Developing distributed contextualized communication services

Abstract

In the past few years, the worldwide adoption of digital devices such as computers, cell phones, media players and personal organizers skyrocketed. Due to advances in networking and computation technologies, we now have the opportunity to allow our devices to communicate and collaborate with each other in order to create an entirely new set of distributed user-centric services. An example of a distributed service would be a cell phone that learns more about social communication patterns by communicating with an email client application. This thesis demonstrates how we could develop such a system. I built a telephone application that benefits from the exchange of context information with a personal information manager to help users prioritize calls and make better-informed decisions about them. The application is based on a lower level specification that serves as the foundation for the design of sensible distributed services.