Gulliver's Genie : agency, mobility, adaptivity

The challenge presented by ambient intelligence and pervasive computing is an environment within which computing artifacts become seamlessly merged into our surroundings, whereby interaction with such artifacts becomes intuitive and unobtrusive, where the devices become sensitive to the presence of people and are imbued with the ability to anticipate and service the individual needs of each and every user. In this paper, we present Gulliver's Genie, an archetypical ubiquitous computing application. Gulliver's Genie embraces three central constructs; those of agency, mobility and adaptivity. The architecture adopts a Multi-Agent Systems metaphor whereby agents manage and maintain a context within which mobile users exist and, based upon this context, seeks to adapt and personalize content based upon perceived individual user needs. Agents are mobile and may migrate to or from environmental artifacts reflecting their computational constraints.