Ebook: Workshop Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Intelligent Environments

This is the third in a series of workshops hosted by the Intelligent Environments Conference which, itself, is the seventh edition in a series of highly successful conferences that were organized in Colchester, UK (2005), Athens, Greece (2006), Ulm, Germany (2007), Seattle, USA (2008), Barcelona, Spain (2009) and Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia (2010). This year the event will be held at Nottingham Trent University, United Kingdom, a beautiful city, famed for its connection to the tale of Robin Hood. The workshops provide a forum for scientists, researchers and engineers from both industry and academia to engage in discussion on newly emerging, or rapidly evolving topics that have yet to reach the level of maturity associated with conferences or journals. This year we are pleased to include the following workshops:

• AITAmI'11 – “The 6th Artificial Intelligence Techniques for Ambient Intelligence”. This workshop focuses on the special relevance of AI technology to the goals of Ambient Intelligence and practical applications. It was organised by Juan Carlos Augusto (University of Ulster at Jordanstown) and Diane Cook (Washington State University).

• CS'11 – ‘The 2nd International Workshop on Creative Science: Science Fiction Prototyping for Engineering and Product Innovation". This workshop explores the use of science fiction as a means to motivate and direct research into new technologies by creating science fiction stories grounded in current science and engineering research. It was organised by Brian David Johnson (INTEL), Victor Callaghan (University of Essex) and Simon Egerton (Monash University Sunway Campus, Malaysia).

• HCIAmI’11 – “The 2nd International Workshop on Human-Centric Interfaces for Ambient Intelligence”. This workshop provides a forum to explore multi-disciplinary human-centric interfaces for Ambient Intelligence applications. It was organised by Hamid Aghajan (Stanford University, USA), Ramón López-Cø'zar Delgado (University of Granada, Spain) and Ronald Poppe (Twente University, Netherlands).

• IC'11 – “The International Workshop on the Intelligent Campus”. This workshop addresses the next generation intelligent campus environment that takes a holistic view of incorporating several themes of campus intelligence, such as iLearning, iSocial, iGreen, iHealth, iManagement, and iGovernance. This year there is a special focus on the iLearning theme of iCampus, with two newly-created tracks: “Track 1: Immersive Education Spaces” & “Track 2: Educational Technology”. It was organised by Jason Ng (Etisalat BT Innovation Center), Michael Gardner (Essex University), Minjuan Wang (San Diego State University), and Vic Callaghan (Essex University).

• SciT'11 – “The 1st International Workshop on Scientific Theatre: A Multidisciplinary Approach to Designing Intelligent Environments”. This workshop addresses the establishment of multidisciplinary forum, based on the use of the creative arts as means to convey scientific achievements to as wide an audience as is possible, and demonstrating ways of applying technology to advance art and enhance social engagement. It was organised by Yevgeniya Kovalchuk (University of Essex, UK).

• SOOW'11 – “The 2nd International Workshop on Smart Offices and Other Workplaces”. This workshop examines the intelligent workplace and includes issues ranging from building services through intelligent media to the use of expert system for decision making and stress reduction. It was organised by Peter Mikulecký (University of Hradec Kralove, Czech Republic).

• WISHWell'11 – “The 3rd International Workshop on Intelligent Environments Supporting Healthcare and Well-being”. The workshop explores pervasive healthcare technology solutions within the hospital and the home targeting an assortment of patient conditions and circumstances. It was organised by John O'Donoghue (University College Cork, Eire) and Juan Carlos Augusto (University of Ulster at Jordanstown, United Kingdom).

As is evident from this list, the IE11 workshops address a diverse set of topics. The formats are equally diverse ranging from regular lectures to practical sessions involving over 80 presentations.

Victor Zamudio and Victor Callaghan (the two Victors!) took over running the workshops from Juan Carlos Augusto who started the IE workshop stream in 2008 and ran them for 3 years before becoming the IE11 conference programme chair in 2011. Vic Callaghan founded the IE conferences back in 2005 being a programme chair until this year when he swapped with Juan to take on the workshop chair. Interestingly, Vic had expected this to be a lighter job than chairing the main conference but quickly discovered it was, if anything, more work intensive being akin to running a collection of mini-conferences!

Of course, as with any successful event, there are numerous people to thank. We are especially grateful to our organizing committees, whose voluntary and unpaid work made these workshops possible. We are also grateful to the many unnamed local organizers who behind the scenes have tirelessly worked to make these workshops a success. In addition, we are especially grateful to Nottingham Trent University, and especially Dr Ahmad Lofti whose support has been key to the success of these workshops. Likewise we are also grateful to BT and INTEL for their sponsorship. We also wish to acknowledge you; the readers we may never meet but who build on the work reported in this volume and thereby share our interests and visions. We hope you will have found these proceedings interesting and useful. Of course we reserve our special thanks for the researchers, who do the work, achieve the advances, set the research agenda and then come to Intelligent Environments workshops to report on this; your participation is greatly valued and is the principal reason this workshop event is such success.

