Existing Challenges and New Opportunities in Context-Aware Systems

Merging the features of Cloud computing, autonomic computing, pervasive computing, and mobile computing are now at its initial stage but the effort is visibly showing the benefits of these paradigms. A large number of applications can take advantage of this, including healthcare, traffic control, and social network applications. However, these applications are complex by nature and introduce several challenges of their own, for example, reliable sensing, accurate context recognition, scalability, security, and the challenge of dealing with previously unforeseen side-effects of adaptations. These challenges can be surmounted when researchers of diverse background come together and provide different views of the same problems and help each other understand the complex relationships between contending ideas. The Casemans 2012 workshop opens the necessary platform for researchers of ubiquitous computing, autonomic computing, and similar fields to address these issues.