Special issue on Ambient Intelligence

Abstract

Ambient Intelligence (AmI) refers to predominantly electronic solutions that allow environments to be sensitive, adaptive, and responsive to the presence of people (Aarts et al. 2002). This opens up a world of unprecedented experiences to people in their day to day surroundings. Building on the early ideas of ubiquitous computing by Marc Weiser (1991) who envisioned a digital world where electronic devices are embedded to form a fine grained distributed network, AmI aims to go further in integration by involving the entire environment and any physical object in the interaction with people, thus improving their well being, productivity, creativity, and leisure through enhanced user system interaction. Furthermore, beyond mere physical integration of electronics, this paradigm focuses on the creation of enhanced experiences, thereby having major cultural and business related implications (Aarts and Encarnacao 2006; Aarts and Marzano 2003). The notion ambience in Ambient Intelligence refers to the need for a large-scale embedding of technology in a way that it becomes unobtrusively integrated into every-day objects and environments. The notion intelligence reflects that the digital surroundings exhibit specific forms of social interaction, i.e., the environments should be able to recognize the people that live in it, personalize to individual preferences, adapt themselves to the users, learn from their behavior, and possibly act upon their behalf. This implies that embedding through miniaturization is the main systems design objective from a hardware point of view. From a software point of view we distinguish between the following major AmI functionalities, i.e., context awareness, ubiquitous access, and natural interaction. The user benefits of the AmI paradigm are aimed at improving the quality of peoples’ lives by creating the desired atmosphere and functionality via intelligent, personalized, interconnected systems and services. However simple this requirement may sound, its true realization is for the time being not within our reach. There are three global factors that enable the development of Ambient Intelligence, i.e., technology, global connectivity, and socio-economical aspects. Focusing on the technological factor, we use a well-known frame of reference provided by the developments in semiconductor industry, which is known as Moore’s law (Noyce 1977). This law states that the integration density of systems on silicon doubles every 18 months. This trend is going on for more than 30 years and provides a clear forecast for the development of semiconductor technology. Recently, some new angles have been opened which in conjunction with Moore’s law can be formulated as follows.