Best wishes,

Victor Zamudio, Vic Callaghan – IE'11 Workshop Chairs

Juan Carlos Augusto, Diane Cook – AITAmI'11

Brian David Johnson, Simon Egerton, Victor Callaghan – CS'11

Hamid Aghajan, Ramón Lø'pez-Cø'zar Delgado, Ronald Poppe – HCIAmI'11

Jason Ng, Minjuan Wang, Michael Gardner, Victor Callaghan – IC'11

Yevgeniya Kovalchuk – SciT'11

Peter Mikulecký – SOOW'11

John O'Donoghue, Juan Carlos Augusto – WISHWell'11

July 2011

This keynote will discuss the necessity of so-called companion properties for ambient intelligence applications. These non-functional properties are the key to successful, credible and user accepted ambient intelligence systems and can be achieved by a combination of technologies like situation recognition and interpretation, planning and decision support and, probably most important, adaptive multimodal user interaction capabilities.

The advent and increasing trend of context-aware systems push current systems towards new requirements. Context-aware systems are usually built upon a middleware to ease its development and fulfill those requirements, being provided of robustness and services to be used very quickly. However, most of those middlewares were designed thinking of small context-aware systems rather than big world-wide interconnected systems. Some of the requirements of these scenarios not fulfilled by the former middlewares such as mobility, scalability and dynamicity are addressed in this work providing a context-aware middleware of distributed rule reasoning capabilities.

The human activity monitoring in a smart environment requires to compare human behavior registered through sensors with human activity models. However, due to the erratic nature of human behavior, the building of these models is one of the major issues to be overcome for those who work with intelligent environment. This work proposes a general theoretical approach to define human activity models, based on the combination of a Knowledge Engineering methodology and a Machine Learning process which are both funded on a general theory of dynamic process modeling.

This paper illustrates our work concerning the development of a layered architecture for deciding the situation-aware behavior of a Smart Home Environment (SHE). In the proposed approach, the surface level is directly embedded in the environment, while deeper levels represent the control software and perform progressively abstract and conceptual activities whose results can be fed back to the outside world (environment, user, supervisor). In particular, the reasoning layer is in charge of interpreting and transforming the data, collected through sensors of the smart environment, into high level knowledge about the situation. On the other hand, the learning layer, based on Inductive Logic Programming, suitably exploits the interaction of the user with the system to refine the user model and improve its future behavior. Finally, we provide the description of a typical scenario in which the proposed architecture might operate, along with a practical example of how the system might work.

As creative creatures, people like to change and customise their environments. In the computing world, this has led to a growing demand for people to be able to customise their ‘electronic spaces such personal computers and mobile phones’. In this work-in-progress paper, we argue that this reasoning can also be applied to AmI (Ambient Intelligence) Environment. However, existing computational models have significant shortcoming that act as a barrier to implementing the concept of end-user development in AmI environments. This paper presents a scenario that illustrates the need for a more functional and robust underlying computational model. We argue that OO (object-oriented) concepts could form the basis of such a system and, to these ends, present preliminary ideas for an object oriented end-user development system for building AmI applications.

Modern technology has brought many changes to our everyday lives. Our need to be in constant touch with others has been met with the cellphone, which has become our companion and the convergence point of many technological advances. The combination of capabilities such as browsing the Internet and GPS reception has multiplied the services and applications based on the current location of the user. However, providing the user with these services has certain drawbacks. Although map navigation systems are the most meaningful way of displaying this information, the user still has to manually set up the filter in order to obtain a non-bloated visualization of the map and the available services. To tackle this problem, we present here a semantic multicriteria ant colony algorithm capable of learning the user's routes, including associated context information, and then predicting the most likely route a user is following, given his current location and context data. We also propose an affective component for the algorithm that will add a value to routes likelihood score so it will emphasize those predicted routes that could affect positively user experience or emotional state. This knowledge could then be used as the basis for offering services related to his current (or most likely future) context data close to the path he is following.

Ambient Assisted Living environments projects arise as technological responses of the scientific community to problems associated with the populationageing phenomenon. In theory, these environments should allow de-localization of healthcare services delivery and management to the home, thus containing the economic and social costs associated with old age. The VirtualECare project is one of those environments, enhanced with proactive techniques for a better user experience, focused on elderly chronic patients, through the ability of constant learning and adaption based in user interaction and its contexts. This learning and, consequently, adaption needs, however, unequivocally user identification, especially in multi-user environments. Traditional identification techniques and methodologies are not suitable for these scenario since, usually, require user interaction and wireless identification technique (e.g. RFID, Bluetooth) are very exposed to personification. In order to obtain the expected results we needed a more advanced technology. One possible, appropriate and already fairly developed technique is Facial Recognition. In this paper we present the VirtualECare project approach to Facial Recognition authentication techniques its advantages, disadvantages and possible implementations paths.

