Room 335, Media Lab, 20 Ames St., Cambridge Increasingly, we are
realizing that to make computer systems more intelligent and
responsive to users, we will have to make them more sensitive to
context. Traditional hardware and software design overlooks
context because it conceptualizes systems as input-output
functions. Systems take input explicitly given to them by a
human, act upon that input alone and produce explicit output.
But this view is too restrictive. Smart computers, intelligent
agent software, and digital devices of the future will also have
to operate on data that they observe or gather for themselves.
They may have to sense their environment, decide which aspects
of a situation are really important, and infer the user's
intention from concrete actions. The system's actions may be
dependent on time, place, or the history of interaction. In
other words, dependent upon context. But what exactly is
context? We'll look at perspectives from machine learning,
sensors and embedded devices, information vi