The annual Council of Professors and Heads of Computing (CPHC) conference and the annual research symposium of the BCS Academy from 10 to 12 April 2012 was hosted by the University of York.

A current hot topic for CPHC and BCS is Computing at School (CAS). Simon Humphreys, coordinator of the CAS initiative, and Simon Peyton-Jones, Chair of the board of members, reported on current developments. The working group is a grassroots movement supporting teachers of computing and ICT. It has currently  more than 1300 members, growing weekly, and is about to launch a computer science teachers association. Only recently the UK government has understood the difference between ICT and Computing and that learning how to use Excel etc. is not enough. This is quite similar to the situation in Germany where the German Informatics Society (GI e. V.) tried to make government (and journalists too, btw) learn this distinction for many years. Now, we, the computer science researchers and lecturers, can tell government what we expect students to know when they come to university. The problem is — and the discussion showed that quickly — we do not know yet what we deem essential, even though we agree on coding to be as an important basic skill as, for example, knowing basics in chemistry, physics, and mathematics. As the UK government wants to make changes effective already in September we need to act quickly. As universities can and should support schools in coming up with a curriculum, CAS is looking for partnering universities to help schools make better informed decisions on what and how to teach our subject.

CPHC conference programme (pdf), BCS Academy Symposium programme (pdf)

Reflection on our previous group meetings brought up an idea to organise a workshop. As one of research focuses of our research group is also context awareness of mobile phones, the workshop’s theme was chosen as ‘modelling of context-aware mobile applications’. We divided the session into two slots: discussion slot and modelling slot (Workshop handouts). The aim of the discussion slot was to analyse what context awareness is and how it is related to mobile phones. Context categorisation depicted in Figure 1 was used as a base for the debate (source: Feng, L., Apers, P.M. & Jonker, W., 2004. Towards Context-Aware Data Management for Ambient Intelligence).

We described this context as ‘runtime context’ and developed this categorisation by adding other categories such as ‘device-context’ and ‘application-context’.  ‘Development context’ was considered as another possible approach to look at context awareness. The conclusions of the discussion was taken further into a practical activity with a goal to model a general engine for context awareness of mobile applications.

As a bonus, Prof Tony Clark from Middlesex University attended the workshop and showed us his demo of a context aware application. The application architecture design followed a tree graph structure where each leave represented a particular context. Each parent node, representing a more complex context, had to be notified about context changes from its child nodes and reacted accordingly. Each node was connected to a rule base and context database which would hold data about context history.

Finally, a meta-model of the ‘context awareness manager’ component for mobile applications was created. We would like to take it further and write a paper. But this will be our aim for next workshop.