Ebook: Intelligent Environments 2016

Intelligent Environments (IEs) refer to physical spaces in which IT and other pervasive computing technologies are woven and used to achieve specific goals for the user, the environment, or both. IEs have the ultimate objectives of enriching user experience, improving the management of that environment and increasing user awareness.

Research in IEs is driven by inventive, innovative and fast-paced ideas, and, as such, there is a sense of urgency in materializing them, assessing their practical implications, and verifying whether they deliver their promised results. The mantra for research in this area is well conveyed by a thought brought to us by Steve Jobs: “Let's go invent tomorrow instead of worrying about what happened yesterday”. Workshops, as brief gatherings towards the establishment of collaborations and incitement of creativity, are the ideal venue for creating and sharing this “tomorrow”.

The 12th International Conference on Intelligent Environments focuses on the development of advanced intelligent environments, as well as newly emerging and rapidly evolving topics. In the present edition, we are pleased to include in this volume the proceedings of the following workshops and symposia that emphasize multi-disciplinary and transversal aspects of IEs, as well as cutting-edge topics:

• 5th International Workshop on Smart Offices and Other Workplaces (SOOW'16);

• 5th International Workshop on the Reliability of Intelligent Environments (WoRIE'16);

• 1st International Workshop on Legal Issues in Intelligent Environments (LIIE'2016);

• 2nd International Symposium on Future Intelligent Educational Environments and Learning (SOFIEE'16);

• 2nd International Workshop on Future Internet and Smart Networks (FI&SN'2016);

• International Workshop on Intelligent Environments Supporting Healthcare and Well-Being (WISHWell'2016);

• International Workshop on Computation Sustainability, Technologies and Applications (CoSTA'2016);

• Creative Science 2016 (CS'16) and Cloud-of-Things 2016 (CoT'16);

• Workshop on Wireless Body Area Networks for Personal Monitoring in Intelligent Environments (WBAN-PMIE);

• Physical Computing Workshop.

As is visible from the list, the workshops and symposia organized in conjunction with the main conference provide a forum for researchers, scientists and engineers to engage in many interesting and active discussions that will encourage further research in these key areas of Intelligent Environments.

The proceedings contain a series of contributions reflecting the latest research developed in IEs and related areas, focused on stretching the borders of the current state of the art and contributing to an ever increasing establishment of IEs in the real world.

It is our aim to inspire readers in their own work, in the hope that reading these proceedings plants the seeds for new, interesting, and original ideas.

We would like to thank all the contributing authors, as well as the members of the Organizing Committees and Program Committees of the workshops and symposia for their highly valuable work, which contributed to the success of the Intelligent Environments 2016 event. We are also grateful to the conference organizers and local staff who worked for the success of this event.

Thank you for your help, this event would not exist without your contribution.

As a final note, the Workshops Chairs would like to take the opportunity to thank Professor Juan Carlos Augusto and the other members of the IE'2016 organization for the trust they placed on us.

We are looking forward to seeing you all in London and actively participating in these exciting workshops.

September 2016

Paulo Novais, Universidade do Minho, Portugal

Shin'ichi Konomi, University of Tokyo, Japan

Workshops Chairs of IE'16

The topic of Group Decision Support Systems (GDSS) is a not a recent one. In fact, it has been studied for the last three decades. In this work, we deal with the topic of Intelligent Reports in GDSS' context. A defective interaction between the system and the decision-maker may lead to the complete failure of the GDSS. However, the study on how and which kind of information should be exposed to decision-makers is almost non-existent. Therefore, it is important to create reports adapted to the specific necessities of each decision-maker so that each one can acknowledge the advantage to use the system and feel motivated to do so. We believe that in this work, we approach important points that require special attention when developing Intelligent Reports. We navigate through all the important factors that affect decision-makers while making a decision. We detail each point and link them to all related questions and to which kind of structure an Intelligent Report should have in order to not compromise the success of the GDSS.

