As computing devices and sensors get smaller, the interface with their user becomes more and more boring and irritating. The user has to explicitly input everything in detail in order to get some decent service from his device. Part of the solution to this problem is known as CONTEXT AWARENESS: thanks to hardware sensors and machine learning techniques, the device knows the context of the user and changes its behavior accordingly. The Technology for Enabling Awareness (TEA) project investigates several aspects of context awareness for small, mobile devices.
The project is product-driven. TEA’s technical objective is to develop an awareness-enabling add-on component for mainstream mobile computing and communication devices, such as PDAs, laptops, and mobile phones. Such information can be used for controlling incoming streams, annotating outgoing streams, or for setting device controls. For example, a GSM may know whether or not to ring urgently or buzz subtly, a PDA may know when to initiate a network connection, or to wait until a connection is cheaper and more reliable, and a laptop can know when to switch to low-power mode because its user is engaged in a phone conversation across the room.

Selected Publications