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All users like to feel special, and individualized. In congruence with this individuality users like to customize their computing experience. They like services that remember who they are, and their preferences. In addition to services having to remember user identities and their preferences, services also have to be adaptive. This adaptability means user preferences do not have to be set or pre-programmed by the user. Instead, the services will set the preference and personalize the user experience based upon previous user inputs and usage patterns. Example of this technology is the digital video recorder TIVo. TIVo records TV shows according to preset interests of the user, the more advanced version of TIVo records TV shows based on what the user have been watching in the past. So in essence if a user watches a lot science fiction shows, TIVo will prerecord shows of that nature without the user telling it to. And if the user preference changes, the service should be smart enough to change the presets without user prompting it to. This personalization and adaptation technologies are the basis of ubiquitous computing. They are also the core for realizing context awareness in pervasive service provisioning. Users want to discover the most appropriate service to support their tasks, and the most appropriate service depends on user preferences and context therefore, ubiquitous computing aims to provide the personalization needed for an individual user.
'''Context Awareness'''
Users do not like to feed their devices and application information. Ubiquitous devices should determine as much information about the user as possible in order to adapt to and predict what a user wants. To do this requires contextual awareness. Context includes such information as the user’s identity, location, and activities. By identity we mean who the user is and what are their preferences. By location we mean where the user is in the world or in a room, where have they been. And what is around them. And by activities we mean what is the user doing and what have they done. In true ubiquitous computing, this activity awareness extends not just to what the user is doing with the device or application, but what is the user doing in the world. All this information should be determined implicitly, without direct input from the user. It is that explicit input from users that should be avoided in order to making the computer processes invisible to the user, and thereby makes the user experience feel more natural. A good example of context awareness is a device that changes the device language to French automatically when a user speaks French instead of having the user manually change the language to French. While that may take more sophisticated speech recognition systems than we have available today, the amount of contextual awareness in devices is increasing. With the addition of GPS and online access in smartphones and tablets in the last few years, services now have access to a significantly greater amount of locational context information.
'''Data Sharing'''
In the ubiquitous computing model there are often many computers running many services. Users will expect that interactions with any given device will be shared with any other device. Services must be able to share information and use other services on the same device and across other devices. In addition it is likely than many services are going to be running at any given time, both on a single device and across many. These services need to be able to interact in real-time. For example, if you are watching television and a news story is mentioned, the user should be able to read it in more detail in a news service on any other device they are using. All this should happen without the user needing to search for it the news story. This sort of seamless interaction between multiple services and devices will allow users to easily and naturally carry on with whatever activity they are doing without needing to work at the device to make it do what they want it to do. This will make the computers invisible to users by making users think of the computers as an entirely different class of device. From the example the user perceives a television and perhaps a phone and not two computers with different interfaces.
