Rich context is characterized by the use of a wide range of sensed and historic information, aggregated into a coherent model of a user’s state and surroundings; including things like their location, motion, weather, connectivity options, and proximity to others. This data and its analysis form the backbone for a new class of services in areas like weather, traffic, wellness, or entertainment.

Research, spread evenly across Beijing, Lausanne, Palo Alto and Tampere, is focused on:

• Service architectures
• Intelligent mobile platforms and scalable context service systems
• Enabling technologies such as:
• Data management & mining
• Pervasive sensing
• Context data economics

Teams working on Rich Context Modeling include:

• Data Insight
• Context Data Intelligence & Economics
• Pervasive sensing
• Context Computing
• Mobile Internet Services Systems
• Mobile Business Solutions
• Mobile Social Networking
• Context Aware Social Media
• Audio Video content representation
• Context, Content and Communities
• Context Data Publications-Subscriptions
• Scalable Rich Context Data Processing
• Multimodal Sensing and Context

Working with these teams are several of our Open Innovation partners:

• University of Cambridge
• EPFL (Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne)
• ETHZ (Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule Zürich)
• Massachusetts Institute of Technology
• Tampere University of Technology
• Tsinghua University

Avoiding traffic congestion can save time, gasoline, greenhouse gas emissions, and stress. The Mobile Millennium project is a public-private research partnership that aims to address these key societal issues by providing drivers with current traffic information where and when they can use it.

By being aware of location and direction, as well the geometry of buildings or landmarks, Mobile Augmented Reality applications can make mobile phones into a "Magic Lense" which can enhance images captured by the phone's camera with additional information, including historical information or commerce.