Ebook: Workshops Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Intelligent Environments

Workshops Proceedings of the 5th Int. Conf. on Intelligent Environments Barcelona, Spain, 19th of July, 2009

We are witnessing an historic technological revolution as computing reaches maturity to become immersed in our daily life to an extent that some decades ago was considered science fiction.

Advances in the engineering of sensing and acting capabilities distributed in wide range of specialized devices is providing at last an opportunity for the fundamental advances that computer science achieved in the past few decades to make an impact in our daily lives.

This technical confluence is matched by a unique historical context where users are better informed (and more aware of the benefits that technology can provide) and production of more complex systems is becoming more affordable. Sensors/actuators deployed in an environment (in this context it can be any physical space like a house, an office, a classroom, a car, a street, etc.) facilitate a link between an automated decision making system connected to that technologically enriched space. This computing empowered environment enables the provision of an intelligent environment, i.e., “a digital environment that proactively, but sensibly, supports people in their daily lives”. This is a very active area of research which is attracting an increasing number of professionals (both in academy and industry) worldwide.

The prestigious 5th International Conference on Intelligent Environments (IE'09) is focused in the development of advanced Intelligent Environments and stimulates the discussion on several specific topics which are crucial to the future of the area. As part of that effort to stimulate developing in critically important areas five workshops were supported as part of IE'09. This volume is the combined proceedings of those five workshops:

The Workshop on Digital Object Memories (DOMe'09) aims to bring together technical experts, artists, designers, and potential end-users of Digital Object Memories to explore the technical, social, privacy, and legal implications of digital object memory systems, to establish a common view on the underpinning requirements to digital memories, and to leverage cooperation in future activities. Digital Object Memories comprise hardware and software components that physically and/or conceptually associate structured and unstructured digital information with real-world objects in an application-independent manner. If constantly updated, the over time Digital Object Memories provide a meaningful record of an object's history and use. From a technical point of view, Digital Object Memories provide an open-loop infrastructure for the exchange of object-related information across application and environment boundaries, and as such allow for novel classes of applications in which rich object histories are created and exploited. From the user's point of view, Digital Object Memories create a new design space for everyday interactions and our relationship with physical artefacts. Digital Objects could become sites for their owners' personal stories, but also afford people the opportunity to explore an object's provenance and connections to other elements of physical and digital life.

The Workshop on RFID Technology: Concepts, Practices and Solutions (RFID'09). Bar codes technology has taken a leading role for more than 30 years in the identification field and RFID will soon replace it world wide in many applications. RFID offers promising opportunities for businesses (manufacturing, transport, logistics, pharmaceuticals, health, agriculture, security and more) and society, due to their power to report their location, identity and history. The unavoidable advance of RFID technology will have tremendous advantages and provide us with good applications in different areas. A few years ago, applications based on RFID systems were hardly used internally inside some companies. But, nowadays advances in electronics, wireless communication and networking architecture have facilitated the implementation of real deployments and commercial applications of systems based on RFID. RFID technology allows for the automation of data capturing along the supply chain. This makes product tracking and process control very dependable and accurate. Such reliability and accuracy is made possible because identification technology assigns a unique identification number to every single object (EPC: Electronic Product Code). Then an advanced data management system uses this number to allow access to the associated information in real time. A small radiofrequency tag is attached to the object to host its identification number. Thus, RF is used to read the tags (or write them in some cases) and the internet can be used to access data bases with the related information. This workshop should bring together researchers, engineers and practitioners interested in the advances and business applications of RFID.

The Workshop on Artificial Intelligence Techniques for Ambient Intelligence(AITAmI'09) aims at stimulating the development of human-like effectiveness within the artificial systems that provides support to humans. The event is not focused on a specific application area, although it welcomes reports on applications given the value to inform the community with regards to solutions for specific cases and to extrapolate strategies across areas. The overall emphasis is providing a forum where to analyze the possibilities that Artificial Intelligence has to make smart environments smarter. Learning, reasoning, adaptation, user preferences and needs discovery, sensible interaction with users, and many other topics form the regular agenda of this event. The content of this section includes the abstract of one keynote speaker, and papers accepted for oral and poster presentations. This section has two focused subsections on: “Mobile Robots in Automated Building Systems”, organized by Dr. A. Sgorbissa and “Intelligent Environments Supporting Healthcare and Well-being”, organized by Dr. J. O'Donoghue. All these contributions come from recognized professionals in the area which are reporting on their latest reflections and achievements in the problem of improving the decision making capabilities of intelligent environments.

