A Hybrid Architecture For Context-Aware Systems

Today applications give us complex services in behalf of the user no matter of location, time or hardware infrastructure. There is a growing realization that computer systems will need to be increasingly sensitive to their context. That is, the application can decide what to do, based not only on the explicitly presented input, but also on the context, and its result can affect not only the explicit output, but also the context. This paper describes the need for an extensible context framework with embedded features. A hybrid (symbolic/connectionist) architecture is proposed. It consists of a multitude of agents having both a symbolic and a connectionist part. The symbolic part represents some knowledge structure, while the connectionist part represents its relevance to the current context. The performance of the system emerges as a result of the work and interaction of the currently active agents, where the set of active agents is not predefined for a specific task but is dynamic and reflects the specific context.