Vision Of Ambient Intelligence Research Articles

Multimodal Daily-Life Logging in Free-living Environment Using Non-Visual Egocentric Sensors on a Smartphone

Egocentric non-intrusive sensing of human activities of daily living (ADL) in free-living environments represents a holy grail in ubiquitous computing. Existing approaches, such as egocentric vision and wearable motion sensors, either can be intrusive or have limitations in capturing non-ambulatory actions. To address these challenges, we propose EgoADL, the first egocentric ADL sensing system that uses an in-pocket smartphone as a multi-modal sensor hub to capture body motion, interactions with the physical environment and daily objects using non-visual sensors (audio, wireless sensing, and motion sensors). We collected a 120-hour multimodal dataset and annotated 20-hour data into 221 ADL, 70 object interactions, and 91 actions. EgoADL proposes multi-modal frame-wise slow-fast encoders to learn the feature representation of multi-sensory data that characterizes the complementary advantages of different modalities and adapt a transformer-based sequence-to-sequence model to decode the time-series sensor signals into a sequence of words that represent ADL. In addition, we introduce a self-supervised learning framework that extracts intrinsic supervisory signals from the multi-modal sensing data to overcome the lack of labeling data and achieve better generalization and extensibility. Our experiments in free-living environments demonstrate that EgoADL can achieve comparable performance with video-based approaches, bringing the vision of ambient intelligence closer to reality.

Fault Tolerance Structures in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs): Survey, Classification, and Future Directions.

The Industrial Revolution 4.0 (IR 4.0) has drastically impacted how the world operates. The Internet of Things (IoT), encompassed significantly by the Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs), is an important subsection component of the IR 4.0. WSNs are a good demonstration of an ambient intelligence vision, in which the environment becomes intelligent and aware of its surroundings. WSN has unique features which create its own distinct network attributes and is deployed widely for critical real-time applications that require stringent prerequisites when dealing with faults to ensure the avoidance and tolerance management of catastrophic outcomes. Thus, the respective underlying Fault Tolerance (FT) structure is a critical requirement that needs to be considered when designing any algorithm in WSNs. Moreover, with the exponential evolution of IoT systems, substantial enhancements of current FT mechanisms will ensure that the system constantly provides high network reliability and integrity. Fault tolerance structures contain three fundamental stages: error detection, error diagnosis, and error recovery. The emergence of analytics and the depth of harnessing it has led to the development of new fault-tolerant structures and strategies based on artificial intelligence and cloud-based. This survey provides an elaborate classification and analysis of fault tolerance structures and their essential components and categorizes errors from several perspectives. Subsequently, an extensive analysis of existing fault tolerance techniques based on eight constraints is presented. Many prior studies have provided classifications for fault tolerance systems. However, this research has enhanced these reviews by proposing an extensively enhanced categorization that depends on the new and additional metrics which include the number of sensor nodes engaged, the overall fault-tolerant approach performance, and the placement of the principal algorithm responsible for eliminating network errors. A new taxonomy of comparison that also extensively reviews previous surveys and state-of-the-art scientific articles based on different factors is discussed and provides the basis for the proposed open issues.

Preface

Artificial Intelligence provides a rich set of methods and tools for implementing the Ambient Intelligence vision, i.e. to transform our environments into smart spaces assisting as with our everyday tasks in an intelligent, seamless and non-obtrusive way. Among them, Semantic Web technologies, such as RDF, ontology languages and others, can be used to address several of the challenges that come with this vision, mainly with respect to modelling, sharing and reasoning with context information. This thematic issue demonstrates their capabilities by presenting three different Semantic Web-based solutions for mobile and computing environments.

