NRC outreach calls for context aware pioneers

LAUSANNE, Switzerland – The new Nokia Research Center project in collaboration with the Swiss Federal Institutes of Technology has yet to officially swing its doors open, yet we’ve noticed in a hidden corridor on the NRC website that it’s already begun casting its net to pull in even more talent and creative thinkers – the core focus on context aware services and the “Internet of Things”, an extremely exciting area of development that we’ve covered a many times here on Conversations.

The whole premise of this concept of an “Internet of Things” is about enabling people to interact with their surroundings in unconventional yet natural and intuitive ways. For example you might take a photo of a real-life object to get details about it, or use your phone’s sensors to scan the environment echoing human-like senses, including smells, sounds and touch. It’s all about the pursuit of creating plausible and practical context aware services and applications.

On the NRC site, it has posted a teaser article, calling for proposals for research groups, and outlines the following areas as key:

Context aware services and applications
New ideas of services benefitting the context information. Such services could be e.g. social networking and personalized advertisements.
Usability and human aspects, pervasive communication interfaces
Improved device usability based on the better knowledge of current and predicted contextual data.
Networking and context awareness
How to improve connectivity of the device based on the knowledge of context. Using connectivity to calculate current context.
Security, privacy, and trust aspects in pervasive communication
How to apply security, privacy, and trust in all above mentioned cases.

Do you believe a phone and services could really mimic human senses to interpret our environments? Would owning a contextually aware device be the ultimate mobile solution were it to be realized?

Photo from batega

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Tags | Context aware, Internet of things, Lausanne, Nokia Research Center, NRC