Intelligent systems and smart homes

Abstract

The concept of ambient intelligence propagates a vision of smart homes where people are supported and assisted in their daily activities by information technology that is very different from the computer as we know today. In recent years, significant advances have been achieved in the enabling technologies for smart homes, such as the increasingly mature networked appliances, pervasive sensor technologies and various kinds of wired and wireless communication protocols. These advances play a major role in the facilitation of smart homes. Though, there is not a general agreement on the definition of Home intelligence, many consider Home intelligent to generally be the combination of home network service, home automation service, and internet service to devices, services, as well as offices (in and/or outside home). Recently, home intelligent has been extended to include context aware and situation aware automation by using ubiquitous technologies. For example, in smart home environments, users are progressively offered more personalized services, ranging from home automation, security, monitoring, entertainment, to healthcare. In particular, many research efforts have been targeted to design and development of smart homes for ageing and disabled people. It is widely acknowledged that an important step in ubiquitous computing is context-awareness. Services in pervasive and mobile environments need to be contextaware so that they can adapt themselves to rapidly changing situations. Even though many intelligent systems have been built in recent years, there is a still a lack of a general model to guide the system design. The lack of a general model has resulted the construction of systems that suffer from many interoperability issues. In this context, we envision the creation of smart environments that integrate information, communication and sensing technologies into everyday objects. This special issue is a collection of novel ideas and state-ofthe-art research results on integrating intelligent systems and smart homes. We hope that this special issue will serve as a landmark source for education, information, and reference to students, professionals, and researchers interested in updating their knowledge about intelligent systems and smart homes. Submissions to this special issue come from the open Call for Papers as well as from the selected papers presented at the 2007 International Workshop on Intelligent Systems and Smart Homes (WISH-07) organized at Niagara Falls, Canada, from August 28th to September 1st, 2007. In the paper “Service Integration with UPnP Agent for a Ubiquitous Home Environment”, Wally Chen et al. proposed an approach for UPnP devices connecting to outer networks via UPnP aware gateway. They also developed several service oriented applications in a smart campus based on the proposed framework. The paper “A Novel Memory Management Scheme for Residential Gateways” by Ibrahim Kamel and Beizhong Inf Syst Front (2009) 11:481–482 DOI 10.1007/s10796-008-9128-x