Context-Awareness is the ability of an application to adapt to a situation. Examples for current context-aware systems are SmartPhones that use their in-built sensors to react to conditions of their environment to adapt, e.g., the output of texts and speech automatically. Context-Awareness is characterized as a key component for ubiquitous systems. Systems, which detect and progress the context of their users, are able to provide optimal services ideally without any explicit input of the user himself. Such a system gathers knowledge of its context by processing data retrieved from sensors via signal processing, pattern recognizion, and reasoning methods into contextual information. The lecture will cover topics from the areas of sensor hardware, sensor-based information processing, knowledge-based systems and pattern recognition, intelligent systems and human-machine-interaction.

Topics of construction and usage of ubiquitous systems will be re-examined taking the perspective of the central component of context processing. The different facettes of the term 'context', which are needed for understanding context-aware systems, such as sensoric context, application context, and user context will be discussed.
This lecture is held in SS2011 for the first time.

Participation in the Practical Course: Context-Aware ubiquitous Information Systems is recommended.

More Information and lecture material.