Anind K. Dey

GVU Impact Award Winner

GVU alumnus Anind Dey, now an assistant professor at Carnegie Mellon University, was recognized for the creation of the “Context Toolkit” during his doctoral work at Georgia Tech.

While at Tech, Dey was interested in developing context sensitive applications, i.e. applications that are sensitive to their setting. For example, a mobile tourist guide could suggest activities based on the time of day, a person’s location, and his or her previous activities. The context sensitive software available in 1997 was not capable of providing the type of detailed information about real time location and environment needed to support this type of application. So Dey developed the “Context Toolkit” to facilitate the development of an entire range of context sensitive applications.

“It came out of a frustration from not being able to develop compelling context-aware applications. My advisor, Gregory Abowd, kept pushing me to articulate why I was having difficulty in building them, and it was through this repeated articulation that we started to see a pattern in the hurdles surrounding building context-aware applications. We then analyzed all of these hurdles and slowly put together an infrastructure that supports the easier development of context-aware applications,” said Dey.

The “Context Toolkit” went on to become extremely influential in both academic and non-academic settings. Sourceforge, the website on which the software is available for download, reports that the toolkit has been downloaded some 700 times for use. A quick look at Google’s citation numbers for some of Dr. Dey’s seminal articles also makes for impressive reading with a cumulative total of over 3000 citations for his top five articles.

When asked about the impact that the toolkit has made, current GVU faculty member Keith Edwards replied, “It’s probably the seminal work on context-aware computing. Although there had been prior research in context-aware computing, Anind’s work is likely the most cited in context-aware computing that there is. While I am sure there are other computer scientists of his age whose work has been similarly well-cited and influential on the community, there certainly aren’t very many of them. Anind has been an asset to both Georgia Tech and to GVU.”

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