High-level programming paradigm for context-aware computing

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The objective of this proposed research is to investigate a high-level programming paradigm for context-awarecomputing. This paradigm will consist of theoretical and practical foundations for developing programminglanguages that enable and support programming context-aware software applications, and software models,abstractions and infrastructure as the foundations to build context-aware software systems. Here by "high-level" we mean that the paradigm will be at a high level of abstraction with support of formal theories. The programming languages and software models, abstractions and infrastructure designed based on theparadigm will have formal abstract semantics that will be independent of concrete context-aware applicationsystems and low-level specific operational environments and platforms.Context-aware computing means that computations of a software application that is aware of, varies in, anddepends on the underlying, runtime contexts and context changes. Here contexts can be generally defined asexternal varying environments that affect or determine the computations of the application. Examples of suchexternal environments or contexts include time, location, situation, and user profile. Context-awareprogramming means writing computer programs that specify how computations or behaviors of context-awaresoftware applications depend on or vary in underlying contexts. The current (low-level) solutions tocontext-aware programming are mainly focused on extending conventional programming languages andsystems with context-aware supports in forms of additional software constructs, APIs, and packages.This proposed research will take an abstract-to-concrete approach to investigating the paradigm. We willinvestigate an abstract computing model for context-aware computing. We will investigate high-levelcontext-aware programming languages for writing context-aware application programs based on the abstract context-aware computing model. We will also investigate implementation of the abstract context-awarecomputing model on various concrete context-aware software and hardware platforms/environments.