Changes

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.

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 settings without additional commands. 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 is pushed to provide the personalization needed for an individual user.