Context Awareness: Your phone is watching you
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Imagine a phone that tracks your location and other sensor data to know when you are in a meeting, driving, or sleeping, and behaves appropriately. This knows what kinds of food you like, your daily calorific requirements, and makes due recommendations of restaurants in your neighbourhood. It tells you when your pulse is low, and when you need some coffee. It tells you when there's a sale in your neighbourhood. A device that gets smarter as it knows you better. Tablets and smartphones that adapt to you without being intrusive, or being open to intrusions. This was the vision given to developers on the last day at the Intel Developer Forum. The first five minutes of this video are worth watching, this fictional account vents typical frustrations of a smartphone owner.
'By combing hard sensor information such as where you are and the conditions around you combined with soft sensors such as your calendar, your social network and past preferences, future devices will constantly learn about who you are, how you live, work and play. As your devices learn about your life, they can begin to anticipate your needs. Imagine your PC advising you leave the house 10 minutes early for your next appointment due to a traffic tie-up on your way to work. Consider a “context aware” remote control that instantly determines who is holding it and automatically selects the Smart TV preferences for that person.
An average smartphone is equipped with an array of sensors – proximity, accelerometer, GPS, compass, and microphone, not to mention access to your personal data and usage history. Phones could use all this data to tell you when there's a sale nearby, what you should eat, based on your budget and nutritional reqirements, not just give you navigational aids while driving but also tell you to take an umbrella if there's a forecast of rainy weather.
Apps like FourSquare, Layar, and Google Goggles use locational awareness to some degree, social networking sites are beginning to do the same – Facebook Places, announced recently, allows users to tag their location on a map so that friends can track them in the real world.
“My GPS coordinates and compass heading don’t tell my smartphone all that much about me,” said Rattner. “Imagine a device that uses a variety of sensory modalities to determine what you are doing at an instant, from being asleep in your bed to being out for a run with a friend.
Intel’s vision of “context-aware” computing had a few demonstrations that didn’t quite nail the UI, to be honest. But being able to generate a travel blog with annotated photos and videos sounds amazing.
Jarrell showed Fodor’s experimental Personal Vacation Assistant running on a mobile Internet device and designed in conjunction with Intel. The PVA uses a variety of context sources such as personal travel preferences, previous activities, current location and calendar information to provide real-time travel recommendations to vacationers. The PVA can even generate, at the user’s request, a travel blog with annotated photos and videos visited during the trip.
This goes into the Go-Jiyo, Second-Life, Acer ur-fooz section of avatar-driven apps, not exactly my favourite category, but then I’m probably not the target audience.
Rattner also showed the Socially ENabled Services (SENS) research project that provides the ability to sense and understand your real-time activities and, if you choose to do so, share that knowledge “live and direct” to networked friends and family through animated avatars on whatever screen, be it PC, smartphone, or TV, is handy.
Security should be a big concern when you’re handing in all that personal data of yours, Intel also plans to bring hardware enabled techniques that will lock your device and protect your device from spyware and theft.
“While we’re developing all of these new ways of sensing, gathering and sharing contextual data, we are even more focused on ensuring privacy and security as billions of devices get connected and become much smarter.” Rattner said. “Our vision is to enable devices to generate and use contextual information for a greatly enhanced user experience while ensuring the safety and privacy of an individual’s personal information. Underlying this new level of security are several forthcoming Intel hardware-enabled techniques that dramatically improve the ability of all computing devices to defend against possible attacks.”