The workshop on Behaviour Monitoring and Interpretation (BMI) was launched in 2007 and was co-located with the German conference on Artificial Intelligence. The first two editions of the workshop indicated a significant interest in research related to BMI and motivated the creation of the current volume with contributions by a number of leading researchers in this emerging field. Although the book covers a broad spectrum of topics concerned with behaviour monitoring and interpretation, there are essentially two prominent directions in focus here based on their particular interest in the ongoing research: the investigation of motion patterns and the area of Ambient Assisted Living. This volume aims to offer state-of-the-art contributions on these directions of research.

The first chapter is an introduction to the area of BMI by Björn Gottfried and Hamid Aghajan; it explains what this field signifies and how it relates to other research areas. Then, in the first part of this volume, a number of chapters discuss recent developments in monitoring and representing behaviour, with a particular focus on movementbased behaviour. Alexandra Millonig, Norbert Brändle, Markus Ray, Dietmar Bauer, and Stefan Van Der Spek provide an overview of methods for monitoring and analyzing pedestrian motion behaviours. The subsequent chapter by Patrick Laube also considers movement behaviour; however, the focus is on which typical patterns can be distinguished that are not restricted to human beings and also involve patterns of groups of objects. Similarly, groups and their movement patterns are investigated by Zena Wood and Antony Galton who provide a classification scheme for collectives. Yohei Kurata and Max Egenhofer provide a qualitative spatial representation for relating directed line segments to their topological context; in this way they characterise movement patterns of individuals in relation to their topologically described context. Another qualitative representation is provided by Frank Dylla who considers ordinal relations; basic movement patterns are described between pairs of objects.

The second part of the volume includes chapters that are more application driven. Tim Adlam, Bruce Carey-Smith, Nina Evans, Roger Orpwood, Jennifer Boger, and Alex Mihailidis present case studies about the monitoring and support of people with dementia in smart environments. Sylvain Giroux, Tatjana Leblanc, Abdenour Bouzouane, Bruno Bouchard, Hélène Pigot, and Jérémy Bauchet report on AI techniques applied in smart environments, in particular for providing inhabitants with cognitive impairment assistance in their everyday life. Joyca Lacroix, Yasmin Aghajan, and Aart Van Halteren discuss another approach that makes environments smarter: ambient assisted physical activity systems are presented that aid in increasing the engagement of seniors in physical activities.

The third part presents a number of investigations which show how monitored behaviours can be interpreted in smart environments. Peter Kiefer, Klaus Stein, and Christoph Schlieder give a survey on knowledge-intensive methods for intention recognition; in particular, they look at how environments are spatially structured and take into account context-specific background knowledge. Albert Hein, Christoph Burghardt, Martin Giersich, and Thomas Kirste discuss an approach for the detection of high-level activities, in particular for interpreting team behaviours. Asier Aztiria, Alberto Izaguirre, Rosa Basagoiti, and Juan Carlos Augusto present a model for how ambient intelligence systems can automatically discover patterns of user behaviour; they also discuss how the interaction of the users with the system can improve the performance of their system.

The two final chapters are devoted to the infrastructure of smart environments. Matt Duckham and Rohan Bennett investigate decentralised spatiotemporal algorithms that optimise the support of spatially distributed systems of smart environments; for example, in order to monitor environmental changes even at large geographical scale. More related to middleware technologies is the contribution by Alvaro Marco, Roberto Casas, Gerald Bauer, Rubén Blasco, Ángel Asensio, Bruno Jean-Bart, and Miriam Ibanez; they present a framework for enabling the interoperability and handling the heterogeneity of components found in ambient assisted living systems.

We hope you will find the presented material in this volume of interest to your research. A further motivation for introducing this book has been to encourage interdisciplinary interaction among researchers working on the various fields related to BMI. We hope the presented state-of-the-art in this volume will offer a glimpse of the potentials ahead.

June 2009, Björn Gottfried and Hamid Aghajan