World Of Ambient Intelligence Research Articles

Narrative context-based data-to-text generation for ambient intelligence

In this paper, we propose a language generation model for the world of ambient intelligence (AmI). Various devices in use today are connected to the Internet and are used to provide a considerable amount of information. Because language is the most effective way for humans to communicate with one another, one approach to controlling AmI devices is to use a smart assistant based on language systems. One such framework for data-to-text generation is the natural language generation (NLG) model that generates text from non-linguistic data. Previously proposed NLG models employed heuristic-based approaches to generate relatively short sentences. We find that such approaches are structurally inflexible and tend to generate text that is not diverse. Moreover, there are various domains where numerical values are important, such as sports, finance, and weather. These values need to be generated in terms of categorical information. (e.g., hits, homeruns, and strikeouts.) In the generated outputs, the numerical values often do not accurately correspond to categorical information. Our proposed data-to-text generation model provides both diversity and coherence of information through a narrative context and a copy mechanism. It allows for the learning of the narrative context and sentence structures from a domain corpus without requiring additional explanation of the intended category or sentential grammars. The results of experiments performed from various perspectives show that the proposed model generates text outputs containing diverse and coherent information.

Beacon-Based Cluster Framework for Internet of People, Things, and Services (IoPTS)

Internet of Things (IoT) applications can offer a great potential of benefits to end users. We are moving towards an Internet of People, Things and Services (IoPTS) and a future world of ambient intelligence, where users can seamlessly interact with IoT devices and get information about the services they offer. Interaction can take place directly or through dedicated mobile apps that are built to acquire data from sensors or clusters of IoT devices. The article presents a user-centric cluster framework, taking into account the resource-constrained nature of the IoT devices. As part of the framework, the authors propose a Mobility Aware Clustering Scheme (MACS), which organizes the IoT devices in clusters using a fitness function for each node, and a Profile Aware Proactive Cluster Discovery (PAPCD) mechanism using Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) beacons for service advertisement. The authors also propose an IoT service filtering and ranking algorithm to match the users' preferences and requirements

Virtuality and Capabilities in a World of Ambient Intelligence, by Luiz Costa

Virtuality and Capabilities in a World of Ambient Intelligence, by Luiz Costa

A survey of software engineering best practices for the development of smart applications in Ambient Intelligence

Over the past decade, the world of Ambient Intelligence and smart environments has brought us a wide variety of novel applications with potential for exhibiting sophisticated intelligent behavior. These applications are called smart because they can sense, anticipate and adapt themselves to the context, desires and intentions of their users. However, the unpredictability of human behavior, the unanticipated circumstances of execution and a growing heterogeneity of future operational environments impose significant development challenges if these innovative applications are to gain wide acceptance in our daily life. Therefore, applying well-established software engineering methodologies is a fundamental prerequisite for delivering high quality and robust smart software applications. This survey provides a illustrative presentation of software engineering best practices in the area of smart environments and Ambient Intelligence. The aim of this survey is not to explore and compare every possible related work in detail, but to offer insights into the latest developments in this domain and to further the research into the successful design, development and evaluation of Ambient Intelligence frameworks and applications. (This research is partially funded by the Interuniversity Attraction Poles Programme Belgian State, Belgian Science Policy, and by the Research Fund KU Leuven.)

Safeguards in a world of ambient intelligence: A social, economic, legal, and ethical perspective

The book Safeguards in a world of ambient intelligence is unique in its kind. It discusses social, economic, legal, technological and ethical issues related to identity, privacy and security in Amb...

Safeguards in a world of ambient intelligence: A social, economic, legal, and ethical perspective

The book “Safeguards in a world of ambient intelligence” is unique in its kind. It discusses social, economic, legal, technological and ethical issues related to identity, privacy and security in Ambient Intelligence (AmI). It introduces AmI and, subsequently, makes it vivid by describing four scenarios. Threats and vulnerabilities as well as safeguards are identified, which stress the already common aspects of current IT and AmI. The book is a little EU-biased but is otherwise well balanced and excellently structured.

