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.