Ambient Intelligence: Vision, research, and life

This paper evaluates the progress in the field of Ambient Intelligence since its early days. It discusses the extent to which earlier visions of Ambient Intelligence have materialized arguing that to a large extent we already live in an era of Ambient Intelligence, despite that ‘true intelligence’ appears to remain elusive. We examine the extent to which this is so, focusing on shifting mind-sets and ambitions for researchers in the last years. We discuss the various reincarnations of the vision from a historical and societal perspective, together with some of the critiques leveled against it. With many research challenges still remaining open, we discuss how Ambient Intelligence research can be aligned to contemporary societal needs. Particularly important is to create mechanisms that will enable people to interact and benefit from the envisioned technological infrastructure avoiding some of the dangers that embedding computational intelligence in our physical environment brings about. Observing the diversification of research to address different application areas, we note how the impetus towards Ambient Intelligence needs to be renewed with a uniting challenge that transcends the development of technological infrastructure.

Introduction to the thematic issue on Reflections and advances in Ambient Intelligence

During the past decade, researchers from humanities, design, science and engineering, have been collectively working towards the realization of the Ambient Intelligence vision. This thematic issue records the evolution of the field and fosters scientific debate on research issues and reflection on the progress of Ambient Intelligence and its future.

A Linear General Type-2 Fuzzy-Logic-Based Computing With Words Approach for Realizing an Ambient Intelligent Platform for Cooking Recipe Recommendation

This paper addresses the need to enhance transparency in ambient intelligent environments by developing more natural ways of interaction, which allow the users to communicate easily with the hidden networked devices rather than embedding obtrusive tablets and computing equipment throughout their surroundings. Ambient intelligence vision aims to realize digital environments that adapt to users in a responsive, transparent, and context-aware manner in order to enhance users’ comfort. It is, therefore, appropriate to employ the paradigm of “ computing with words ” (CWWs), which aims to mimic the ability of humans to communicate transparently and manipulate perceptions via words. One of the daily activities that would increase the comfort levels of the users (especially people with disabilities) is cooking and performing tasks in the kitchen. Existing approaches on food preparation, cooking, and recipe recommendation stress on healthy eating and balanced meal choices while providing limited personalization features through the use of intrusive user interfaces. Herein, we present an application, which transparently interacts with users based on a novel CWWs approach in order to predict the recipe's difficulty level and to recommend an appropriate recipe depending on the user's mood, appetite, and spare time. The proposed CWWs framework is based on linear general type-2 (LGT2) fuzzy sets, which linearly quantify the linguistic modifiers in the third dimension in order to better represent the user perceptions while avoiding the drawbacks of type-1 and interval type-2 fuzzy sets. The LGT2-based CWWs framework can learn from user experiences and adapt to them in order to establish more natural human–machine interaction. We have carried numerous real-world experiments with various users in the University of Essex intelligent flat. The comparison analysis between interval type-2 fuzzy sets and LGT2 fuzzy sets demonstrates up to 55.43% improvement when general type-2 fuzzy sets are used than when interval type-2 fuzzy sets are used instead. The quantitative and qualitative analysis both show the success of the system in providing a natural interaction with the users for recommending food recipes where the quantitative analysis shows the high statistical correlation between the system output and the users’ feedback; the qualitative analysis presents social science evaluation confirming the strong user acceptance of the system.

An Ambient Intelligent and Energy Efficient Food Preparation System Using Linear General Type-2 Fuzzy Logic Based Computing with Words Framework [Application Notes

Ambient Intelligence (AmI) is a multidisciplinary paradigm, which positively alters the relationship between humans and technology. Concerning home environments, the functions of AmI vision include home automation, communication, entertainment, working and learning. In the area of communication, AmI still needs better mechanisms for human-computer communication. A natural human-computer interaction necessitates having systems capable of modelling words and computing with them. For this purpose, the paradigm of Computing With Words (CWWs) can be employed to mimic human-like communication in Ambient Intelligent Environments (AIEs). This paper demonstrates the extendibility of Linear General Type-2 (LGT2) Fuzzy Logic based CWWs Framework to create an advanced real-world application, which integrates a semi-autonomous, safe and energy efficient electric hob. The motivation of this work is twofold: 1) there is a need to develop transparent human-computer communication rather than embedding obtrusive tablets and computing equipment throughout our surroundings, and 2) one of the most hazardous and energy consuming household devices, the electric hob, does not have competent levels of intelligence and energy efficiency. The proposed Ambient Intelligent Food Preparation System (AIFPS) can increase user comfort, facilitate food preparation, minimize energy consumption and be a useful tool for the elderly and people with major disabilities including vision impairment. The results of real-world experiments with various lay users in the intelligent flat (iSpace) show the success of AIFPS in providing up to 55.43% improved natural interaction (compared to Interval Type-2 based CWWs Framework) while achieving semi-autonomous, safe and energy efficient cooking that can save energy between 11.5% and 35.2%.