In this work preliminary results of the implementation of a service robot is presented. A service robot needs to recognize his environment in order to be able to navigate with freedom, and therefore a robot needs localization and mapping system in order for the robot to be able to perform different task such as searching and relocating objects. This work shows an inexpensive robot that was built with a Lego Mindstorms NXT kit. This kind of robots can be constructed in different morphological configurations due to the capacity of quickly assemble and disassemble. On the other hand the communication based on the Bluetooth protocol allows an efficient way of transmitting information between the robot and the computer; in this case the measurement of the distance from the robot to the wall, enables the creation of a map of the environment in real time. In this project the robot was programmed using Lejos, which enables efficient programming using the Java Virtual Machine. In this project the NXT set-up with the ultrasonic sensor to detect the distance to obstacles and to scroll using the wheel, use the SLAM shifting technique, using an adaptation of this to simulate the instinct of a rodent or wall follower, to move and explore in an unknown environment and simultaneously plot a sketch of the area explored.

There are relatively few scientific or technology breakthroughs whose significance is immediately and widely apparent. Without context, most scientific or technological developments run the risk of seeming trivial or irrelevant in the eyes of the general public. Historical context helps explain the nature of a discovery or innovation; but explaining its significance frequently requires a degree of extrapolation, notably descriptions of potential consequences and ramifications. communicators thus almost always need to include an element of forecasting in their presentations of research findings – typically based on researchers' own thinking about where their work may lead. This talk will illustrate the various ways in which reporting is done in the future tense; present some examples of how it works (and where it fails); outline the constraints on this approach; and suggest some similarities with the SF prototyping process.

This paper is an introduction to the short story and science fiction prototype The Machinery of Love and Grace. We cover a brief overview of the goals of science fiction prototyping as well as an example for how both Albert Einstein and Sigmund Freud used a very similar process to achieve greatness in their work. Finally we look into the specific science behind the story The Machinery of Love and Grace and conclude with the full story.

In this invited paper we describe a competition that aims to engage a wide section of society in the exploration of the future nature of technology. In particular the competition will examine one of the most controversial aspects of Artificial Intelligence, specifically the concept of freewill. What is freewill? Can machines achieve it? What are the consequences for society should that happen? These are just some of the tantalising questions that flow from such a vision. For this competition, we roll back to a more basic stage and explore the basic issues of trying to construct a robot controller that displays behaviour that is analogous to freewill. We do this by offering a set of online tools that enable participants in the competition to create a bespoke controller for a simulated robot “Jimmy”; a waiter working in a futuristic bar set in a virtual world. This paper explains the motivation, design, implementation and rules for this competition

‘When it changed’ and ‘Litmus’ have been two recent book projects from Comma Press, which brought together authors and scientists to produce anthologies of science-based short stories. Each story arose from the direct collaboration of one author and one scientist, and each was followed by a discussion of the motivating science. In this talk I will describe the interaction between myself as a scientist and two of the authors, our process of figuring out how to work together and the science of the two stories produced.

In this Science Fiction prototyping article I present a future proposition of people interacting with technologically-designed or socially engineered producer entities. Entities customized specifically to solve complex societal problems. It is within this consumption/production interaction space that I propose that entrepreneurs will be able to exploit high revenue streams and develop business models and value chains from their innovations. I explore the concept of interaction space entities by means of a fictional reflection of how life might be in the interaction space in the future through two vignettes and a factual discussion of the research inspiring these views.

In this Science Fiction Prototype (SFP) we explore the evolving relationship between technology and people. We do this by considering what may seem to be two irreconcilable aspirations of the human condition; the desire for utilizing ever increasingly sophisticated technology in our life whilst at the same time preserving the spiritual values that make us human. Superficially it would seem that these two forces in our life are pulling us in opposite directions. Can the forces of technology and spirituality be balanced in modern life? To investigate this issue we invent a future in which nano-computing technology is available for sale in many forms. One form is smart-paint called “iSkin” which, when painted on surfaces, turns them into interactive multi-media mediums. The characters in this story use this “magical” paint to create an immersive reality environment, the “WonderHome” in which reality and virtuality become confused in an intoxicating mix of sensory experiences that causes a madness known as “Obsessive-Compulsive Technophilia Disorder (OCTD)”. In the story a cure to this emerges in the form of the ancient Chinese practice of Chan, a form of Buddhism.

This paper presents two fictional stories describing an augmented reality system that helps users learn history in an entertaining way. A complete impression of the surrounding environment is achieved by virtual human agents with sophisticated AI and thorough interaction with other users.

For those, who measure the length of their lives in numbers of experiences instead of years lived; for those, who strive to pack the knapsack of their lives optimally, maximizing its utility. Interfaces can help to go beyond the traditional trio of body, mind, and spirit serving as doors connecting them. These doors, however, could allow for an unauthorized entry and pose threat to our safety, if not designed or protected properly. This science fiction prototype allows the reader to peep through one of the doors, imprudently left opened by someone from the era of Halls – the era that followed the times of virtual reality, computer games, and the Internet.

The short story “Song of Iliad” describes a future music therapy “performance space” in which children around the globe create music together, form a band and perform for others. The story encapsulates the human-driven design approach and presents an example of how future design processes might exploit emotion-driven design in creating highly personified products and services.