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Recent years have witnessed the expeditious evolution of intelligent smart devices and autonomous software technologies with the expanded domains of computing from workplaces to smart computing in everyday routine life activities. This trend has been rapidly advancing towards the new generation of systems where smart devices play vital roles in acting intelligently on behalf of the users. Context-awareness has emerged from the pervasive computing paradigm. Context-aware systems have the ability to acquire contextual information from the surrounding environment autonomously, perform reasoning on it, and then adapt their behaviors accordingly. With the proliferation of context-aware systems and smart sensors, real-time monitoring of environmental situations (context) has become quite trivial. However, it is often challenging because the imperfect nature of context can cause the inconsistent behavior of the system. In this paper, we propose a context-aware intelligent decision support formalism to assist cognitively impaired people in managing their routine life activities. For this, we present a semantic knowledge-based framework to contextualize the information from the environment using the protégé ontology editor and Semantic Web Rule Language (SWRL) rules. The set of contextualized information and the set of rules acquired from the ontology can be used to model Context-aware Multi-Agent Systems (CMAS) in order to autonomously plan all activities of the users and notify users to act accordingly. To illustrate the use of the proposed formalism, we model a case study of Mild Cognitive Impaired (MCI) patients using Colored Petri Nets (CPN) to show the reasoning process on how the context-aware agents collaboratively plan activities on the user's behalf and validate the correctness properties of the system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Traffic is very terrible in most big cities. These cities need many traffic police to control traffic congestion. They can change the duration of traffic lights to reduce levels of congestion of corners. However, the time changed by them is determined just only the feeling of themselves. Making decisions suitable for current congestion at that moment is not trivial. The resistant questions are how to define the logical time of traffic lights or how is an effect of this corner to the consecutive one. Maybe we need to increase the time of the green light at the next corner because of the traffic jam at this corner. The link between two corners is interaction inside concurrent processes. Besides, some exceptional cases also need to be handled, for instance, ambulances or fire trucks. The green light needs to be turned on when they come, and turn back the red light state later. This article proposes a tentative approach that uses context types, including locations, priorities of cars, velocity, and remaining time (the car comes to the corner) to determine traffic light periods. The context‐aware is applied in the infrastructure of the Internet of Things when transferring information to the corner. Maybe, in the future, the other systems such as Arduino, Raspberry pi, or other embedded systems will be joined in the designs as acting part (turn the traffic lights on/off) and communicating role (connecting to the Internet via wifi) to control the duration of the traffic lights. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the world of Big Data, a tool capable of filtering data and providing choice support is crucial. Recommender Systems have this aim. These have evolved further through the use of information that would improve the ability to suggest. Among the possible exploited information, the context is widely used in literature and leads to the definition of the Context-Aware Recommender System. This paper proposes a Context-Aware Recommender System based on the concept of embedded context. This technique has been tested on different datasets to evaluate its accuracy. In particular, the use of multiple datasets allows a deep analysis of the advantages and disadvantages of the proposed approach. The numerical results obtained are promising. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: The application of Context Aware Computing (CAC) can be an effective, useful, feasible, and acceptable way to advance medical research and provide health services. Methods: This review was conducted in accordance with the principles of the development of a mixed methods review and existing knowledge in the field via the Synthesis Framework for the Assessment of Health Information Technology to evaluate CAC implemented by Evidence-Based Health Informatics (EBHI). A systematic search of the literature was performed during 18 November 2021–22 January 2022 in Cochrane Library, IEEE Xplore, PUBMED, Scopus and in the clinical registry platform Clinicaltrials.gov. The author included the articles in the review if they were implemented by EBHI and concerned with CAC technologies. Results: 29 articles met the inclusion criteria and refer to 26 trials published between 2011 and 2022. The author noticed improvements in healthcare provision using EBHI in the findings of CAC application. She also confirmed that CAC systems are a valuable and reliable method in health care provision. Conclusions: The use of CAC systems in healthcare is a promising new area of research and development. The author presented that the evaluation of CAC systems in EBHI presents positive effects on the state of health and the management of long-term diseases. These implications are presented in this article in a detailed, clear, and reliable manner. