S. needs to have companies continually challenging them on all sides to force greater economic and technological growth. Constraining competition hurts innovation, fostering and nurturing it, makes innovation flourish [5]. The scientist and engineer plays a critically important role in the overall ecosystem of technological and economic change as a result, driving existing companies who are lethargic and complacent out of business with disruptive innovation, while challenging existing companies to continually improve. All of these dynamics and innovations revolve around adding a continually higher level of value to the consumer, enriching their experience and their value obtained.
Within the next five years, each of us will most likely have a smart phone that has an order of magnitude more computing power than the most powerful laptop or desktop PC today. These smartphones will be able to instantly drill down into contextual data no matter where we are globally, providing immediate insight into what is more relevant and of interest to us in the immediate area [3]. The level of economic activity, growth, transaction cycles and trust potentially achievable in these transactions is exceptional, as is the ability to put contextual computing into an area of increased knowedlge transfer and learning as well [4]. When this occurs the scientist and engineer will have succeeded in creating a knowledge learning system, in effect accelerating innovation en masse across entire regions.
This paper has used contextual computing as an allegorical reference to illustrate how pervasive disruptive innovations can be and how immediate their effects are on an industry or nation. The role of contextual computing and search is already changing how people learn, communicate and build trust with each other, all made possible by scientists and engineers.
References
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[2] T. Broens. Context-aware, ontology-based, semantic service discovery, masters thesis, university of twente, enschede, the netherlands, 2004.
[3] P. Korpipaa, J. Mantyjarvi, J. Kela, H. Keranen, and E.-J. Malm. Managing context information in mobile devices. IEEE Pervasive Computing, 02(3):42 -- 51, 2003.
[4] S.B. Mokhtar, D. Fournier, N. Georgantas, and V. Issarny. Context-aware service composition in pervasive computing environments. In N. Guelfi and a. Savidis, editors, RISE, volume 3943 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science, pages 129 -- 144. Springer, 2005.
[5] B. Schilit, N. Adams, and R. Want. Context-aware computing applications. In IEEE Workshop on Mobile Computing Systems and…
