See the project home page.

Research on pervasive systems is driven by the emergence of new types of mobile and embedded computing devices and developments in wireless network technologies. Due these new technologies the domain of computing started spreading from the workplace and home office to other facets of everyday life.

In current computing environments characterised by mobility of users and heterogeneity of computing devices and networks, the context of computing applications (e.g. computing power, type of available networks, Quality of Service of communication, user requirements and preferences) may change. In order to adapt to these changes, the computing systems and/or computing applications need to be context-aware; that is, they need to understand the context of the computation and be able to adjust their behaviour to context changes.

The goal of pervasive computing is to interconnect a variety of standalone and embedded computing devices to provide

• seamless computing that makes differences in technologies transparent to users and allows
  • mobility of users, devices, computing applications
  • network and device indepedence for users
  • accommodation of changing user requirements
• intelligent support for user tasks

The research issues addressed in the PACE project include

• context models, context processing and context management
• preference models, preference elicitation and preference management
• adaptation to context changes (at various levels i.e. application, middleware, network, operating system)
• new programming paradigms for programming evolvable context-aware applications

PACE is a DSTC project supported by Telstra.