A Survey on Ambient Intelligence in Healthcare

Ambient Intelligence (AmI) is a new paradigm in information technology aimed at empowering people's capabilities by the means of digital environments that are sensitive, adaptive, and responsive to human needs, habits, gestures, and emotions. This futuristic vision of daily environment will enable innovative human-machine interactions characterized by pervasive, unobtrusive and anticipatory communications. Such innovative interaction paradigms make ambient intelligence technology a suitable candidate for developing various real life solutions, including in the health care domain. This survey will discuss the emergence of ambient intelligence (AmI) techniques in the health care domain, in order to provide the research community with the necessary background. We will examine the infrastructure and technology required for achieving the vision of ambient intelligence, such as smart environments and wearable medical devices. We will summarize of the state of the art artificial intelligence methodologies used for developing AmI system in the health care domain, including various learning techniques (for learning from user interaction), reasoning techniques (for reasoning about users' goals and intensions) and planning techniques (for planning activities and interactions). We will also discuss how AmI technology might support people affected by various physical or mental disabilities or chronic disease. Finally, we will point to some of the successful case studies in the area and we will look at the current and future challenges to draw upon the possible future research paths.

Towards Smart Education: Ambient Intelligence in the Mexican Classrooms

The rapid adoption of portable devices, like tablets and smart phones, has allowed students to have access to information directly in the classroom. However, this is not enough. Due to the new trends of interaction with computers and wireless interconnection networks between heterogeneous devices and the growing interest in improving the teaching-learning process, has led to the educational field the application of a discipline known as Ambient Intelligence (AmI) with the purpose of provide intelligence to the ordinary classroom. AmI is a new information paradigm, in which people are immersed in a digital environment that is aware of their presence and context, which also suits their needs. In this research work, we describe a smart classroom, which aims to realize the AmI vision in education. This vision applied in Mexican schools can significantly enhance the educational domain, through personalizing and adapting of the learning environment to enable natural interactions and context aware education in the technologically augmented classroom of the future.

Regressive Augmentation: Investigating Ubicomp’s Romantic Promises

Regressive Augmentation: Investigating Ubicomp’s Romantic Promises

AGENT-BASED, CONTEXT-AWARE INFORMATION SHARING FOR AMBIENT INTELLIGENCE

In a future vision of Ambient Intelligence — or AmI — our surrounding environment will integrate a pervasive, interconnected network of sensors, intelligent appliances and computer-like devices. This implies, on the one hand, hardware and interface related issues, and, on the other hand, a layer of context-aware services that manages the large quantities of information generated throughout a system formed mostly of devices with limited capabilities. This paper presents the first steps toward the realization of the AmIciTy framework: a multi-agent system that relies on local interaction and the self-organization of agents, having as purpose the context-aware sharing of pieces of information. The paper presents the structure of the system, the design of the agents, the manner of building scenarios, experiments and the evaluation of a prototype.

Service oriented computing for Ambient Intelligence to support management of transport infrastructures