The Challenges of Ambient Law and Legal Protection in the Profiling Era

Ambient Intelligence is a vision of a future in which autonomic smart environments take an unprecedented number of decisions both for the private and the public good. It involves a shift to automated pattern recognition, a new paradigm in the construction of knowledge. This will fundamentally affect our lives, increasing specific types of errors, loss of autonomy and privacy, unfair discrimination and stigmatisation, and an absence of due process. Current law's articulation in the technology of the printed script is inadequate in the face of the new type of knowledge generation. A possible solution is to articulate legal protections within the socio‐technical infrastructure. In particular, both privacy‐enhancing and transparency‐enhancing technologies must be developed that embed legal rules in ambient technologies themselves. This vision of ‘Ambient Law’ requires a novel approach to law making which addresses the challenges of technology, legitimacy, and political‐legal theory. Only a constructive and collaborative effort to migrate law from books to other technologies can ensure that Ambient Law becomes reality, safeguarding the fundamental values underlying privacy, identity, and democracy in tomorrow's ambient intelligent world.

Identity, profiling algorithms and a world of ambient intelligence

The tendency towards an increasing integration of the informational web into our daily physical world (in particular in so-called Ambient Intelligent technologies which combine ideas derived from t...

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’.

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.

Safeguards in a World of Ambient Intelligence

Safeguards in a World of Ambient Intelligence

Privacy now and in the age of ambient intelligence

The central question of this paper is the future of privacy. After a short introduction to the concept and the evaluation methodology of privacy, we apply this methodology to the coming changing world. According to available predictions this is the world of ambient intelligence, which is based on large scale information exchange to provide a convenient environment to humans. However, privacy is usually based on restricting information. Is there a convenient equilibrium point between ambient intelligence and privacy? This paper does not give a definitive answer, but it tries to clarify the issues, the stakeholders and possible solutions.

The Locus Opus: Playing with Privacy in a World of Ambient Intelligence

This legal paper considers the threat to personal privacy and data protection implied by a World of Ambient Intelligence (AmI). Such a World offers the potential of a personalised society but may also enable an environment of absolute surveillance. Core analysis concentrates on the terse relationship between EU Data Protection Law and US vested interests in order to identify the lacunae which may lead to legal uncertainty in an AmI World. This analysis is then used to develop an argument calling for the considered use of all regulatory solutions that might effectively enforce the protection of personal privacy. The paper concludes that an AmI World presents a significant threat to personal privacy. If not legally addressed, such a society will render the individual mobile but transparent in a space contracting over time.

SENTIENT CITIES Ambient intelligence and the politics of urban space

Increasing amounts of information processing capacity are embedded in the environment around us. The informational landscape is both a repository of data and also increasingly communicates and processes information. No longer confined to desk tops, computers have become both mobile and also disassembled. Many everyday objects now embed computer processing power, while others are activated by passing sensors, transponders and processors. The distributed processing in the world around us is often claimed to be a pervasive or ubiquitous computing environment: a world of ambient intelligence, happening around us on the periphery of our awareness, where our environment is not a passive backdrop but an active agent in organizing daily lives. The spaces around us are now being continually forged and reforged in informational and communicative processes. It is a world where we not only think of cities but cities think of us, where the environment reflexively monitors our behaviour. This paper suggests that we need to unpack the embedded politics of this process. It outlines the three key emerging dynamics in terms of environments that learn and possess anticipation and memory, the efficacy of technological mythologies and the politics of visibility. To examine the assumptions and implications behind this the paper explores three contrasting forms of ‘sentient’ urban environments. The first addresses market-led visions of customized consumer worlds. The second explores military plans for profiling and targeting. Finally, the third looks at artistic endeavours to re-enchant and contest the urban informational landscape of urban sentience. Each, we suggest, shows a powerful dynamic of the environment tracking, predicting and recalling usage.

Alternative futures: AmI scenarios and Minority Report

In the last few decades, scenarios have provided a way of analysing the implications of alternative futures, especially as they might be impacted by new technologies. This has been no less true of ambient intelligence (AmI), which may be embedded everywhere in the not so distant future. Most of the scenarios developed by AmI enthusiasts have been rather ‘sunny’, showing how the new technologies promise to make our lives more efficient, enjoyable, productive, enriching. A European project, called Safeguards in a World of Ambient Intelligence (SWAMI), deliberately developed ‘dark scenarios’ to highlight the threats to privacy, identity, trust, security and inclusiveness posed by the new technologies. The SWAMI consortium also developed a methodological structure for deconstructing and analysing the dark scenarios. This paper takes that approach a step further by applying it to a cultural artefact, partly to test the validity, utility, applicability of the SWAMI methodology to a scenario not constructed by the consortium and partly to show how some cultural artefacts can be regarded as scenarios in their own right as well as warnings about future technologies. The cultural artefact chosen here was the Steven Spielberg film Minority Report, because it features so many AmI technologies and draws attention to the issues that have been the focus of the SWAMI project.

