Informal Literature Review on Collaboration, Context-awareness and Uncertainty in Ubicomp

After 5 months, I started to divide and conquer my literature review. The split is in 4 parts from (general to specific): “Ubiquitous computing“, “HCI/CSCW in ubiquitous computing” (in progress), “Context awareness“, and “Uncertainty in ubiquitous computing“. The goal is to make me write a first context of my research, analyze and criticize, and try to scope it and build a specific framework for the next step, the research topic. I try to specify some clues about it at the end of Uncertainty in ubiquitous computing.

It is for my own and my supervisor purposes, therefore currently quite informal, sometimes a bit patchy and scattered. Well, the normal features of ever-evolving documents.

Ubiquitous computing
Covers the different approaches in integrating computer technologies with the everyday physical world, as well as the research, technical, human and social challenges.

HCI/CSCW in ubiquitous computing
(In progress, … hard to get a coherent structure…)

Context-awareness
Covers the switch of perspective from representational to interactional problems, the need of context dynamism and system improvisation, the inherent technical-social gap that divides what we know we must support socially and what we can support technically, and how to bridge the gap with accommodation and appropriation.

Uncertainty in ubiquitous computing
Based on the reemergence of uncertainty in high level of representation, it covers, the sources of uncertainty, how HCI studies the impacts, the phenomenological analysis and positivist strategies to deal with uncertainty, the pervasive games approach to study uncertainty in real-world settings, as well as how dealing with uncertainty fits with the design for appropriation.