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the development of machine learning, to improve the accuracy in recommendation systems, the main purpose of the suggested approach consists of using techniques and algorithms which can predict and suggest relevant tourist services (k-items) to users according to their interests, needs, or tastes. In this research, we describe how machine learning techniques can automatically provide personalized recommendations to the requestors by considering both their preferences and their implicit/explicit contextual information and the current contextual constraints of the points of interest. We build an efficient, intelligent H-RN algorithm that hybridizes both the most known machine learning algorithms, namely Random Forest and Naïve Bayes, with both collaborative filtering techniques (model-based and memory-based technique). Different experiments of our approach as part of a recommender system in the touristic field are performed over the four large real-world datasets. Recommender systems can use H-RN to improve recommendation prediction and reduce the search space of tourist services. Moreover, the results of recall, precision, accuracy, F-measure, and average rate, as well as a set of statistical tests (One-way ANOVA, Diversity) and error metrics (RMSE, MAE) have been discussed to show the improvement of the prediction accuracy of our algorithm compared to the baseline approaches in various settings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Precise fine-grained office occupancy detection can be exploited for energy savings in buildings. Based on such information one can optimally regulate lighting and climatization based on the actual presence and absence of users. Conventional approaches are based on movement detection, which are cheap and easy to deploy, but are imprecise and offer coarse information. We propose a power monitoring system as a source of occupancy information. The approach is based on sub-metering at the level of room circuit breakers. The proposed method tackles the problem of indoor office occupancy detection based on statistical approaches, thus contributing to building context awareness which, in turn, is a crucial stepping stone for energy-efficient buildings. The key advantage of the proposed approach is to be low intrusive, especially when compared with image- or tag-based solutions, while still being sufficiently precise in its classification. Such classification is based on nearest neighbors and neural networks machine learning approaches, both in sequential and non-sequential implementations. To test the viability, precision, and saving potential of the proposed approach we deploy in an actual office over several months. We find that the room-level sub-metering can acquire precise, fine-grained occupancy context for up to three people, with averaged kappa measures of 93-95% using either the nearest neighbors or neural networks based approaches.

An essential goal of recommendation systems is to provide users with accurate and personalized recommendations that meet their preferences. With the rapid growth of IoT-connected sensors, the availability of contextual information has increased, and this has necessitated the fast development of Context-Aware Recommendation Systems (CARS). Context-Aware recommenders are different from traditional recommenders because of their ability to predict the ratings of target users/items by exploiting the knowledge of contextual information. Context-aware recommenders define the context as any information that characterizes the situations of items and users at a particular interaction. They are essential for some contexts where prediction can be more precise in generating specific personalized recommendations. This paper provides a comprehensive review of context-based recommendation systems in IoT environments, namely IoT-CARS, and sheds light on their requirements, characteristics, and applications. We characterize context-aware recommenders in terms of the different IoT contexts and how these contexts are modeled. We also highlight the used metrics to evaluate the performance of various context-based recommenders.

Summary: As sensor nodes are power constrained, saving energy and prolonging network lifetime have been given the greatest priority in the design of routing protocols in wireless sensor networks (WSNs). In this regard, duty‐cycling is broadly utilized as an underlying MAC (Medium Access Control)‐based protocol for routing solutions. In this regard, a cross‐layer approach, integrating MAC and routing protocols, is required to achieve a trade‐off between energy efficiency and communication reliability, through adapting nodes duty‐cycle to routing decisions. Besides, with the proliferation of WSNs applications in various domains, achieving energy efficiency should not be performed while ignoring the diverse quality of service (QoS) demands of the considered applications to ensure their well functioning. In this context, we propose a context‐aware routing framework under duty‐cycled networks, a generic framework that allows to support heterogeneous applications and traffic patterns. An evaluation of the framework is also proposed in this paper. Results prove the effectiveness of context‐awareness and the cross‐layer interaction between the different modules of the framework to guarantee desired QoS while reducing energy consumption. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Health monitoring assists physicians in the decision-making process, which in turn, improves quality of life. As technology advances, the usage and applications of context-aware systems continue to spread across different areas in patient monitoring and disease management. It provides a platform for healthcare professionals to assess the health status of patients in their care using multiple relevant parameters. In this survey, we consider context-aware systems proposed by researchers for health monitoring and management. More specifically, we investigate different technologies and techniques used for cardiac condition monitoring and management. This paper also proposes 'mCardiac', an enhanced context-aware decision support system for cardiac condition monitoring and management during rehabilitation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Breast histology image classification is a crucial step in the early diagnosis of breast cancer. In breast