Context Aware Help and Guidance for Large-Scale Public Spaces

Human activity is highly influenced by the context and environment of the user. Presence of other users in the vicinity can also influence the context of use and thus activity. In ubiquitous computing environments, people are surrounded by numerous computing devices helping them to carry out various tasks. However, users seek precise and fine-grained information that is not provided by the computing environment but required to carry out their tasks. Especially nomadic users have little choice than to call upon help from other people present in their vicinity. There are social issues (e.g. availability and interruptibility) along with issues of relevance and reliability to find the most appropriate person to ask for information. Identifying this person is still a challenge today. We have developed software prototype U-Help-System (UHS) to demonstrate how using a social network in combination with the user profile and preferences, can help nomadic person to approximate in selecting people that can support the user in a large scale ubiquitous computing environment.