The Workshop on Ethical Design of Ambient Intelligence (EDAmI'09) presents research and studies that have tackled with issues related to new technologies, ethics and user experience of ambient intelligence. One of the goals of the workshop is to focus on ethical guidelines that have been produced especially for the design of new technologies. Since Ambient Intelligence applications based on information and communication technology embedded in our environment and everyday objects will clearly raise several ethical issues it seems very timely to have a workshop dedicated to this issue. While the technical design of smart environments is still quite challenging, it seems that it could be even more challenging to do social design in this very broad area of research and development. The Workshop is organised by the Ethical Issues of Emerging Technologies (ETICA) and Micro-Nano integrated platform for transverse Ambient Intelligence applications (Minami) projects, which are looking at new technologies and subsequent arising ethical issues at both practical and theoretical levels. Co-chairs of the workshop come from both projects and include Veikko Ikonen, Catherine Flick, Philippe Goujon, Eija Kaasinen, Bernd Stahl and Kutoma Wakunuma who have all put lots of effort into reviewing all the contributions to ensure high quality papers to a broad audience of researchers, developers and designers. The papers of the workshop offer good state of the art view to the ethical design of Ambient Intelligence. Some of the papers are focused on practical issues of Ambience Intelligence while others look at the issue from a more theoretical perspective.

The Workshop on Smart Offices and Other Workplaces (SOOW'09) concentrates on intelligently helpful working environment that ensures broad but focused and personalized access to relevant information and knowledge resources, supporting thus both learning needs of the managers as well as their decision making activities. The area of smart offices and other workplaces covers naturally technical point of view, however, the workshop extends to much broader but related topics. Thus the contributions to the workshop range from autonomous multimedia gathering for meetings summaries, through contextual filtering of social interactions to exercise in the smart workplace. All accepted contributions in this section present an interesting aspect of the smart office and intelligent workplace domain and open space for further discussion hereby fulfilling the intent of the workshop.

As a result of the content focus of those events described above, this volume offers you a glance of the latest developments in key areas of the development of Intelligent Environments. It compiles the latest research done by active researchers in the area working to push ahead the boundaries of science and focused on achieving the deployment of intelligent environments in the real world. The effort of this professionals will influence the way we leave tomorrow's world. We hope you enjoy as a reader the content of this volume as much as the attendees of these workshops enjoyed the live presentation of the papers and the thought provoking discussions emanating from them.

The co-editors of this volume want to thank all the people that facilitated the realization of each one of these events: the remaining co-chairs of the workshops, the members of their Program Committees, which facilitated the review of papers, the external reviewers which also contributed to that task, and the conference organizers which provided a supportive environment for the realization of these events.

July 2009

Michael Schneider, Alexander Kröner, Patrick Olivier, and Peter Stephan, DOMe'09

Julio C. Encinas and Andrés García Higuera, RFID'09

Juan Carlos Augusto, Diane Cook, John O'Donoghue, and Antonio Sgorbissa, AITAmI'09

Veikko Ikonen, C. Flick, P. Gojoun, E. Kaasinen, B. Stahl, and K. Wakunuma, EDAmI'09

Peter Mikulecký, Pavel Čech, and Carlos Ramos, SOOW'09.

This paper reports the development of the Storytelling Memories project that formulates an interactive platform of memory immersion and experience within a museum environment. Specifically focusing on the memories of Bomber Command veterans the project utilises a touch sensitive surface as an interface between the viewer and the memories. A physical controller, when placed near the interface surface will “unlock” contained memories, enabling an open-ended storytelling experience. The design encourages the user to interact directly with the memories to create their own dialogue, with the intention of developing a more emotive, personal connection to the Veteran.

Taking on the role as an advocate for maintaining memories of displacement and migration for the Estonians, ‘Our New Home’, the Estonian Exhibition in 2007 and 2008 at the Powerhouse Museum of Design and Technology in Sydney, explored the narrative of the journey traversed by these individuals through a series of videos and a collection of artifacts. The objective of this paper is to present a concept of a follow-up exhibition. The focus will be the use of a single object from the Estonian community as a physical interface to open up digital content within a museum space that is augmented by technology. This concept aims to create a more experiential exhibition through visitors' participation.

This design proposal explores the concept of tangible digital mementos concealed inside baubles to be periodically revisited at special occasions. A photostory describes the concept and a technical description provides details. We outline how this concept could be extended to other objects, like tinsels, creating chains for stories.

The continuous collection of digital information via smart labels attached to physical objects is a promising way to support information availability across all stages of a product's lifecycle. Since such “digital product memories” may contain a vast amount of heterogeneous data, we expect a strong demand for user support in tasks related to information retrieval and discovery. In this article, we focus on the interaction between consumers and digital product memories in a retail scenario. On the basis of several prototype implementations, we summarize various ways of retrieving and presenting product-related information with the goal to shed some light upon aspects of relevance for the interaction between users and object memories in general.

