Articles
AI MAGAZINEM obile applications that automatically adapt to their surrounding circumstances will lead to an enhanced user experience. Emerging mobile applications exploit a user's location to deliver personalized services. In current practice, the user's location is captured at the level of position, that is, geospatial (latitude-longitude) coordinates. However, what often matters for experience is the user's place -a location in conceptual terms, such as home, work, gym, or grocery shopping, that combines positions with the user's activities, properties of the user's environment, and the activities of people surrounding or interacting with the user.The Platys project seeks to realize the above notion of place and enable the construction of a rich variety of applications that take advantage of place to render relevant content and functionality and, thus, improve user experience. Examples include proactively (1) changing phone settings (for example, turn ringer off during a meeting and turn it back on at the end of the meeting); (2) downloading relevant information (for example, the map of an amusement park, museum, or any place the user visits); (3) annotating images or other media; (4) filtering content such as alerts, notifications, and customized ads; (5) changing the ambiance (for example, playing music); (6)