A Context-Aware Collaborative Mobile Application for Silencing the Smartphone during Meetings or Important Events

This study describes a mobile application, i.e., Silent-Meet, that uses group-driven collaboration and location-based collaboration for automatically switching smartphones into silent mode during meetings or important events. More precisely, for the first step of the collaboration, a partial agreement algorithm will be used for establishing if a meeting is confirmed by its participants and, for the second round, confirming if the meeting will take place, based on the location of the participants. The application tries to avoid those cases when a meeting is accepted but the participants are not coming to the meeting or when participants do not reply to the meeting invitations but they are still attending the meeting. SilentMeet uses a new technique for exchanging information, for coordinating and for taking distributed decisions, called Global Proactive Scenarios (GPaSs).
For executing GPaSs, a rule-based middleware architecture for mobile devices is utilised. GPaSs and the middleware architecture allow developers of collaborative applications to define the actions of their applications in a structured way without having to take care of the communication and coordination of the mobile devices. Also, there is no need for developing a server-side application; all the logic is integrated into GPaSs. Apart the main goal of the application, which is to silence mobile phones during meetings, there are three secondary objectives: a) to provide an collaborative application capable of acquiring contextual information from various devices, b) to check if it is possible to achieve collective reasoning using a rule-based middleware architecture for mobile devices, and c) to validate GPaSs in a real-case example.