a software application providing features of context-awareness and mobility support. The project specification are provided by the lecturer or by the students. The final score is computed as the average of the scores of the seminar and of the project. 

 

Teaching tools

Teaching materials (slides, code examples) are made avalaible to students through the course web-page:

https://site.unibo.it/iot/en/teaching-1/context-aware-systems

Links to further information

http://www.cs.unibo.it/~difelice/sm/

Office hours

See the website of Marco Di Felice