Microsoft Research working on Context-based intelligent pre-loading of apps on Windows Phone

Its always nice to see Microsoft Research actually applying their talents to Windows Phone rather than some other random mobile OS.

Their latest project to pop up is a way to reduce load times for Windows Phone 7 apps. The method, dubbed “FALCON”, would use context e.g. location, date, time, or in this case the connected WIFI network to learn and predict which apps you are about to use and load them into the fast app switching stack.

One of the researchers, Tingxin Yan, explains:

A context-aware mobile app preloading component for mobile OS. Based on intensive data analysis of app usage across multiple mobile users, FALCON presents a decision engine which exploits temporal and spacial characters of user behaviour to pre-load apps ahead of time, thereby improves the responsiveness of smartphones.

The project is to be presented at the MobiSys 2012 conference in June. The research is part of a broader Microsoft Research project called “Context Data OS (ConDOS)” which aims to enhance mobile operating systems by integrating and responding to context.

Hopefully if this does come to fruition Microsoft will radically increase the number of apps in the fast switching stack, so the list is not cluttered with apps I may use, but of course those ones I am actually using.

Via istartedsomething.com and theverge.com