Research on Modeling and Using Context Over 25 Years

This book is the outcome of 25 years of research on how to model and use context in real-world applications on a spectrum from technology-centered (SEPT, SART) to human-centered (e.g. FlexMIm) applications, that is, from well-defined domains to more fuzzy ones.
It presents:
·         an operational definition of context that initiated a conceptual framework associated with an implementation framework, the Contextual-Graphs (CxG) formalism
·         the use of the research for designing a future type of AI systems, namely the context-based intelligent assistant systems
There is a large international and interdisciplinary community of individuals convinced by the promises of bottom-up approaches as an alternative to the current top-down approaches in AI mainly. Practitioners will discover a tool easy to understand and use. Researchers will dispose of a comprehensive conceptual framework facilitating its extension on aspects not yet covered beyond group activity modeling, in the realm of the research on AI systems.




The research of Professor P. Brézillon focuses since 1992 on the study of Intelligent Assistant Systems, and particularly the aspects as explanation, context, and incremental knowledge acquisition. Since several years, the emphasis of his studies is on the notion of context. Professor P. Brézillon is the instigator of the series of international and interdisciplinary conferences (biannual) on modeling and using context from 1997 (in Rio de Janeiro, Brasil) to 2019 (in Trento, Italy).

He has published about 450 papers in international conferences and international journals (e.g., IEEE Expert, AI Magazine, The Knowledge Engineering Review, and the International Journal on Human-Computer Studies). He has been the chair of several workshops (at ECAI, IJCAI, etc.), co-organizer of two international conferences in the AI area, member of 191 program committees, and has given several invited talks and tutorials.

Professor P. Brézillon is the Coordinator of about twenty real-world projects and participates in 40 contract managements. For example, the SART project with the subway company in Paris (France) is a real-world application dealing explicitly with context  from 1995 to 2002. The SART project met around 50 persons in France (Paris) and Brazil (Rio de Janeiro) for developing an intelligent assistant system to support the responsible of subway lines in incident situation. The French Foreign Ministry retained SART as a leader project in the France-Brazil cooperation. Professor P. Brézillon also intervenes in several projects in medicine, mainly around breast cancer diagnosis.