Mobile Sensing Towards Context Awareness

In recent years, mobile technologies suffered a great development and became increasingly widespread, creating new opportunities and challenges to a large variety of areas, namely mobile sensing. Mobile sensing is an interesting and recent research topic, as nowadays mobile devices are used not only for communicating, but also for accessing the Internet, purchasing goods, exchanging information, and organizing our everyday life. In addition to continuously providing connectivity through multiple wireless interfaces (e.g. 3G, Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth), these devices also integrate various types of sensors, from microphones and cameras to accelerometers and positioning systems (GPS), allowing to capture useful real-time information about the user’s context. Therefore, the main goal of this work is to use that data and develop advanced algorithms for context estimation, inference and prediction, in order to provide the user with content tailored to his context, current activity, and preferences.