Ambient Intelligence Environments: Focus on a Human

Ambient Intelligence (AmI) deals with a new world where computing devices are spread everywhere (ubiquity), allowing the human being to interact in physical world environments in an intelligent an d unobtrusive way. These environments should be aware of the needs of people, customizing requirements and forecasting behaviors. AmI environments may be so diverse, such as homes, offices, meeting rooms, schools, hospitals, control centers, transports, touristic attractions, stores, sport installations, music dev ices, etc. In the aims of Ambient Intelligence, research envisages to include more in telligence in the AmI environments, allowing a better support to the huma n being and the access to the essential knowledge to make better decisions when i nter-acting with these environments. This paper can be seen as a State of the Art of Ambient Intelligence, according to an Artificial Intelligen ce (AI) perspective. We will define Ambient Intelligence; refer some of their pr ototype and syst...

Information Systems Frontiers, 2009

Ambient Intelligence (AmI) refers to predominantly electronic solutions that allow environments to be sensitive, adaptive, and responsive to the presence of people (Aarts et al. 2002). This opens up a world of unprecedented experiences to people in their day to day surroundings. Building on the early ideas of ubiquitous computing by Marc Weiser (1991) who envisioned a digital world where electronic devices are embedded to form a fine grained distributed network, AmI aims to go further in integration by involving the entire environment and any physical object in the interaction with people, thus improving their well being, productivity, creativity, and leisure through enhanced user system interaction. Furthermore, beyond mere physical integration of electronics, this paradigm focuses on the creation of enhanced experiences, thereby having major cultural and business related implications (Aarts and Encarnaçao 2006; Aarts and Marzano 2003). The notion ambience in Ambient Intelligence refers to the need for a large-scale embedding of technology in a way that it becomes unobtrusively integrated into everyday objects and environments. The notion intelligence reflects

Ambient Intelligence is an influential vision of the future in which people interact with a digital environment almost as naturally as they communicate with one another. Computers smaller than a postage stamp offer the prospect of a world where the focus is on people rather than technology. As well as bringing convenience and comfort, Ambient Intelligence could also revolutionize the way we look after our health, by providing a basis for personalized health care that is automated wherever possible and desirable. For the Rathenau Institute, vision development and exploration is a valuable tool for studying the social impact of science and technology. As Werner Siemens said, ‘He who has a vision has a future.’ Siemens grasped that having a vision enables one to move forward with a sense of direction. Ambient Intelligence is a vision with implications for every aspect of daily life. However, it is of course important to consider how realistic a vision it is. Back in 1998, the Rathenau ...

foresight, 2007

Purpose -To identify safeguards against threats and vulnerabilities posed by the emerging world of ambient intelligence.

Communications in Computer and Information Science, 2010

We are gradually making a transition to a new era where computers become truly intertwined with our daily lives. Up to not so long ago, we were able to know clearly where computers were and in which way they affected our lives. This has been gradually blurred and now computing devices of various types are all around us, embedded in different objects we interact with and in that way they influence our lives. There are indications that this trend is irreversible and that computing and society will now interact with each other in far richer ways than before, to the point that computing will become transparent to humans and still intrinsically involved in our daily living. This paper provides a brief overview of the evolution of these fields, describes some of the current developments, and points at some of the immediate challenges that researchers in these area face. Fig. 1. Historical evolution and shift on availability of computing power per person.

2000

The present study tries to understand the relation between an individual and an ambient intelligent environment. Three cases have been taken into consideration: resident of popular housing projects, students of a domotica centre of education, and last generation vehicles maintenance technicians. The research is based both on qualitative studies, such as focus groups, and on quantitative analyses, through surveys using

Ambient Intelligence aims to enhance the way people interact with their environment to promote safety and to enrich their lives. A Smart Home is one such system but the idea extends to hospitals, public transport, factories and other environments. The achievement of Ambient Intelligence largely depends on the technology deployed (sensors and devices interconnected through networks) as well as on the intelligence of the software used for decision-making. The aims of this article are to describe the characteristics of systems with Ambient Intelligence, to provide examples of their applications and to highlight the challenges that lie ahead, especially for the Software Engineering and Knowledge Engineering communities. In particular we address system specification and verification for the former and knowledge acquisition from the vast amount of data collected for the latter.

Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing, 2014

Ambient Intelligence emerged more than two decades ago, with the exciting promise of technologically empowered environments that would be everywhere, cater to all our needs, be constantly available, know who we are and what we like, and allow us to make explicit requests using natural means instead of the traditional mouse and keyboard. At a time in which this technological unravelling was expected to have already happened, we still use the mouse and the keyboard. In this paper we make a brief analysis of why is this evolution taking more than initially expected. We then move on to analyse several dierent projects that are innovative, in the sense that they encompass elds of application that go beyond the initially envisioned, and show the diverse areas that AmI systems may potentially come to change.

Communications in Computer and Information Science, 2014

In this paper, we present a complete overview of Ambient Intelligence (AmI) focused in its applications, considering the involved domain and technologies. The applications include AmI at home, care of elderly and people with disabilities, healthcare, education, business, public services, leisure and entertainment. The aim of this survey of AmI's applications is to show its socials and ethical implications and specially privacy issues. Intelligent Environments (IE) collect and process a massive amount of person-related and sensitive data. These data must ensure privacy of the users. An important concern in AmI´s applications is privacy. Addressing design by privacy, an important challenge to consider is the development of an architecture that includes the different privacy policies and how can we fusion them in a specific application domain. Ensuring privacy in Intelligent Environments is a difficult problem to solve, as there are different perceptions of privacy and its role in computing for each user. In the so called 'design by privacy' we have to identify the relevant design issues that should be addressed for its developing. Here we present an approach to the dimensions to consider, in order to provide privacy in the design of Ambient Intelligence's applications.

IEEE Expert / IEEE Intelligent Systems, 2008

Ambient intelligence (AmI) deals with a new world of ubiquitous computing devices, where physical environments interact intelligently and unobtrusively with people. These environments should be aware of people's needs, customizing requirements and forecasting behaviors. AmI environments can be diverse, such as homes, offices, meeting rooms, schools, hospitals, control centers, vehicles, tourist attractions, stores, sports facilities, and music devices. Artificial intelligence research aims to include more intelligence in AmI environments, allowing better support for humans and access to the essential knowledge for making better decisions when interacting with these environments. This article, which introduces a special issue on AmI, views the area from an artificial intelligence perspective.