Prof Christian Becker, Mannheim University, Germany is visiting DSSE @ FIT of Monash University as part of the ARC EII taskforce on context-awareness and will give a half-day tutorial on 21 January (10am-2pm, Seminar Room H7.84, Lvl 7 Building H Caulfield) and a research seminar for the faculty on 22 January (2pm, Seminar Room H7.84, Lvl 7 Building H Caulfield). He'll also have the opportunity to meet with individual researchers and PhD students to discuss respective research projects.

Please RSVP Arkady Zaslavsky ASAP whether you'll be attending both events and would like to meet Christian.
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WHEN: 10am-2pm, Monday 21 January

WHERE: Seminar Room H7.84, Lvl 7 Building H, Caulfield Campus Monash University

Speaker: Prof Christian Becker, Mannheim University, Germany

Tutorial Title: Context

Abstract:
In rapidly changing scenarios, such as the ones considered in the fields of mobile, pervasive, or ubiquitous computing, systems have to adapt their behavior based on the current conditions and the dynamicity of the environment they are inmersed in. Moreover, users should not have the burden to manually configure or confirm adaptations, so that automatic solutions for these problems are needed. In order to function according to a user's expectation, these systems have to consider the situation, activity, state, etc. of the user and all other relevant entities. Such information is commonly refered to as context. This tutorial provides an overview of context definitions, approaches to model and manage context information, and the use of context information in context-aware applications.

Introduction
Context Definitions
Context Types
Examples of Context-Aware Applications

Context Models
Organization
Addressing Context Information
Primary and Secondary Context
Spatial Models
Properties
Scope
Dynamism
Complexity

Context Management
Application-specific
Shared
Federated

Classes of Context-Aware Applications
Selection
Action
Presentation

Context-Aware Communication
Spatial Events
Hoarding
Geocast

Case Studies: A number of different projects will be discussed and classified along the presented criteria.
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WHEN: 2pm, Tuesday 22 January

WHERE: Seminar Room H7.84, Lvl 7 Building H, Caulfield Campus, Monash University

Speaker: Prof Christian Becker, Mannheim University, Germany

Seminar Title: System Support for Pervasive Computing

Abstract:
In the vision of Pervasive Computing computers pervade our daily environment - mostly as embedded systems that augment our surrounding. Applications can utilize a number of services that are available in the physical proximity in order to offer their users services tailored to their current context. Due to mobility and effects, such as power saving, services will fluctuate. Applications have to adapt to compensate fluctuations as well as make use of "better" services that become available.

In the Peer to Peer Pervasive Computing project 3PC we have investigated middleware concepts that allow to establish a so called smart peer group that is formed from devices with a common mobility pattern. Within this smart peer group, resources are shared. We named this middleware BASE and used it as a technical foundation to investigate concepts and mechanism for automated application adaptation. In our component system PCOM contracts between components are enriched in their semantics and thus allow the system to automatically substitute a component in case of fluctuations or availability of a better candidate.

The talk closes with an outlook to current research that builds on the concepts developed in 3PC.

Biography
Christian Becker is a full professor for Information Systems at the University of Mannheim since 2006. Prior to this he was a visiting professor for distributed systems at the University of Duisburg-Essen in Spring Term 2006. He studied Computer Science at the Universities of Karlsruhe and Kaiserslautern where he received the Diploma in 1996. From 1997 till 2001 he was a researcher at the distributed systems and operating systems group at the University of Frankfurt where he received his PhD in 2001 with a thesis about Quality of Service Management in Distributed Object Systems. In 2001 he joined the distributed systems group at the University of Stuttgart as Post Doc. His research focussed on system support for Pervasive Computing and Context-Aware Computing. He was a member of the Nexus project that investigates concepts for global scale context management. In 2004 he received the venia legendi (Habilitation) for Computer Science (Informatik). Christians research interests are distributed systems and Context-Aware Computing.