Ensuring effective Ambient Intelligence based upon the wide range of static as well as real-time datasets required to manage a transport infrastructure such as a motorway, is a daunting task. This paper presents how this challenge has been faced through the development of a service-based networked infrastructure capable to make a wide range of Geographical Information (GI) available to the operators of a major Italian motorway. In doing so, the system has used open standards from ISO and Open Geospatial Consortium. Unlike current Spatial Data Infrastructures (SDIs), which address relatively static data in time slices, the work presented allows, similarly to traditional GIS, to manage true dynamic data available through geo-referenced sensors along the motorway. The main objective of the project described within this paper was to link existing systems and networks to deliver a comprehensive, coordinated and sustained intelligent infrastructure which can be used to improve management of the motorway as a system. This approach follows the vision of Ambient Spatial Intelligence, which explores how to better embed intelligent features to respond to spatio-temporal queries and to better monitor geographical events within built and natural environments. The combination of information available from different sources (GI, sensor networks, etc.) with information on traffic and vehicle situation is essential to provide context awareness to operators. The networked platform developed has extended the traditional concept of SDIs with an unprecedented volume of real-time geo-referenced sensor data, deployed along the motorway path, all characterized by high spatial and temporal resolution.

Ambient Intelligence: Beyond the Inspiring Vision

Ambient Intelligence (AmI) has emerged in the past 10 years as a multidisciplinary field within ubiquitous computing, attracting considerable research, funding and public attention and leading to many research groups, and conferences specifically focused on Ambient Intelligence topics. From its conception, AmI has always been a field strongly driven by a particular vision of how ICT technologies would shape our future. This has given the AmI vision, essentially as proposed by ISTAG, an excessively central role in shaping the field and setting its research agenda. We argue that this inspiring vision should no longer be the main driver for AmI research and that we should now re-interpret its role in the background of 10 years of research. In this paper, we reflect on what it means for AmI to move behind its foundational vision and we identify a number of emerging trends around some of its core concepts, more specifically the notion of intelligence, the system view and the requirements process. The main motivation is to search for alternative research directions that may be more effective in delivering today the essence of the AmI vision, even if they mean abandoning some of the currently prevailing approaches and assumptions. Overall, these trends provide a more holistic view of AmI and may represent important contributions for bringing this field closer to realisation, delivery and real social impact.

VIRTUAL EYE — THE BLIND CHILD NAVIGATION MODEL USING WIRELESS SENSOR NETWORK

The visions of context-sensitive services, ubiquitous computing, and ambient intelligence have driven several aspects of wireless sensor networks research, but perhaps none more so than localization and tracking. Location of a user is one of the most fundamental types of context, and can be applied in a vast number of environments from smart homes to improved security solutions. However, accurate localization of users is not trivial, and most of the individual systems presented suffer from coverage problems. We present a system-level approach to localize and track normal and blind users on the basis of different sources of location information. The system can be applied outdoors and indoors using GPS and Zigbee as the source of location data. The overall system architecture is modular and extendible, allowing for creation of location- and context-aware services for blind child tracking with the inclusion of additional sources of localization data. Extensive performance evaluation presented for blind child navigation shows that the system is both accurate as well as scalable.

Ambient Assisted Living Research in the CareLab

As technology development progresses, the vision of ambient intelligence has provided a human-centric approach to applications of technology. In the context of aging societies, ambient intelligence has focused on providing assistive solutions for elders at risk of losing their independence. In this article we report on a research environment called CareLab and describe three projects that have studied the role of technology in the monitoring and coaching of older adults. By focusing on the need for a feeling of safety, cognitive stimulation, and social connectedness, these projects have investigated the role of technology applications for supporting the elderly in maintaining an independent lifestyle. Finally, we discuss some challenges crucial for the success of ambient assisted-living research.

Interoperable and adaptive fuzzy services for ambient intelligence applications

In Ambient Intelligence (AmI) vision, people should be able to seamlessly and unobtrusively use and configure the intelligent devices and systems in their ubiquitous computing environments without being cognitively and physically overloaded. In other words, the user should not have to program each device or connect them together to achieve the required functionality. However, although it is possible for a human operator to specify an active space configuration explicitly, the size, sophistication, and dynamic requirements of modern living environment demand that they have autonomous intelligence satisfying the needs of inhabitants without human intervention. This work presents a proposal for AmI fuzzy computing that exploits multiagent systems and fuzzy theory to realize a long-life learning strategy able to generate context-aware-based fuzzy services and actualize them through abstraction techniques in order to maximize the users' comfort and hardware interoperability level. Experimental results show that proposed approach is capable of anticipating user's requirements by automatically generating the most suitable collection of interoperable fuzzy services.