Today, industrial production and supply chains are facing increased demands regarding flexibility and transparency of processes, caused by a trend for mass-customization and increasingly tighter regulations for the traceability of goods. To fulfill such challenging market demands, auto-ID technologies and semantic product descriptions are becoming part of future value chains. In this paper a modelling approach for a digital object memory (DOM) allowing for the attachment of product life cycle (PLC) information to everyday objects is presented. After reporting on the design aims, memory architecture and data structure, potential benefits of the chosen approach are presented.

This paper presents an exploration of the design of a memory model to support the management of persistent historical memories recorded by smart work objects. Analysis of a range of potential application categories and scenarios involving a smart work object is used to highlight the requirements and different characteristics of object memories. The analysis is then used to identify a range of pertinent issues and trade-offs which are used to inform the design of a generic parameterized memory model. A case study involving a smart object prototype in a workplace application scenario is then presented. The case study then analyzes how the proposed memory model can be applied to memories collected by the prototype.

In this paper, we present a Trace Based framework for managing and transforming traces of observation and use of real life objects. Considering trace based systems as Digital Object Memories (DOMe), we describe how our framework can be used to manage DOMe, using trace models and transformations to raise the abstraction level of traces and infer useful knowledge. To demonstrate our approach, we present a simple fictional example of smart home where the use and the state of some of everyday objects are observed, and the resulting traces of such observations are exploited as DOMe providing useful services.

There are many strategies to assist the user in pervasive environments. In some cases, the user has to achieve a goal according to a plan known by the environment. We address the issue of enabling the environment to be aware of which task of the plan is currently on-going. We present a strategy that makes use of temporal patterns called memory chronicles and that watches events that occur in object memories to recognize if they match any memory chronicle of any task of the plan. We take the example of a smart kitchen where tools and ingredients are considered as objects with memories and where the cook reproduces a recipe according to a recipe plan known by the kitchen. We explain how the kitchen makes use of memory chronicles to applying cooking task recognition and guide the cook through the recipe plan.

Today, RFID is used to identify a wide range of work pieces or individual products for tracking their movements through the logistics chain. For future purposes the idea of storing only a single ID must be extended to a Semantic Product Memory. This memory stores data of the complete product life cycle. This paper introduces a middleware for accumulating semantic product memories with sensor data. Our contribution encompasses software modules for a uniform sensor access, a sensor data ontology and a query interface for semantic product memory applications.

The preliminary design of a RFID (radiofrequency identification) based traceability system that will work in a slaughterhouse is presented. One of the aims of this system is to guarantee the quality requirements established by the CRDO (Consejo Regulador de la Denominación de Origen or the governing board of the protected designation of origin) “Jamón de Teruel” in its regulation. The information will be uniquely attached to the meat by means of RFID tags. The special adverse environmental conditions and the economic restrictions will strongly influence our design.

Distribution centers management is often a drawback for many companies in which delivery time is a critical factor. Especially for companies which have to send their products in small quantities to their customers, orders configuring and retrieving is a tedious and time consuming task. The use of mixed pallets formed with different classes of products is also a common practice for retailers. In order to improve performance of all this, this work proposes an experimental platform which represents the whole distribution center, and in which agents and RFID elements are used. Use of both RFID and agents is what is called here an RFID-Integrated Manufacturing System II. In addition to one virtual simulation, a physical model is being used in laboratory, composed of physical elements, which represents inputs and outputs of the warehouse in a distribution center. In this part is where physical RFID readers are included. They are in charge of taking information of loads getting in and out from the distribution center. The main target of this article is to show how these physical readers have been developed and what are the results of using them in the described physical platform.

Warehouses are essential components of logistics and supply chains. The performance of warehouse operations significantly affects the efficiency of the whole chain it belongs to. Radio frequency identification (RFID) is an emerging technology capable of providing real-time information about the location and properties of tagged object(s), such as people, equipment or products. The main objective of this article is to provide some insights into the practical benefits that can be drawn from the RFID technology in the context of warehouse operations management. To this end, we have developed a set of heuristic routing and sequencing procedures that take, and, alternatively, do not take into account, real time RFID information and compared their performance via simulation on a set of randomly generated although realistic warehouse scenarios.

Monitoring of environmental conditions of products in Supply Chains is commonly demanded by users in distribution and manufacturing processes. This information is also required by customers and authorities at final stages. Sometimes is difficult to collect this information, but especially when products are mixed within the same pallet. The process of mixing products in pallets is called “picking” and is a usual practice when customers require small quantities of each item. The number of resources used and the amount of mistakes involving this process suppose and important drawback for distribution companies. To tackle this lack of competiveness created, this work proposes a three-levels based RFID System. This system tries to improve the process of identification and monitoring of condition of products by means of passive and active tags, and the necessary RFID readers. The three different RFID components are connected to three different levels which Supply Chain has been divided in. RFID readers are actually in the third level, the highest one, are wirelessly connected using ZigBee networks. GPRS modules are also used here to provided real-time global localization of products (RTLS) in the moment of being accessed by readers.

