Towards a Person-Centric Context Aware System

Sammanfattning: A recent trend is to integrate sensing, communication, and computation into every aspect of our daily life, ranging from various user devices to physical environment. The goal is to give computer systems an awareness of the users and their situations, so that they can support their diverse interaction needs at anytime, any place. A major problem hindering achieving this promising goal is that the users usually play a passive role in these systems with little possibility to interfere with the processing. Additionally, there is no option for the user to prevent being monitored by the system.This drawback stems from the lack of an independent and consistent user oriented viewpoint in current ubiquitous computing systems, which can easily result in the occurrence of user privacy invasion and misinterpretation of the user.To overcome this problem, this thesis proposes a Person-Centric Context Aware System architecture, helping to preserve an independent representation for each individual user to different computer systems. The main idea embraced in this system architecture is that the users are the owners of their personal information, thus they should have the control of how their information will be used by others.In the design of this system architecture, a number of important issues have been addressed with their corresponding solutions in terms of different system components. Among these issues, three are identified as the most crucial ones, and hence these issues have received most of our efforts to provide better solutions: Context Data Communication, Location Detection, and Communication Anonymity support. A prototype system constructed during the process of developing each specific solution is also presented. Together these comprise the main contributions of this thesis work. Finally, our concluding remarks are presented together with our planned future work, based on the current implementation of a Person-Centric Context Aware System.