[UCI-Calit2] Seminar Today : Context-Aware Messaging

Stuart Ross stuross at calit2.uci.edu
Tue Aug 21 09:01:43 PDT 2007


Context-Aware Messaging: Nomatic*Gaim and Nomatic*Aid

a seminar by Dr. Donald J. Patterson
Assistant Professor, Department of Informatics

Tuesday, August 21, at 12:00 noon
Calit2 Building, Auditorium   (NOTE ROOM CHANGE)
A light lunch will be available AFTER the seminar, in the Calit2 atrium

This seminar is part of a series by the faculty mentors in Calit2's
program of Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowships in Information
Technology (SURF-IT). 
The SURF-IT Fellows working with Dr. Patterson are Danish Khan and Sam
Kaufman; both are Informatics majors.

Nomatic (for presence) is a context-aware instant messaging (IM)
architecture, that works with all major IM protocols on all major
operating systems through a plug-in architecture. What Nomatic does is
to figure out where you are and what you are doing from sensors that are
with your computing platform.  That information is reported to a central
server which utilizes machine learning techniques to develop a semantic
interpretation about the name of your current place, activity, or social
context. The result is that the people on your IM list can see where you
are and what you are doing - as you describe it. Although clients can be
built on any IM platform, most of the reference code is based on the
open-source project pidgin (formerly gaim), which we have augmented with
the ability to communicate to our presence management service. 

The goal of Nomatic*Gaim is to encourage more appropriate IM
communication through remote awareness of context. Traditional
indications of user interruptibility in IM are limited to a few static
phrases such as 'online' vs. 'offline'. However, as more mobile devices
come pre-installed with IM clients, such overly simple phrases cannot
capture the situation adequately.  Nomatic*Gaim will capture information
about a user's environment from sensors such as ambient sound and light,
motion, and location, applying artificial intelligence to that
information, and then presenting an assessment on the user's IM status
line. This allows for people on the user's IM list to determine more
accurately if it is appropriate to interrupt a user or not by observing
a greater variety of computer-generated phrases derived from your own
assessments.

Nomatic*Aid consists of a handheld geo-tagging photo device that enables
coordination between human relief workers during and after crises. For
an effective crisis response, spatial and temporal information about
resources and displaced people has to be collected and analyzed by the
team of responders. The information garnered needs to be disseminated
and collated by a central server. This project intends to use camera
cell phones equipped with a Global Positioning System (GPS) to tag,
store, and communicate context-based data. The handheld devices will
serve as data collection and storage devices as well as communication
nodes. Since the devices have limited transmission range, unpredictable
mobility, and limited battery power, routing algorithms that exploit
these unique challenges will be designed.

The seminar is open to the public.
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