This paper presents a work in progress study focusing on evaluating the environmental conditions and its influence on students' academic performance. The motivation is to find link between the environmental factors such as temperature, humidity, indoor air quality, lightning and the sense of comfort of individual students measured by the specific body movements. The paper elaborates on the sensor network architecture and the movement identification as well as on the multi-factor study design. The results of this study will be used to design a smart classroom that would control for identified influencing factors in order to improve students' comfort and provide for better academic performance.

Following the concept of ubiquity further on, Ambient Intelligence (AmI) is focused on technologies and approaches for development of intelligent environments aiming at supporting their users. Architectures of these environments are usually modeled by multi-agent systems, facilitating thus investigation of various processes enabling the environments' functionalities. In this scope, it is challenging to study decision processes used by individual components (agents) of the environment in mutual cooperation for creating decisions about ways how and when to support particular users activities adequately. A recent project DEPIES "Decision Processes in Intelligent Environments", supported by the Czech Scientific Foundation in the period of 2015 to 2017, is oriented on investigation of various decision processes that could appear in various types of intelligent environments, modeled by adequate multiagent architectures. This paper aims at presenting information about the project goals, its methodology and approaches used as well as intended to be used in near future. A special part of the paper is devoted to possibilities of modeling and simulation of decision processes using the AnyLogic multimethod simulation tool.

The emerging Internet of Things opens endless possibilities to the contemporary notion of smart offices, where employees can benefit for automations so that the workplace can maximize employees productivity and enterprise performance. However, usually the integration of new components in smart environments is not straightforward. In this article we propose the use of a semantic vocabulary to define this automation, and an architecture consisting of a web task automation server and mobile task automation components that enable contextual services. One the one hand, the architecture exhibits flexibility to interconnect internet services and devices. On the other side, the use of semantic technologies provides semantic interoperability and expressivity for the automation definition.

This paper presents an architecture for a system that assists workers in manual tasks. The system integrates different assistance modalities applicable for assembly and maintenance. It supports several operational environments and assists the worker by providing instructions for sequential processes. The system is not limited to specific assistance modalities and currently integrates augmented reality on multiple devices like smart glasses or tablets and enhanced sensor technologies to adapt assistance to the context. The instructions are formalized using entity-relationship diagrams and an information model focusing on AR-based assistance is developed. Finally, the system architecture used to integrate the different modalities in a modular manner is shown.

We present a formal model for modelling Event-Condition-Action Rules by partitioning a state space and evolution function taking into account the features that are typical of Intelligent Environments. This model allows for a precise definition of formal requirements and for their efficient verification.

In this paper we present a practical solution to the problem of connecting “real world” data exchanged between sensors and actuators with the higher level of abstraction used in frameworks for multiagent systems. In particular, we show how to connect an industry-standard publish-subscribe communication protocol for embedded systems called MQTT with two Belief-Desire-Intention agent modelling and programming languages: Jason/AgentSpeak and Brahms. In the paper we describe the details of our Java implementation and we release all the code open source.

The current proliferation of electronic things and smart devices are the main cause of arising of the Internet of Things, Internet of Services, and Internet of Agents approaches. This paper presents a framework for the development of soft real-time applications based on the Service Oriented Computing and Computer-Based Agents currently known as Internet of Services and Internet of Agents, respectively. The framework includes six dimensions—agent, interaction, environment, planning, organization, and normative—which are organized in order to accomplish the new current challenges of the Internet of Things. In addition, the framework also allows designing real-time agents through the inclusion of real-time restrictions in agent goals and plans in order to build real-time applications of Internet of Things.

Ambient Intelligence Healthcare Systems (AmI-HSs) are increasingly being deployed in hospitals, nursing homes, medical environment with the aim of supporting physicians to manage the complexity of performing varied medical activities. Such systems have to be able to handle multiple medical devices, and human activities in a dynamic environment in which people and things can evolve over time as well as change their position with respect to the operational ambient. Design reliable AmI-HSs is of great importance since such system are considered safety-critical, but no software development life cycle (SDLC) exists that supports a design for reliability approach suited for AmI-HS, which must abide by international regulations to guarantee safety and effectiveness. To fill this gap, in this work a evidence-oriented, risk-driven design methodology is proposed. The novelty of our approach consists of interleaving risk management activities within the SDLC, and by guiding the design using evidence produced via a probabilistic risk assessment approach.

