DALICA: Agent-Based Ambient Intelligence for Cultural-Heritage Scenarios

Villa Adriana is an enormous archaeological area where ancient artifacts and modern technology have found an unexpected equilibrium. The old artifacts are huge stone monuments; the modern technology includes PDAs and signals from the Galileo satellite combined with intelligent software agents. As part of the European CUSPIS project (Cultural Heritage Space Identification System, www. cuspis-project.info), we exploited intelligent agents for two ambient-intelligence scenarios applicable to Villa Adriana. One scenario involves cultural assets fruition-the possibility of accessing and enjoying cultural assets. This scenario concerns the dissemination of information about cultural assets; for example, users can visit a museum or archaeological site and receive on their mobile devices appropriate, personalized information about that place. The other scenario involves cultural assets monitoring, which concerns securely transporting cultural assets from the owner organization to a renter organization and back.     

环绕智能研究综述

新一代的计算模式代替PC时代的计算模式是不可逆转的发展趋势,理解AmI的概念、应对AmI提出的技术与非技术挑战非常关键.首先讨论了环绕智能概念的起源,并比较了AmI概念与Ubiquitous Computing等相关概念的异同.然后综合分析了AmI领域的国内外研究现状,提出了一种针对AmI领域的研究内容的层次划分方法,并且讨论了AmI研究面临的技术挑战.随后,分析比较了世界IT强国针对AmI远景制定的工作计划,总结了AmI研究近期研究热点和未来发展趋势.     

Guest Editorial Introducing Automation and Engineering for Ambient Intelligence

The main focus of this special issue is to bring together solutions from research and engineering for the automatic understanding of a complex scene, via a multimodal array of sensors with automation of adaptation as the theme connecting various research areas. Four papers comprise this special issue.     

A proposal of ubiquitous fuzzy computing for Ambient Intelligence

Ambient Intelligence is considered as the composition of three emergent technologies: Ubiquitous Computing, Ubiquitous Communication and Intelligent User Interfaces. The aim of integration of aforesaid technologies is to make wider the interaction between human beings and information technology equipment through the usage of an invisible network of ubiquitous computing devices composing dynamic computational-ecosystems capable of satisfy the users requirements. Many works focus the attention on the interaction from users to devices in order to allow an universal and immediate access to available content and services provided by the environment. This paper, vice versa, focuses on the reverse interactions, from devices to users, in order to realize a collection of autonomous control services able to minimize the human effort. In particular, by merging computational intelligence methodologies with standard Web technologies we show how ubiquitous devices will be able to find the suitable set of intelligent services in a transparent way.     

Ambient Intelligence—the Next Step for Artificial Intelligence

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.     

Developing Ambient Intelligence Systems: A Solution based on Web Services

Enabling the ambient intelligence vision means that consumers will be provided with universal and immediate access to available content and services, together with ways of effectively exploiting them. Concentrating on the software system development aspect, this means that the actual implementation of any ambient intelligence application requested by a user can only be resolved at runtime according to the user's specific situation. This paper introduces a base declarative language and associated core middleware, which supports the abstract specification of Ambient Intelligence applications together with their dynamic composition according to the environment. The proposed solution builds on the Web services architecture, whose pervasiveness enables both services availability in most environments, and specification of applications supporting automated retrieval and composition. In addition, dynamic composition of applications is dealt in a way that enforces the quality of service of deployed applications in terms of security and performance.     

Interactive theatre via mixed reality and Ambient Intelligence

Our system of Mixed Reality and 3D Live with Ambient Intelligence (AmI) is indented to bring performance art to the people while offering to the performance artists a creative tool to extend the grammar of the traditional theatre. Actors and dancers at different places are captured by multiple cameras and their images are rendered in 3D form in such a way that they can play and dance together on the same place in real-time. Our Quanticum Man is an allegory of the time of the General Relativity and the matter of the Quantum Mechanics. The new type of interactive theatre enables social networking by supporting simultaneous participants in human-to-human social manner.     

面向服务构架的智能环境研究

介绍了智能环境的概念,分析了其研究的相关问题,提出一个面向服务架构的智能环境框架.结合面向服务架构的特点,具体分析了智能环境中的智能感知、服务的描述、服务注册和发现机制,以及服务的动态调度和集成等相关问题.     

Distributing emotional services in Ambient Intelligence through cognitive agents

Ambient Intelligence (AmI) is a pervasive computing paradigm whose main aim is to design smart environments composed of invisible, connected, intelligent and interactive systems, which are naturally sensitive and responsive to the presence of people, providing advanced services for improving the quality of life. Nevertheless, AmI systems are more than a simple integration among computer technologies; indeed, their design can strongly depend upon psychology and social sciences aspects describing, analysing and forecasting the human being status during the system’s decision making. This paper introduces a novel methodology for AmI systems designing that exploits a service-oriented architecture whose functionalities are performed by a collection of so-called cognitive agents. These agents exploit a novel extension of Fuzzy Cognitive Maps benefiting on the theory of Timed Automata and a formal method for representing human moods in order to distribute emotional services able to enhance users’ comfort and simplify the human/systems interactions. As will be shown in experimental results, where a usability study and a confirmation of expectations test have been performed, the proposed approach maximizes the system’s usability in terms of efficiency, accuracy and emotional response.     