pathological diagnosis, Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) have demonstrated great success using digitized histology slides. However, tissue classification is still challenging due to the high visual variability of the large-sized digitized samples and the lack of contextual information. In this paper, we propose a novel CNN, called Multi-level Context and Uncertainty aware (MCUa) dynamic deep learning ensemble model. MCUa model consists of several multi-level context-aware models to learn the spatial dependency between image patches in a layer-wise fashion. It exploits the high sensitivity to the multi-level contextual information using an uncertainty quantification component to accomplish a novel dynamic ensemble model. MCUa model has achieved a high accuracy of 98.11% on a breast cancer histology image dataset. Experimental results show the superior effectiveness of the proposed solution compared to the state-of-the-art histology classification models. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nowadays, the Internet of Things (IoT) and mobile devices are ubiquitous. Both, the IoT and mobile devices contain sensors and thus can provide data about the device's environment. The sensor data can be used to infer the current context. However, for this purpose, the sensor data have to be aggregated. In this aggregation process, several different sensors and data provided by other sources, such as databases, can be used. In order to facilitate this, the paper presents a modeling language for context modeling based on sensors. Moreover, a detailed usability evaluation of the presented context modeling language is shown. This evaluation is based on three hypotheses regarding learnability, time expenditure and effectiveness. An experiment involving an experimental group and a control group was conducted to test these three hypotheses, and the results were interpreted. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mobile edge computing (MEC) allows the use of its services with low latency, location awareness and mobility support to make up for the disadvantages of cloud computing, and has gained a considerable momentum recently. However, the dynamically changing quality of service (QoS) may result in failures of QoS-aware recommendation and composition of MEC services, which significantly degrades users’ satisfaction and negates the advantages of MEC. To address this issue, by considering user-related and service-related contextual factors and various MEC services scheduling scenarios, we propose two context-aware QoS prediction schemes for MEC services. The first scheme is designed for the situations when MEC services are scheduled in real-time, which contains two context-aware real-time QoS estimation methods. One method can estimate the real-time multi-QoS of MEC services and the other method can estimate the real-time fitted QoS of MEC services. The second scheme is designed for the situations when MEC services are scheduled in the future. This scheme includes two context-aware QoS prediction methods. One method can predict the multi-QoS of MEC services and the other method can predict the fitted QoS of MEC services. Finally, adaptive QoS prediction strategies are developed in the light of characteristics of the proposed QoS prediction methods. According to these strategies, the most appropriate QoS prediction method can be scheduled. Extensive experiments are conducted to validate our proposed approaches and to demonstrate their performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

[Purpose / Significance] Smart service is an important orientation of library research. Its development and construction needs to integrate many intelligent technologies and realize a series of technological innovation of management and services. As a key application among intelligent technologies, the context-awareness technology has been widely concerned by the academic community. [Method / Process] This review summarizes the latest research of context-awareness technologies from the perspectives of data collection,data description and modeling, perceived service and smart service applications. [Results / Conclusions] Based on the literature review, we present a context awareness framework for smart library services. Finally, the development trends of the context awareness technologies for smart services are provided.

Mark Weiser coined the term Ubiquitous Computing (UbiComp) describing a future in which everyday life-objects would have embedded computers providing services anytime and anywhere. This paradigm is theme recurrent in many graduate courses of Computer Science around the world. To better understand the challenge of teaching Ubiquitous Computing (UbiComp), we surveyed 15 professors and 60 graduate and undergraduate students from 16 universities. According to this survey, the two most challenging Ubicomp concepts to explain in a lecture are context-awareness and middleware platforms. Results also showed professors’ difficulty in finding tools to assist the practical teaching of UbiComp’s concepts. Current UbiComp tools require high programming skills or they are not designed for educational purposes. Therefore, this work presents the design, development, and evaluation of LUCy (Learning Ubiquitous Computing Easily), a Virtual Learning Environment which aids UbiComp practical classes. LUCy has two main elements: a Web tool and an Android mobile app. The former provides UbiComp theory materials, videos, practices, and simulations. The latter uses smartphones features and sensors to run simulations of UbiComp concepts. We evaluated LUCy during Context-Awareness classes in UbiComp courses, at the same university, along with three distinct semesters. In different three sessions, we gathered information about LUCy’s pedagogical and usability issues. Then, we performed a quasi-experiment using a pretest and posttest design methodology with twenty-seven students. Results showed LUCy practices significantly improves students reasoning about Context-Aware concepts.