The development of collaborative systems has traditionally involved an enormous amount of complexity, due to their distributed nature, the number of interactions between remote users and the need to support optimal persistence and communication mechanisms. Nonetheless, the growing success of the Web 2.0 has increased the interest towards the development of collaborative Web applications. However, Web standards have not supported the required mechanisms to develop efficient and quality collaborative applications until recently. This paper presents the most recent and newest standards and technologies supporting the development of these types of applications. Moreover, the experience of applying those standards and technologies to develop VIRTRAEL is presented. VIRTRAEL is a Web platform supporting the evaluation and intervention of elderly people in a collaborative manner.

The intrinsic characteristics of modern society lead to an increasing surveillance both in the private sector and public sector. The emergence of new ubiquitous and pervasive technologies, although directed to the fulfillment of everyday's needs, allow, nevertheless, a greater control and supervision of all citizens, which reminds some of authors of the panopticon proposed by Jeremy Bentham and later developed by Michel Foucault. We discuss the fundamental ideas underpinning the model of panopticism and consider whether they are able to portray adequately the current state of affairs, in particular the tendencies observed after the exposure of NSA activities of global surveillance.

The use of electronic communications and open networks bring along serious risks for the fundamental rights of citizens. Cloud computing, RFIDs, ambient intelligence, software agents bring with them the danger of the “homo conectus”. As an example of the possibilities of control brought along by technologies, it must be analyzed the employment relationship. It must be enquired the existence of a right to disconnect.

A Smart House Welfare Technology project to facilitate the independent living of older people at their home is being developed at the University College of South-east Norway (USN). Smart Houses are a promising and cost-effective option of improving access to home care for older people. The project models behavior patterns using sensor information, detects when deviations of these patterns occur, and notify caretakers in case of a potential dangerous situation. In order to implement the project, it is necessary to consider the legal areas related to Smart Houses development. Therefore, the purpose of this article is to describe existing legal aspects on the deployment of Smart Houses for older people, with emphasis on Norway. The main legal aspects identified were data privacy, data access and management, stakeholders interests , and informed consent.

This study, performed at the request of a multinational telecommunications company based in the Unites States, evaluated potential cross-cultural differences that could impact instructional design when developing training for a global audience, specifically Chinese engineers. The research team surveyed 66 participants from the target audience to identify their learning preferences for process and procedure-based tasks, as well as potential cultural influences that could impact training design. Longstanding cultural differences between the U.S. and China may impact the effectiveness of selected instructional design methods. However, some of the popular cultural models tend to stereotype learners by their geographical regions. This study discovers that these stereotypical generalizations about mainland Chinese learners may be called into question by the rapidly shifting social, cultural, and economic conditions in China. This study suggests the following guidelines when designing training for Chinese engineers: 1) Understand the complexity of the learning population; 2) Select instructional methods based on effectiveness for the task and the learning population's preferences; 3) Provide culturally sensitive options for resolving learner questions; and 4) Offer high quality translated materials when appropriate.

To promote learners' effective engagement in e-Learning course, this study designed and implemented an e-Learning course named Novice Teachers' Educational Technology Training Course for 279 teaching novices in a self-directed e-Learning environment. As students were engaged in the tasks, we monitored their engagement and conducted an evaluation on a micro-video that the students created by the two course designers. The study found that: 1) Process-oriented assessment which are behavioral engagements in self-directed e-Learning course can promote learners to finish the learning activity and get high scores. 2) High-level behavioral engagement does not equate to high-level cognitive engagement while learners' cognitive engagement is more important than behavioral engagement. 3) There exists differences between high-level and low-level learning achievement in the cognitive engagement of learning activities. High-level achievement learners are more actively participating in learning activities, such as reflection, doing, discussion and publishing works. Therefore, for course designers, they should design more learning activities which go from absorption to participation and to creation.