智能门户搜索引擎技术

随着Web息量迅猛增长．传统搜索引擎所查询到的结果由于检索的内容过多,从而造成用户检索到的信息准确度不高,基于智能门户搜索引擎技术的研究已成为搜索引擎发展的新主题。该文详细介绍了智能门户搜索引擎技术,并在此基础上设计了一个智能门户搜索引擎的系统模型(Domain-based Seal-ch Engine,DBSE),该模型采用了多Agent技术以帮助用户快速有效地挖掘有用信息。     

Combining the real world with simulations for a robust testing of Ambient Intelligence services

This paper proposes a general architecture for testing, validating and verifying Ambient Intelligence (AmI) environments: AmISim. The development of AmI is a very complex task because this technology must often adapt to contextual information as well as unpredictable behaviours and environmental features. The architecture presented deals with AmI applications in order to cover the different components of these kinds of systems: environment, users, context and adaptation. This architecture is the first one that is able to cover all these features, which are needed in a full AmI system. The paper shows that AmISim is able to cover a complete AmI system and to provide a framework which can test scenarios that would be impossible to test in real environments or even with previous simulation approaches. Simulated and real elements coexist in AmISim for a robust testing, validation and verification of the AmI systems, which provide an easier and less costly deployment.     

Augmented interaction with physical books in an Ambient Intelligence learning environment

This paper presents an augmented reality environment for students' improved learning, which is based on unobtrusive monitoring of the natural reading and writing process. This environment, named SESIL, is able to perform recognition of book pages and of specific elements of interest within a page, as well as to perceive interaction with actual books and pens/pencils, without requiring any special interaction device. As a result, unobtrusive, context - aware student assistance can be provided. In this way, the learning process can be enhanced during reading with the retrieval and presentation of related material and, during writing, by the provision of assistance to accomplish writing tasks whenever appropriate. The SESIL environment is evaluated in terms of robustness, accuracy and usability.     

A design-and-play approach to accessible user interface development in Ambient Intelligence environments

User interface development in Ambient Intelligence (AmI) environments is anticipated to be a particularly complex and programming intensive endeavor. Additionally, AmI environments should ensure accessibility and usability of interactive technologies by users with different characteristics and requirements in a mainstream fashion. Therefore, appropriate user interface development methods and tools are required, capable of both reducing development efforts and ‘injecting’ accessibility issues into AmI applications from the early design stages. This paper introduces two tools, named AmIDesigner and AmIPlayer, which have been specifically developed to address the above challenges through automatic generation of accessible Graphical User Interfaces in AmI environments. The combination of these two tools offers a simple and rapid design-and-play approach, and the running user interfaces produced integrate non-visual feedback and a scanning mechanism to support accessibility. AmIDesigner and AmIPlayer have been evaluated to assess their usability by designers, and have been put to practice in the redevelopment of a light control application in a smart environment as a case study demonstrating the viability of the design-and-play approach. The results confirm the usefulness and usability of the tools themselves. Overall, the proposed approach has the potential to contribute significantly to the development, up-take and user acceptance of AmI technologies in the home environment.     

Intelligence modeling for coping strategies to reduce emergency department overcrowding in hospitals

Emergency department (ED) crowding is a common challenge for hospitals across the globe. The efficiency and effectiveness of ED services can be improved through identifying the causing ED crowding and modeling the prediction of ED crowding. The nature of ED crowding involves a complex dynamics of intertwined processes and workflows among the different departments within a hospital; thus, the problem cannot be tackled by examining ED alone. It is important to build a model which can identify the factors causing ED crowding and validate the coping strategies of hospitals. This study proposes an intelligence model which first introduces the well-know decision tree method to fit an accommodated nonlinear association and obtain intelligent grading rules of ED crowding; Then it integrates the intelligent grading rules and indexes of coping strategies to construct a hierarchical linear model. The results simultaneously solved traditional modeling issue of high correlation among independent variables and un-convergence. It also provides a better illustration of ED crowding phenomena with more accurate model fitting, as well as a clear linkage between coping strategies and the factors causing ED crowding. Furthermore, our proposed model can have a better understanding of problem nature and guild a better bed management for decision makers. It can also detect intelligently whether hospitals have drawn up active or passive bed management strategies to cope with ED crowding.     

基于域的主动代码定位和撤销机制

主动网络的可编程特性在为网络提供了快速部署新协议和安装新服务能力的同时也带来了新的安全隐患,主动代码的定位和撤销就是其中的一个关键问题。该文提出了一种基于域的主动代码的定位和撤销机制,该机制不仅消耗资源少,响应时间快,而且还使用了认证和授权策略来保证节点的安全性。     

Ubiquitous Agents for Ambient Ecologies

The cost of state-of-the-art devices and robots is critical for the uptake of Ambient Intelligence (AmI). One way to utilize low-cost hardware for both devices and robots is to run smart software remotely as agents deployed on computationally rich environments. In this context, the devices and the robots can be seen as the Avatars of agents, while the way devices and agents are related may be considered as an Ambient Ecology. We show how the application of a middleware platform called EVATAR realizes this vision by exemplifying the main issues with a multi-robot and a smart-home scenarios.