Resource allocation in wireless cellular networks has been an important and challenging issue. With the rapid development of wireless communications, more and more mobile multimedia and innovative applications (e.g. augmented reality and video conferences) have emerged, which are suitable for wireless broadcast and have requirements on transmission delay. In this paper, we focus on delay-constrained multi-cell broadcast networks, taking user mobility into consideration for future channel estimation. The promising network coding technique is also adopted to improve transmission efficiency. The objective is to minimize total transmission energy consumption via joint resource allocation and scheduling optimization. Both optimal and heuristic solutions are proposed. Simulation results show that the proposed schemes perform better than other benchmark schemes, in terms of transmission energy consumption and success rate.

This article debates on notions of context-awareness as a relevant asset of networking and computing architectures for an Internet of Things (IoT), in particular in regards to a smoother support of the the networking operation between Cloud and Edge. Specifically, the paper debates on notions of context-awareness and goes over different types of context-awareness indicators that are being applied to Edge selection algorithms, covering the approaches currently used, the role of the algorithms applied, their scope, and contemplated performance metrics. Lastly, the paper provides guidelines for future research in the context of Cloud-Edge and the application of context-awareness to assist in a higher degree of automation of the network and, as consequence, a better support of the Cloud to Edge continuum.

This paper proposes an indoor location-based augmented reality framework (ILARF) for the development of indoor augmented-reality (AR) systems. ILARF integrates an indoor localization unit (ILU), a secure context-aware message exchange unit (SCAMEU), and an AR visualization and interaction unit (ARVIU). The ILU runs on a mobile device such as a smartphone and utilizes visible markers (e.g., images and text), invisible markers (e.g., Wi-Fi, Bluetooth Low Energy, and NFC signals), and device sensors (e.g., accelerometers, gyroscopes, and magnetometers) to determine the device location and direction. The SCAMEU utilizes a message queuing telemetry transport (MQTT) server to exchange ambient sensor data (e.g., temperature, light, and humidity readings) and user data (e.g., user location and user speed) for context-awareness. The unit also employs a web server to manage user profiles and settings. The ARVIU uses AR creation tools to handle user interaction and display context-aware information in appropriate areas of the device’s screen. One prototype AR app for use in gyms, Gym Augmented Reality (GAR), was developed based on ILARF. Users can register their profiles and configure settings when using GAR to visit a gym. Then, GAR can help users locate appropriate gym equipment based on their workout programs or favorite exercise specified in their profiles. GAR provides instructions on how to properly use the gym equipment and also makes it possible for gym users to socialize with each other, which may motivate them to go to the gym regularly. GAR is compared with other related AR systems. The comparison shows that GAR is superior to others by virtue of its use of ILARF; specifically, it provides more information, such as user location and direction, and has more desirable properties, such as secure communication and a 3D graphical user interface.

The part of this special issue with the title of "Context-awareness and Nature of Computation and Communication: ICCASA and ICTCC 2021" edited by Prof. Phan Cong Vinh is presented to scientists, researchers, experts and students in the fields of context-awareness and nature of computation and communication. Hopefully, they will find this part stimulating their research related to the hot topics of context-awareness and nature of computation and communication and being useful for their future work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study introduces an ensemble-based personalized human activity recognition method relying on incremental learning, which is a method for continuous learning, that can not only learn from streaming data but also adapt to different contexts and changes in context. This adaptation is based on a novel weighting approach which gives bigger weight to those base models of the ensemble which are the most suitable to the current context. In this article, contexts are different body positions for inertial sensors. The experiments are performed in two scenarios: (S1) adapting model to a known context, and (S2) adapting model to a previously unknown context. In both scenarios, the models had to also adapt to the data of previously unknown person, as the initial user-independent dataset did not include any data from the studied user. In the experiments, the proposed ensemble-based approach is compared to non-weighted personalization method relying on ensemble-based classifier and to static user-independent model. Both ensemble models are experimented using three different base classifiers (linear discriminant analysis, quadratic discriminant analysis, and classification and regression tree). The results show that the proposed ensemble method performs much better than non-weighted ensemble model for personalization in both scenarios no matter which base classifier is used. Moreover, the proposed method outperforms user-independent models. In scenario 1, the error rate of balanced accuracy using user-independent model was 13.3%, using non-weighted personalization method 13.8%, and using the proposed method 6.4%. The difference is even bigger in scenario 2, where the error rate using user-independent model is 36.6%, using non-weighted personalization method 36.9%, and using the proposed method 14.1%. In addition, F1 scores also show that the proposed method performs much better in both scenarios that the rival methods. Moreover, as a side result, it was noted that the presented method can also be used to recognize body position of the sensor. