Demonstrations An Ambient, Personalised, and Context-Sensitive Information System for Mobile Users Ayse Göker 1 Stuart Watt 1 Hans I. Myrhaug 2 Nik Whitehead 3 Murat Yakici 1 Ralf Bierig 1 Sree Kanth Nuti 1 Hannah Cumming 1 1 School of Computing The Robert Gordon University St. Andrew Street, Aberdeen Scotland, UK {asg,sw,my,rb}@comp.rgu.ac.uk 2 SINTEF ICT, N-7465 Trondheim Norway hansim@sintef.no 3 Faculty of Information Technology University of Akureyri Iceland nikloaw@unak.is Abstract In this demonstration, we will show a context-aware information system intended for mobile users. The demonstration involves special-purpose hardware devices, called ‘context tags’, which can work with mobile devices such as mobile phones, to provide ambient information to users on the move. Key to the framework is special support for content service providers, through software that allows existing content to be delivered seamlessly to mobile devices, as and when it is needed by users. The demonstration will show how these components work together to provide an effective ambient information system for mobile users. Keywords Ambient computing, ambient intelligence, context-aware information systems, mobile information systems INTRODUCTION People’s information needs change as they encounter new situations. Meeting these information needs in a personalized and context-sensitive manner is one of the challenges of ambient computing and ambient intelligence. The motivation for this work has been to provide relevant information to the right situation and user in an ambient manner. The trend in miniaturization continues as with the growing amount of handheld and embedded computers. Until recently, few applications and content services were developed and made available on such equipment. This, however, is already changing as we can observe the trend amongst telecom operators trying to channel content on top of providing network access. Digital content is, therefore, fully on its way into handheld and wireless networked devices. This seems to lead to an increased need for ambient information access. From the user’s perspective, the thrust is about having access to and receiving relevant information in the situation. Seen from an ambient information management and retrieval perspective, it is about populating people’s pockets and the surroundings with intelligent search engines that operate on ambient and distributed content repositories. One implication of this might be that digital information is effectively more close to the body on handhelds, personal belongings, and in clothes – or embedded inside objects, furniture, rooms, and open areas in the surroundings – ready for its distribution. Our approach to addressing the challenge of information needs with ambient intelligence is by enhancing the surroundings with: ambient and proximity/vicinity-based content service access and delivery, digital content, miniature wireless web servers, micro search engines, and context-aware technology. The result is that relevant content can automatically be distributed and delivered onto each mobile phone in the vicinity of physical objects, rooms, and open areas. We demonstrate how one can distribute information relevant to the local situations to provide people with ambient information experiences, and also how this has a strong potential to meet their information needs in a more context-sensitive and personalized way. DESCRIPTION OF THE DEMONSTRATION As part of our vision about users, their interaction with the surroundings and their information needs, this demonstration shows the hardware and software we have developed for this purpose. We have developed and implemented a system comprising general context-aware technology that is proposed as a solution with a unifying framework for exploiting user contexts in ambient computing. The overall architecture includes three cornerstones: a specifically developed tag (context tag), a content service provider, and the mobile user (with a mobile device), described later in section 3. The system integrates the developed tag technology with information from content service providers in order to deliver personalised, context-sensitive information Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. To copy otherwise, to republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. EUSAI2004, 8-10 November 2004, Eindhoven, the Netherlands. Copyright 2004 ACM 1-58113-992-6 $5.00 EUSAI 2004, November 8-10, Eindhoven, the Netherlands 19