This book contains selected papers from the first international meeting Ambient Intelligence Forum – AmIF 2008 in Hradec Králové, Czech Republic. The forum is intended as the beginning of a series of rather broadly oriented discussion opportunities for discussing interdisciplinary, if not transdisciplinary aspects of rapidly evolving areas of Ambient Intelligence. This year's conference aims to review and discuss recent advances and promising research trends in AmI technology, intelligent environments, methods, middleware development, as well as applications in areas such as healthcare, product lifecycle, as well as transport services, among others.

The intention to provide an opportunity of a very broad interaction among a wide rank of authors coming from different surroundings means a great enrichment to all participants and gives ground to the success of the conference. Finally it led towards an interesting choice of three invited and twenty five contributed papers, that are published in this book. All papers were carefully reviewed by the international programme committee. Participants from twelve countries contributed to the scientific programme and established a fruitful discussion atmosphere with a number of interesting outcomes.

We wish to express our deep gratitude to all who contributed to the success of the conference and enabled the publication of this book. We wish to thank all the participants, in particular the invited lecturers Prof. Yang Cai (Carnegie – Mellon University), Prof. José Bravo Rodriguez (Castilla – La Mancha University), as well as Prof. Tomáš Sabol (Technical University of Košice), who accepted our invitation. We also thank all contributors and conference participants for creating a very pleasant and fruitful conference atmosphere. Of course, our special thanks go to the members of programme committee.

We further acknowledge the work of all partners who helped organizing the conference as well as the generous financial support provided by our sponsors: University of Hradec Králové, Technical University of Košice, Hradec Králové Regional Authority, AITPL European Cluster, FLUID-WIN European Project, the Czech Scientific Foundation Project No. 402/06/1325 AmIMaDeS, and also the firms Poly PLASTY Jaroměř and Unicorn, a.s. Prague.

Last but not least, we wish to thank IOS Press BV, Amsterdam, for a very good collaboration and helpful assistance in preparing this book for press, and of course, for publishing the book. Special thanks go to Dr. Juan Carlos Augusto and Maarten Fröhlich.

In Hradec Králové, October 16th, 2008

Peter Mikulecký, Programme Committee Chair

Pavel Čech, Organizing Committee Chair