Customer:  Telecom Italia Learning Services S.p.A.
Duration: 2002 – 2003

The Project

The e-CASA (Easy Context-Aware System Architecture) Project, carried out from May, 2002, to April, 2003, has dealt with the development of a context aware service platform, within the field of Ambient Intelligence. The context aware services are based on the analysis of a “context”, in which each user is defined by the following set of parameters: location, set of parameters which describes the physical and digital users coordinates; profile, which represents the user personal file containing the personal data, the requsted and enabled services, the interests, the preferences and the knowledges;moment, regarding the day and the hour of the interaction with the system and the surrounding environment, or with other users in specifics places, such as the user’s own office or home.

In the expectations of the experts, the use of these new services will be very “natural”, being possible to hide the underlying technological complexity to the users.

RadioLabs activities

Radilabs has designed a platform for developing context aware services based on JAVA/RMI. The employed architecture assumes that the provided services will be managed by environmental servers, connected to the Internet by means of a fixed and broadband infrastructure. The user, on the other hand, use a wireless connection with Wi-Fi technology. The user contextual information are distributed on Internet; part of them on the server of the visited environment (VAS), and the remaining ones on the computer of the user (HAS).
Radiolabs has conducted three test-bed of services:

1. Internet access in a new environment : web access from the user laptop or PDA, with automatic authentication based on the provision of user ID and password taken by the user context.
2. Printing Service (Print from portable device (PDA, laptop) on the closest printer, automatically selected by the system.
3. Local Information Recovery: Visualization of the ID cards of near users.

The Partners

The Project has been realized in collaboration with Telecom Italia Learning Service (TILS S.p.A.)

Learn more

G.Cortese, F.Davide, A. Detti “eCASA: an Easy Context-Aware System Architecture” in Proc. IEEE Vehicular Technology Conference (VTC 2003), Orlando, October 2003.