This book brings together current research and adopts a pragmatic approach to modeling and using context to solve real-world problems. The editors were instrumental in creating - and continue to be involved in - the interdisciplinary research community, centered around the biennial CONTEXT (International and Interdisciplinary Conference on Modeling and Using Context) conference series, focused on studying context and its implications for artificial intelligence, software applications, psychology, philosophy, linguistics, neuroscience, as well as other fields.

The first three chapters lay the foundations, looking at the lessons learned over the past 25 years and arguing for a continued shift toward more pragmatic approaches. The remaining chapters contain contributions to pragmatic context-based research from a wide range of domains, including technological problems - such as subway incident management and autonomous underwater vehicle control - identifying emotions from speech without understanding the words, anonymization in a world where privacy is increasingly threatened, teaching in context and improving management teaching in a business school.