Context Based Digital Personality

Jesús Ángel García Sánchez
Indra Sistemas S.A
jagsanchez(at)indra.es

The CBDP project created a digital personality of the user which eases configuring and controlling devices by linking the user to the different devices. It also facilitates updating the behaviour of the different devices at runtime.

The CBDP project created a context-based Digital Personality (DP) as a proxy between digital surroundings and the end user. Digital Personality, as proposed in this project, refers to the capability of capturing in digital form personality characteristics of people. By personality characteristics, we are referring to both physical and psychological conditions of people.

The objective is to parameterize the user preferences according to a hierarchical categorization, to be defined in the project, in her/his digital personality, the services to be offered and the actuators to act on. The user’s information received from the sensors will be sent to the hosted digital personality in order to be processed taking into account those preferences to generate the data, in order to allow providers to offer services and to be sent to the different actuators.

The main goal of the project was to create a scalable and distributed architecture formed by modular services which can be applied to multiple scenarios and pilots.

CBDP framework architecture

The main CBDP framework architecture is depicted in the figure. It shows an abstract view of the different layers which provide the common services and the interaction between them. Among others, some of the framework services are: context manager, a machine learning engine, a conflict resolution system, a recommendation system, and a reasoning engine.

When talking about Context Based Digital Personality, we are considering different contexts – home domain, construction sites and mobile services provision. However, the project solution is applicable to any context in which there is an intercommunication need among people and devices. For this reason, the envisioned scenarios and pilots emphasised the commercial viability and the applicability to real-life situations. In this context, specific pilot projects for ambient-assisted living, digital terrestrial television, the construction domain, shop marketing, and mobile applications were developed:

DTT scenario
Users have access to a customised programme list and services via a prototype of a set-top-box which is one of the project results.

Shop marketing scenario
In a big shopping center in Istanbul, users receive on their mobile devices or through screens information about products and offers related to their interest.

Construction site scenario
This scenario implemented the project results into a large construction site in order to improve the security of workers.

M-learning scenario
This scenario uses the digital personality for educational purposes, linking accurate location systems with information about users’ digital personality through the reasoning engine.

Ambient-assisted living scenario
The demonstrator of the AAL scenario consists of installing a device network at the user’s home to help handicapped persons to live at home without assistance.

In conclusion, within the CBDP project multidisciplinary scenarios have been designed using a common semantic interoperable platform which uses context information and users’ digital personality as core elements for the reasoning.

You can find more information about the CBDP project at
http://projects.celtic-initiative.org/cbdp