This paper presents the analysis of a particular case of study consisting of a full pallet with multiple UHF tags readings using a single handheld reader and following the EPC Class1 Generation 2 standard [1]. To perform the analysis, an empirical experiment to obtain the RSSI (Received Strength Signal Intensity) transmitted from a handheld reader and the number of readings for each tag over a fixed period of time was designed. A pallet consisting of 15 boxes filled with plastic objects was employed and measures were taken at different reading angles. To experiment with different materials the configuration of the test pallet was modified including some metallic objects in two random boxes. Finally, some conclusions regarding correlation between RSSI, tag location and number of tag readings are presented for both cases.

The vision of the Internet of Things is challenging researchers from different fields with the common goal of designing innovative Internet-connected experiences or augmenting existing objects' capabilities with Internet-related features. During these first stages, researchers must explore new ways and concepts, and share the results with the scientific community. In this paper, we present our work on creating RFID-based smart gadgets in order to take Internet experience to the next level, merging the on-line and the tangible worlds into a single continuous space.

RFID tags are frequently being incorporated in supply chain systems that communicate with one another. Among other things, these systems communicate individually with RFID tags that pass through their field of presence as well as share data thus collected with other systems. There is a need to link these elements to develop e-infrastructures that enable an organization to learn and evolve, be agile and flexible, and adapt to the changing requirements of the highly inter-connected environment. While providing flexibility and evolvability we argue that the characteristics of information generated through Web Services and RFID tags enable us to provide services that are also stable and available. The stabilisation and convergence of standards for the execution of business processes, Web Services, RFID data enable us to design cyber-infrastructures that resemble the supply chain services they support. We develop a Web Services-based prototype for such applications.

NFC technology is being included in the new generation of cellular phones and with this, a new generation of services and applications. These new applications can be defined in any scope, e.g. shopping centre, transport, education, medicine, among others. All of them share the security problems that NFC inherits from RFID. Particularly in this paper are presented the deployment of services in medical environments that can be carried out with NFC and how to apply security measures in them. We must make a distinction between these defined services into two categories. On one hand, it will be based on cellular phone, where hospital staff (doctors, nurses, etc.) can manage patient's information, capture data from medical devices and manage of Electronic Health Record (EHR). On the other hand we find a set of services where NFC is used like communication channel to transfer information and to set up devices implanted in the human body (implants) and other solutions where we take the properties of electromagnetic induction of passive RFID to use as power source to recharge batteries of those implants (e.g. pacemakers, glucometers, etc.).

The importance of Customer Relationship Management(CRM) to firms in exceedingly competitive environments where customers have an increasing array of access to information cannot be overstated. There has been a resurgence in interest in CRM, specifically real-time CRM, as more data about customer behavior and means to processing these data to generate actionable policies become available. Recent years have also seen the emergence of Radio-Frequency Identification (RFID) tags in a wide variety of applications where item-level information can be beneficially leveraged to provide competitive advantage. We provide an overview of existing literature in this are and then propose a knowledge-based framework for real-time CRM incorporating RFID-generated data. We discuss possible scenarios where such a framework could be utilized.

This paper describes a data generator to synthesize sensor observations in the context of environment monitoring. The overall goal of our work is to monitor the well-being of occupant(s) in a home. Sensors are embedded in a smart home to unobtrusively record environmental parameters. Based on the sensor observations, behavior analysis and modeling are performed. Behavior modeling and analysis require large data sets to be collected over long periods of time to achieve the level of accuracy expected. A data generator – was developed based on initial data i.e. data collected over periods lasting weeks to facilitate concurrent data collection, and development of modeling algorithms. The data generator is based on statistical inference techniques to produce models. Variation is introduced into the data by perturbing the models.

Ambient Intelligence (AmI) is characterized by dynamic ensembles of devices that offer individual services to the user in an unobtrusive manner. For more advanced services often the cooperation of devices is required which can be accomplished by automatic composition of services. AI planning is one possibility to realize service composition. We introduce an architecture containing a service composer that uses AI planning to compose services in AmI environments. The composer can be seen as an enhanced meta planner that uses service technologies. It makes use of three strategies for selecting planners and a heuristic to cancel planners. This design is based on extensive experimental evaluation in which we analyzed the behavior of planners. The overall goal of the design is to balance between runtime of planning processes, used resources, and erroneously not returned planning results.

Our proposal is aimed at achieving a reliable control architecture for intelligent environments. This approach is implemented in a professor's simulated office. To that end, adaptive Neuro-Fuzzy training of Sugeno-type fuzzy inference systems are used. Experimental results and conclusions are shown, stressing the relevance of this approach inspired by the ambient intelligence metaphor in the adaptation of the environment to the professor's physical and emotional conditions.