Lecture 2 - Context Flashcards
(34 cards)
What is context?
The situation in which the device is being used.
Is context highly variable for mobile devices?
Yes, for mobile devices it changes all the time due to their portability. Since they’re always with us too, they’re bound to experiance a lot of different situations.
Examples of context?
- location
- enviroment (light , sound, weather , business , is something socially acceptable in this setting etc.)
- motion (running,walking etc.)
- connectivity (e.g. celluar, wifi , poor conectivity due to being in a rural area)
- situational demands (e.g. holding other items) -> with these there is usually a problem with providing input, perceiving output or both
What is the most common context for context aware mobile devices?
Most likely location
What is the context here?
“A fast-food delivery company wants to create a smartphone
application to help its delivery employees collect orders from
restaurants then deliver them to customers, while traveling by
bicycle.”
- motion, as the person is moving
- situational demands, as person has to control the bike and maintain safety, meaning they have to have their hands on handlebars at all times and avoid using any devices. The person would however be walking at the start and end of the trip, which could be considered.
- enviroment , as the person might be travelling through busy loud areas. Also there might be vibration with the bike due to potholes in the road.Depending on time it might also be too bright, sunny or dark while travelling. Weather would be another enviromental feature to consider, for example raining.
- connectivity , in rural areas there might be no signal
- Due to the demands of the delivery the person may not have free hands, wear gloves and have their device in their pocket, all 3 limiting interaction
What is situational impairment?
when the context restricts a person’s ability to interacting with a device
Example of situational impairment?
While running phone might open random apps, due to water drops falling on the screen, as this is not the intended function it limits the interaction with the user
When thinking about context what else do we need to think about?
How the user provides input in such situation and how they will perceive the output. Are these limited?
What is the property of context-awareness for a device?
It means the device is able to infer context
When there is situational impairment then…
the user is said to be situationally impaired
What might arise from certain contexts?
Situational impairment.
What is context-aware computing?
context-aware computing, we now have the means of considering the situation of use not only in the design process,
but in real time while the device is in use
Are humans good at perceiving context?
Yes, we perceive context to determine how we act, even when we are not conciously aware. We as humans have a shared understanding on how to act in situations (although this might be dependant on culture etc.)
Example of social (human) perception of context? - person on phone
E.g., walk into a room with the intention of speaking to someone:
* You hear them speaking, but see nobody else in the room;
* You infer that they’re probably in a phone conversation;
* You decide to wait until they’re finished or acknowledge you, before
you say something
Context is what type of feedback loop?
Closed-Loop social interaction system.
What is the loop of considering context for a human?
- Human perceives sensory information;
- Human combines sensory inputs with prior knowledge;
- Human infers the current context and identifies appropriate behaviour;
- Human makes a decision about how to (inter)act in that setting
What are the 2 area of research in relation to context?
- detecting and embedding context in information systems (how to detect context , what is relevant to the content , how do we store and retrieve context)
- Using context to improve UIs (how can we infer context in real time , what context is relevant to the users’ tasks , how should UIs respond , what can we infer about the current situation)
How can mobile devices infer context?
Via sensors
Why do we infer context?
To make users’ life easier / improve interaction and potentially implement new features.
At the moment we mainly use context to display context relevant information and adapt UIs
What context was used in the BBC weather app?
- orientation (change presentation based on the way phone is being held)
- location (display weather for correct place)
- time (display weather for the correct time)
What context was used in Google Maps?
- location to recommend nearby restuarants
- location history to highlight places you have been to before
- time to suggest what places are open right now or at a chosen time
In this example we use prior knowledge to improve recommendations based on what the user has previously done
What do we mainly improve when incorporating context into mobile devices and their apps?
We improve the quality of life, saving overall user effort.
Context is:
- potentially bad for privacy
- often difficult to infer
- mutli-faceted, as many modalities are fused together
Should context-aware devices consider prior knowledge?
Most definitely
- can prior situations improve user experiance
- what can we learn from previous experiances
