In the every day reasoning and behavior of people, "context" plays an important role. When I am in holidays I might not look at the price of a drink at the beach, while at home, in the supermarket I hunt for bargains. Or, I might have very environmental friendly habits at home, having solar panels installed, taking the bike whenever possible, etc. but, I travel a lot by plane at work.
So, apparently inconsistent behavior can often be explained by the context.
If we want to model human behavior and interactions for e.g. social simulations or if we want to be able to robustly interact with people in different contexts, like in social robotics, we need to account for the context in which the interactions take place. Although there has been quite some research on the use of context in HCI there has been little fundamental work done and the concept of context is still quite elusive.
In this presentation I will discuss some of the important characteristics of contexts and how they can be modeled for our purposes in social simulation and social robotics.