UT ECE professor Christine Julien has been awarded a National Science Foundation (NSF) Grant entitled “Grapevine: Efficient Shared Situational Awareness for Dynamic Networks.”

Many of today's networks include mobile devices, users, and their applications operating in wirelessly connected situations, where expressive and extensive knowledge about the intrinsically dynamic operating context can significantly enhance and enable new forms of behavior. As our capabilities to locally sense, compute, and communicate increase, we must reexamine traditional notions of context and context-awareness in these increasingly connected environments, which are defined by coordination and cooperation among distributed entities. In this light, this project addresses the following fundamental research questions: how do we expressively identify groups of entities based on predicates over individual entities' and groups' contexts, and how do we define, assess, and share the context of both individuals and groups?

Existing work is largely ego-centric, focusing on how to use knowledge of a single entity's situation to impact its own personal, local behavior. As groups become a defining force of applications in domains as diverse as the Internet of Things, delay-tolerant networks, and intelligent transportation systems, the notion of a shared view of the context will be of primary importance.

Dr. Christine Julien is an Associate Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Texas at Austin. Her research interests are in mobile and pervasive computing, with a focus on application-oriented concerns that include context-aware data generation and discovery, network-oriented concerns that include adaptive context-aware communication, and formal foundations.