Predicting the future location of mobile objects reinforces location-aware services with proactive intelligence and helps businesses and decision-makers with better planning and near real-time scheduling in different applications such as traffic congestion control, location-aware advertisements and monitoring public health and well-being. Recent developments in smartphone and location sensors technology and the prevalence of using location-based social networks alongside the improvements in AI and machine learning techniques provide an excellent opportunity to exploit massive amounts of historical and real-time contextual information to recognise mobility patterns and achieve more accurate and intelligent predictions. This unique survey provides a comprehensive overview of the next useful location prediction problem with context-awareness and the related studies. First, we explain the concepts of context and context-awareness and define the next location prediction problem. Then we analyse more than 30 studies in this field concerning the prediction method, the challenges addressed, the datasets and metrics used for training and evaluating the model and the types of context incorporated. Finally, we discuss the advantages and disadvantages of different approaches, focusing on the usefulness of the predicted location and identifying the open challenges and future work on this subject.

Real-time applications increasingly rely on context information to provide relevant and dependable features. Context queries require large-scale retrieval, inferencing, aggregation, and delivery of context using only limited computing resources, especially in a distributed environment. If this is slow, inconsistent, and too expensive to access context information, the dependability and relevancy of real-time applications may fail to exist. This paper argues, transiency of context (i.e., the limited validity period), variations in the features of context query loads (e.g., the request rate, different Quality of Service (QoS), and Quality of Context (QoC) requirements), and lack of prior knowledge about context to make near real-time adaptations as fundamental challenges that need to be addressed to overcome these shortcomings. Hence, we propose a performance metric driven reinforcement learning based adaptive context caching approach aiming to maximize both cost- and performance-efficiency for middleware-based Context Management Systems (CMSs). Although context-aware caching has been thoroughly investigated in the literature, our approach is novel because existing techniques are not fully applicable to caching context due to (i) the underlying fundamental challenges and (ii) not addressing the limitations hindering dependability and consistency of context. Unlike previously tested modes of CMS operations and traditional data caching techniques, our approach can provide real-time pervasive applications with lower cost, faster, and fresher high quality context information. Compared to existing context-aware data caching algorithms, our technique is bespoken for caching context information, which is different from traditional data. We also show that our full-cycle context lifecycle-based approach can maximize both cost- and performance-efficiency while maintaining adequate QoC solely based on real-time performance metrics and our heuristic techniques without depending on any previous knowledge about the context, variations in query features, or quality demands, unlike any previous work. We demonstrate using a real world inspired scenario and a prototype middleware based CMS integrated with our adaptive context caching approach that we have implemented, how realtime applications that are 85% faster can be more relevant and dependable to users, while costing 60.22% less than using existing techniques to access context information. Our model is also at least twice as fast and more flexible to adapt compared to existing benchmarks even under uncertainty and lack of prior knowledge about context, transiency, and variable context query loads.

With increased deployment of IoT application on cloud platforms, assessing the performance of such application is an open problem. Currently, approaches are limited to legacy database-based applications and does not cater for the needs of IoT applications. This paper proposes, implements and validates a framework namely, IoTQGen, that can generate situation-based queries to conduct performance evaluation of IoT application hosted by cloud IoT middleware platform. The framework comprises: (i) a model to capture the query requirements of IoT applications; (ii) a data generator to generate IoT data based on specified configuration; and (iii) a set of queries designed to represent data analytic IoT applications. The framework supports different query types that can be typically used to represent and address IoT application scenarios. An important functionality of the framework is its ability to issue queries based on dynamic changes in the state of IoT entities (situations). The framework is evaluated based on two smart city use cases to highlight how the framework can be used to generate complex and dynamic queries tailored for IoT application scenarios.

Context awareness adds intelligence to and enriches data for applications, services and systems while enabling underlying algorithms to sense dynamic changes in incoming data streams. Context-aware machine learning is often adopted in intelligent services by endowing meaning to Internet of Things(IoT)/ubiquitous data. Intelligent transportation systems (ITS) are at the forefront of applying context awareness with marked success. In contrast to non-context-aware machine learning models, context-aware machine learning models often perform better in traffic prediction/classification and are capable of supporting complex and more intelligent ITS decision-making. This paper presents a comprehensive review of recent studies in context-aware machine learning for intelligent transportation, especially focusing on road transportation systems. State-of-the-art techniques are discussed from several perspectives, including contextual data (e.g., location, time, weather, road condition and events), applications (i.e., traffic prediction and decision making), modes (i.e., specialised and general), learning methods (e.g., supervised, unsupervised, semi-supervised and transfer learning). Two main frameworks of context-aware machine learning models are summarised. In addition, open challenges and future research directions of developing context-aware machine learning models for ITS are discussed, and a novel context-aware machine learning layered engine (CAMILLE) architecture is proposed as a potential solution to address identified gaps in the studied body of knowledge.

The significant advances in the Internet of Things (IoT) have led to IoT applications being widely used in various scenarios ranging from smart city, smart farming, to Industrial IoT (IIoT) solutions. With the explosion of IoT application development, IoT middleware platforms are increasingly being used for hosting such IoT applications. This has given rise to the need for developing benchmarking solutions to analyze and test the performance of different middleware platforms that host these IoT applications. To develop such benchmarks, there are a number of key components that are needed. One of these components is an IoT dataset. To generate such datasets, representing IoT application requirements in a general and formal way is important. In this paper, we propose a framework to model the IoT Applications Requirements and enable Data Generation(ARDG-IoT). The framework supports a formal way to capture IoT application requirements and use these requirements to generate IoT data that can be used to create benchmarks for different IoT middleware platforms. ARDG-IoT consists of our proposed model, IoTSySML, which captures the application requirements, and an IoT data simulator tool, which is used to generate IoT data. We present an evaluation of the framework using a real world Industrial IoT application case study.

The ubiquity of mobile devices coupled with the advances in Internet of Things (IoT) technologies has led to the development of large-scale applications that can collect information about people and their environments in real-time. Such applications are referred to as Mobile Crowdsensing (MCS). In MCS, tasks are allocated to participants (mobile devices) by a remote server according to the application requirements. The key challenge is reducing the energy consumption of the participating mobile devices. One of the effective approaches to reduce energy consumption of MCS applications is to improve efficiency of task allocation. An efficient task allocation approach can optimize several aspects of MCS applications such as task coverage (minimum number of participants required for a MCS task), data quality, and sensing costs. In this paper, we propose a novel Context-Aware Task Allocation (CATA) approach that aims to allocate sensing tasks to the best participant set while improving energy efficiency in MCS applications. Another important feature of the proposed CATA approach is that it preserves the privacy of participants' by only disclosing the less sensitive data to the server. The proposed approach employs local and global task allocation methods to enable two levels of data sharing and privacy. We describe the series of experiments that were conducted to validate our proposed approach in terms of coverage and efficiency.