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Context‐awareness techniques generally deal with steps for processing information that can be gathered from perspectives of objects in real‐world scenes in accordance with resolving heterogeneous devices and providing meaningful context information in recent computing domains such as Internet of Things, cloud computing, edge computing, and big data analysis. However, analysis applications are necessary to be improved in a way of cooperative approaches because they are independently executed far away from context‐aware systems. This means that the stages are applied to process the data or the derived results, are isolated. That leads difficulties of management and integration for other software modules. As a result, a computing paradigm called edge computing has been suggested to compromise such isolations. For processing context information, it is necessary to establish knowledge parts with validation processes against the isolations. In this paper, we suggest a method for processing datasets in a view of building knowledge parts. The suggested method uses an extensible data enrichment scheme, which represents the relations for the object. In the experiment section, applications of the proposed method are shown in one of the healthcare community centers, and the data abstraction with the analysis jobs can be processed for each real‐world object. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The evolution of the Internet of Things (IoT) accelerates the augmentation of data present on the Internet and possibilities for connections to the more dynamic and heterogeneous devices to the Internet. Recommendation technologies have proven their capabilities of digging the personalised information by proactive filtering in many application domains and can also be a backbone platform in IoT for identifying personalised things, services and relevant artefacts by prevailing over information overload problems. This paper is a comprehensive literature review that categorises IoT recommender systems by exploring the literature’s different IoT based recommendation techniques. We conclude the paper by discussing the challenges and future scope for IoT based recommendations techniques to advancing and widening the frontiers of this research area. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, edge computing technology consists of several Internet of Things (IoT) devices with embedded sensors that have improved significantly for monitoring, detection, and management in an environment where big data is commercialized. The main focus of edge computing is data optimization or task offloading due to data and task-intensive application development. However, existing offloading approaches do not consider correlations and associations between data and tasks involving edge computing. The extent of collaborative offloading segmented without considering the interaction between data and task can lead to data loss and delays when moving from edge to edge. This article proposes a range segmentation of dynamic offloading (RSDO) algorithm that isolates the offload range and collaborative edge node around the edge node function to address the offloading issue. The RSDO algorithm groups highly correlated data and tasks according to the cause of the overload and dynamically distributes offloading ranges according to the state of cooperating nodes. The segmentation improves the overall performance of edge nodes, balances edge computing, and solves data loss and average latency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Real-time prediction of spatial raster time series, such as those derived from satellite remote sensing imagery, is important for making emergency decisions on various geo-spatial processes/events. However, because of the scalability issue and large training time requirement, the neural network (NN)-based models often fail to perform real-time prediction, in spite of their tremendous potential. In this paper, we propose ContRast, a variant of recurrent NN-based context-aware raster time series prediction model that attempts to resolve these issues by: (1) eliminating the need for offline adjustment of network structure by employing self-evolving autonomous learning of recurrent neural network, (2) saving training time by adopting single-pass parameter learning mechanism, and (3) reducing redundant learning by skipping sub-regional data associated with similar spatio-temporal context and reusing already learned parameters to predict for the same. Experimental evaluations with respect to predicting normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI)-raster derived from MODIS Terra satellite remote sensing imagery show that ContRast is highly effective for real-time prediction of spatial raster time series, and it significantly outperforms the existing models. In addition, the theoretical analyses of model complexity and computational cost further justify our empirical observations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Today, exploiting sentiment analysis has become popular in designing recommender systems in various fields, including the restaurant and food area. However, most of the sentiment analysis-based restaurant recommender systems only use static information such as food quality, price, and service quality. The analysis of users’ opinions and the extraction of their food preferences lead to the provision of personalized recommendations, which is a research gap in literature; In this paper, a context-aware recommender system is proposed that extracts the food preferences of individuals from their comments and suggests restaurants in accordance with these preferences. For this purpose, the semantic approach is used to cluster the name of foods extracted from users’ comments and analyze their sentiments about them. Finally, nearby open restaurants are recommended based on their similarity to user preferences. For evaluation, the TripAdvisor website has been used and comments from 100 different users have been collected during the first 9 months of 2018. The precision, recall and f-measure of the system are measured in three scenarios of top1, top3, and top5. The results indicate that the proposed system can provide recommendations with a precision of 92.8%, giving users a high degree of precision. Besides, the system outperforms the previous research in these criteria.