Computer Science Seminar: Monday, March 24, 2003

Speaker:

Dr. Patrick Brézillon, Laboratoire d'Informatique, University of Paris 6, France

Abstract:

The role of the context in a number of technologies is now clearly recognized. There is an international and interdisciplinary community with a web site (http://context.umcs.maine.edu/), a mailing list, and a series of international and interdisciplinary conferences. A working definition of context is "all elements that constrain problem solving without intervening in it explicitly." There is now a consensus on this definition (or similar definitions) across the domains. However, few operational definitions tackle the dynamics of context, otherwise as a simple user's location and time function. For example, the context at one step of problem solving is different from that at another: some elements leave the context, others enter it. The seminar presents a state of the art on context in domains such as ontologies, databases, communication, explanation, knowledge acquisition, machine learning, vision, HCI, and security. The focus is on the practical aspects of the modeling and the use of context in computer systems. The seminar ends on a presentation of a context-based formalism called contextual graphs.