Shining light on the dark side of ambient intelligence

PurposeTo identify safeguards against threats and vulnerabilities posed by the emerging world of ambient intelligence.Design/methodology/approachDark scenarios were constructed to highlight the threats and vulnerabilities; safeguards are identified to address those threats and vulnerabilities and recommendations for specific stakeholders are made for implementing those safeguards.FindingsA multiplicity of threats and vulnerabilities can be expected in the emerging world of ambient intelligence, and a multiplicity of safeguards are similarly necessary to address those.Research limitations/implicationsAdditional technological research is necessary in order to develop some of the safeguards envisaged as necessary.Practical implicationsThe existing legal and regulatory regime suffers from various lacunae and must be amended to address AmI challenges. Many stakeholders have important roles to play.Originality/valueThe paper identifies necessary safeguards to protect privacy, identity, trust, security and e‐inclusion. It identifies specific recommendations for the European Commission, Member States, industry, civil society organizations, academia and individuals.

Gesellschaftliche Herausforderungen durch "intelligente Umgebungen" - Dunkle Szenarien als TA-Werkzeug

Intelligent interconnected devices embedded nearly everywhere will enable new services and applications but will also entail numerous threats and vulnerabilities. This article underlines the need to develop adequate safeguards in order to protect valuable assets such as privacy, identity, security, and trust if society at large is to benefit from Ambient Intelligence (AmI). As the challenge is to identify safeguards for threats and vulnerabilities that are yet to unfold, the dark scenario method developed by the SWAMI project (Safeguards in a World of AMbient Intelligence) is presented as a useful foresight tool to assist in highlighting risks that need to be addressed if AmI is to be successful. The article discusses the conceptual approach and design of the dark scenarios, provides brief examples from the scenario scripts and the systematic scenario analysis, and touches upon the major outcomes of the scenario exercise in terms of the proposed safeguards.

The dark side of ambient intelligence

PurposeTo survey ambient intelligence research in Europe, the USA and Japan and, in particular, in the context of the issues of privacy, identity, security and trust and the safeguards proposed to protect them.Design/methodology/approachThis paper is based on research being conducted by the SWAMI consortium under the EC's Sixth Framework Programme. SWAMI stands for Safeguards in a World of Ambient Intelligence. The consortium comprises five partners: the Fraunhofer Institute (Germany), the Technical Research Center of Finland (VTT Electronics), Vrije Universiteit Brussel (Belgium), the Institute for Prospective Technological Studies (IPTS) (Spain) and Trilateral Research & Consulting (UK). The 18‐month SWAMI project began in February 2005.FindingsMost AmI projects do not take into account privacy, security and related issues. However, a reasonable number do (perhaps a quarter of those in Europe) to a greater or lesser extent and some have proposed safeguards.Research limitations/implicationsThis paper references only a limited set of the research projects being carried out in Europe, the USA and Japan. More detailed information can be found on the SWAMI web site (http://swami.jrc.es).Practical implicationsA mix of different safeguards will be needed to adequately protect privacy, etc. in the new world of AmI.Originality/valueUntil now, there has been no reasonably comprehensive survey of AmI research projects in Europe, the USA and Canada focused on privacy, security, identity and trust issues. None has considered the range of safeguards needed to protect privacy, etc.

Entwurf von Nanosystemen für Ambient Intelligence (Designing Nano-Scale Systems for the Ambient-Intelligence World)

Summary While process technologists are obsessed to follow Moore´s curve down to nanoscale dimensions, design technologists are confronted with gigascale complexity required for the smart objects of the ambient-intelligence world of tomorrow. This world requires zero cost, zero energy yet software programmable novel system architectures to be sold in huge volumes and be designed in exponentially decreasing time. What are these novel silicon architectures? What challenges in research does this create? How to create the necessary tools and skills and how to organise research and education in a world driven by shareholders value? Let us try to make some educated guesses about these questions.