I-Object

In this article, I will investigate the ways in which Ambient Intelligence, the technological paradigm of the near future proposed by the European Union and the electronics multinational Philips, will affect the ways in which individuals construct and express their identities. The Ambient Intelligence vision predicts a world in which technologies will deliver personalized services in a proactive (rather than a responsive or interactive) fashion. I argue that this brings about a change in the way we interact with these technologies, which in turn has an effect on the way we construct and express identities in relation to such technologies. In a world of Ambient Intelligence, I will argue in this article, technological artifacts may come to function as ‘reference collectivities’, comparable to human reference groups. Due to their proactivity, their level of autonomy and self-reliance and our personalized interactions with them, these technologies will come to function as ‘others’, rather than as ‘quasi-others’.

The Fifth International Conference on Intelligent Environments (IE09): A Report

The development of intelligent environments is considered an important step toward the realization of the ambient intelligence vision. Intelligent environments are technologically augmented everyday spaces that intuitively support human activity. The IE conferences traditionally provide a leading‐edge forum for researchers and engineers to present their latest research and to discuss future directions in the area of intelligent environments. This article briefly presents the content of the Fifth International Conference on Intelligent Environments (IE09), which was held July 20‐21 at the Castelldefels campus of the Technical University of Catalonia near Barcelona, Spain.

A swarm of robots using RFID tags for synchronization and cooperation

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to show how a swarm of robots can cooperate to achieve a common task, in a totally distributed and autonomous way, by exploiting powerful clues contained in some devices that are distributed in the environment. This system exploits a coordination mechanism that is twofold, using radio frequency identification (RFID) tags for spatial coordination, and wireless robot‐to‐robot communication for the temporal and semantic synchronization.Design/methodology/approachProgress in the pervasive computing field has led to the distribution of knowledge and computational power in the environment, rather than condensing it in a single, powerful entity. This vision of ambient intelligence is supported by the interchange of information between physically sparse agents cooperating to achieve a common goal. An emerging method for this kind of collaboration considers the agents as insects in a swarm, having the possibility of communicating directly or indirectly with each other. The goal is to fulfill a common task, showing that a collaborative behavior can be useful in the real world. The paper focuses on a technique for the coordination of swarm‐robots with low capabilities, driven by instructions learned from RFID tags used as distributed pervasive memories. These robots exploit ubiquitous computing to regroup in a synchronization area, make a formation in space, coordinate with team‐mates in the same zone, and finally complete a cooperative task. The algorithm is validated through a simulation environment, showing its applicability and performance, before the real implementation on Roomba‐like robots.FindingsThe goal of the research is to prove the feasibility of such a novel approach. It is observed that a swarm of robots can achieve a good degree of autonomous cooperation without a central infrastructure or global network, carrying out a goal in a fair time.Originality/valueThe value is given by the benefits of splitting the synchronization semantics into two levels: space, by exploiting RFID landmarks; and time, by exploiting wireless short‐range communication. RFID tags are used to distribute computational power and actively interact with the surrounding areas, allowing to learn and modify the state of the environment. Robot‐to‐robot communication, instead, is used for providing timing and semantic information. In the proposal, this augmented environment is used to allow a good level of coordination among robots, both in time and space, with the aim of building a cooperative system.

Property, privacy and personhood in a world of ambient intelligence

Profiling technologies are the facilitating force behind the vision of Ambient Intelligence in which everyday devices are connected and embedded with all kinds of smart characteristics enabling them to take decisions in order to serve our preferences without us being aware of it. These technological practices have considerable impact on the process by which our personhood takes shape and pose threats like discrimination and normalisation. The legal response to these developments should move away from a focus on entitlements to personal data, towards making transparent and controlling the profiling process by which knowledge is produced from these data. The tendency in intellectual property law to commodify information embedded in software and profiles could counteract this shift to transparency and control. These rights obstruct the access and contestation of the design of the code that impacts one's personhood. This triggers a political discussion about the public nature of this code and forces us to rethink the relations between property, privacy and personhood in the digital age.