Design of collaborative and context aware mobile applications considering normative requirements from legal science and computer science (NORA)

• Applicants: Professor Dr.-Ing. Klaus David; Professor Dr. Alexander Roßnagel
• Subject Area: Security and Dependability, Operating-, Communication- and Distributed Systems
• Term: from 2020 to 2024
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 441416429

Context-aware applications support users with additional services and functionalities in a situational manner and based, of course on their context. Mobile devices play a vital role in such scenarios, allowing for gathering and processing of information via physical and physiological sensors, taken directly from users’ environments. Context-aware applications, for example, can obtain users’ current locations, activities, as well as their emotions and stress levels. Collaborative context-aware applications gather and combine data of multiple users improving the recognition and prediction of such information, commonly realized via machine learning. By using additional entities, new routines, and information on people’s behaviour can be extracted. Such collaborative processing of information, unfortunately, poses a significant risk to privacy, as sensitive and person-related information is processed on external entities. The goal of this project is, therefore, to design collaborative context-aware and mobile applications as well as machine learning algorithms while considering normative requirements of the law and computer science. By using the method for concretizing normative requirements (in German: Methode zur Konkretisierung Normativer Anforderungen (KONA)) legal as well as technical criteria, requirements, and designs will be derived. In the course of the project, normative requirements will be further extended to apply to concrete technical designs, addressing legal (e.g., data scarcity and transparency) as well as technical norms and criteria (e.g., recognition accuracy and processing times). This still-to-be-developed method KONA will be evaluated on two mobile collaborative context-aware applications as well as machine learning algorithms to recognize and predict contextual information.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants