June 06, 2008
Its time to move from the plain old mobile phone to the fully mobile companion or mobile assistant
Today, powerful mobile appliances such as smart phones, Internet tablets, and personal or in-vehicle transportation guides already offer greatly improved access to communication and “conventional” Internet services, integrating email, web access and messaging, and using voice and gesture to compensate for the limited mobile-device interfaces and situational constraints. But now more can be done to create a next generation of proactive, intrinsically mobile applications that take full advantage of the fact that the devices are mobile and personal, and move with the user during most of their day.
A suite of these applications and supporting services in the cloud can become your personal mobile companion or assistant. These context-aware application systems can know where you are, where you have been and where you are going; they can know where your friends are, and what kind of food you like; they can actively find a preferred place to eat and coordinate with colleagues. They can select and customize useful advertisements and attract offers and coupons appropriate to your needs and interests, and recommend appropriate purchases and activities. They will dynamically adapt their interaction style to your current location and activity; they can filter messages to ensure that the right messages are delivered at the right time and place. To enable this highly personal user experience, these applications collect and use rich context to provide guidance, recommendations, and to act on your behalf to enhance your many life, work and play activities, where ever you are.
The role of context
Enabling these intelligent and proactive applications is the effective and systematic use of context. Context is much more than just your current location, already used effectively in guidance appliances. Context can incorporate information from multiple sensors in your device and the environment (such as motion, temperature, light, health), from your calendar and contact list, from your history of movement and past interactions, from your social network and nearby family, friends and colleagues, and from your current preferences and activities. These context-aware applications leverage a user’s context of use to improve the user experience. Context is particularly important and useful in the dynamic mobile environment. Context-aware systems most often sense and use context information implicitly and proactively on a user’s behalf. The benefit is that a user does not have to explicitly provide information about who they are or where they are located or what they are doing, but this information can be used on their behalf, nonetheless.
Some examples
- A mobile tour guide, where information is proactively provided about the tourist site the user is at or headed towards, providing the right information at the right time.
- An inter-modal transport assistant that helps the user chose, coordinate and reserve travel using a mixture of public transport, taxis and ride-sharing, taking into account location, destination, urgency, preferences and schedules.
- A context-aware recommendation engine for a mobile meeting arranger or tour guide that uses context (including location, nearby friends) to propose a restaurant meeting a number of parameters (e.g. type, price, proximity), incorporating individual and joint recommendations and preferences from friends; if accepted, it can try to make an online reservation, taking in to account travel time to get there, or get some indication of the wait time for a walk in reservation.
- An appropriately equipped cell-phone and cloud-based travel service could look at selected information from your emails, IMs and contact list to recommend things to see and do that you and your friends might enjoy. Furthermore, you might opt-in to receive carefully targeted advertisements and e-coupons from nearby restaurants and attractions that would appeal to you and your group.
- Consider calling someone who moves around a lot. Despite one’s best attempts to keep track of their locations, it is fairly common to call them, only to discover the time zone is wrong, and you have woken them up. Of course they could turn off their phones, but that is not satisfactory for urgent or emergency calls. Instead, it would be much more effective if they could set a context or status (“at home”, “in bed”, “in Phoenix”, “do not disturb”) on their phones, just as they do with their IM or Skype sessions. When a call is placed, the caller might get an indication of the status, or perhaps even location, depending on the degree of access granted by the recipient, and the offer to place the call or defer it. Even more useful would be if some application on the phone could set the context automatically, based on location, time and user preferences. Perhaps it would ask the owner to select a context descriptor if an ambiguous change is detected. Finally, the application on the phone (or in the supporting cloud service) could dynamically evaluate the request to accept the call based on context, urgency and preferences, and automatically route the call to the phone, to SMS or to voice mail, as appropriate.
- Context-aware information management for a mobile professional, who needs the right information delivered in the right way at the right time; based on context the information from sensors, websites, email and IM will be prioritized and filtered, and delivered to their mobile device when the mobile professional is in an appropriate context. For example, if the mobile professional is visiting manufacturing facilities, having items needing critical attention at that site should pop up. A useful metaphor is to have a “virtual yellow sticky” attached to a place (to a context), and have it “pop up” for attention when the time and situation is right. Note, if the person is driving, receiving an urgent SMS or sticky pop-up is not useful; at least the device could offer to read the urgent SMS or message, using TTS.
In a future posting, I will discuss some of the research activities and challenges we are pursuing in theCyLab Mobility Research Center at Carnegie Mellon University in Silicon Valley and Pittsburgh.
