Software Engineering Institute

The most precious resource people have in today’s ever-connected world is their attention. Human interaction with information systems has continually shrunk from hours behind a terminal, to minutes interacting with a cell phone screen, to only 3–5 seconds glancing at a smart watch or wearable device. The key to making information immediately understood and actionable in the era of glance-able interaction is understanding context and, eventually, user intent. People inherently understand context. They naturally apply the context of a situation or conversation during everyday activities. Information systems, on the other hand, apply a user’s context to the task at hand in very different ways. To improve the way that information systems use context, our research has focused on individual and group context supporting dismounted soldiers and first responders operating in edge environments. The goal of our research in context-enabled computing is to ensure that the right information is delivered to the right individual at the right time to ensure mission success. In this webinar, we will cover a wide variety of research activities associated with our efforts to better leverage context for information delivery and sensor tasking.