This book demonstrates the success of Ambient Intelligence in providing possible solutions for the daily needs of humans. The book addresses implications of ambient intelligence in areas of domestic living, elderly care, robotics, communication, philosophy and others. The objective of this edited volume is to show that Ambient Intelligence is a boon to humanity with conceptual, philosophical, methodical and applicative understanding. The book also aims to schematically demonstrate developments in the direction of augmented sensors, embedded systems and behavioral intelligence towards Ambient Intelligent Networks or Smart Living Technology. It contains chapters in the field of Ambient Intelligent Networks, which received highly positive feedback during the review process. The book contains research work, with in-depth state of the art from augmented sensors, embedded technology and artificial intelligence along with cutting-edge research and development of technologies and applications of Ambient Intelligent Networks. This book is intended to introduce ideas, methods, technologies of the future development of humanity, Science and Technology.

ISAmI is the International Symposium on Ambient Intelligence, aiming to bring together researchers from various disciplines that constitute the scientific field of Ambient Intelligence to present and discuss the latest results, new ideas, projects and lessons obtained from recent experiences in building AmI systems. This volume presents the papers that have been accepted in this first edition. These papers reports on innovative results and advances achieved recently in this area.

The concept of an intelligent agent – a computational system capable of performing certain tasks autonomously – derived from the growing potential of digital computers in the mid 20th century and had been widely adopted by the early 1990s. Partly in parallel with this concept, the perspective of ambient intelligence (AmI) emerged in the late 1990s. Agent technology and AmI have many similarities, and the main purpose of this book is to provide an overview of the state-of-the-art of the scientific area that integrates these two. The book addresses a wide variety of topics related to agents and AmI, including theoretical, practical, design, implementation, ethical and philosophical issues. The 12 chapters are arranged in four sections. The first consists of three chapters discussing ethical and philosophical issues; the second part explores various approaches that can be used to develop agent-based AmI Systems; the third part contains three chapters that share the goal to endow AmI systems with useful properties like intelligence and adaptivity and the last section presents concrete applications of agent-based AmI systems. This book provides an insight into recent achievements and future challenges at the intersection of agent technology and ambient intelligence and will assist the development of more intelligent, flexible, effective and user-friendly systems as well as posing critical questions about the future of the role of agents within the AmI perspective.

Our homes anticipate when we want to wake up. Our computers predict what music we want to buy. Our cars adapt to the way we drive. In today’s world, even washing machines, rice cookers and toys have the capability of autonomous decision-making. As we grow accustomed to computing power embedded in our surroundings, it becomes clear that these ‘smart environments’, with a number of devices controlled by a coordinating system capable of ‘ambient intelligence’, will play an ever larger role in our lives. This handbook provides readers with comprehensive, up-to-date coverage in what is a key technological field. . Systematically dealing with each aspect of ambient intelligence and smart environments, the text covers everything, from visual information capture and human/computer interaction to multi-agent systems, network use of sensor data, and building more rationality into artificial systems. The book also details a wide range of applications, examines case studies of recent major projects from around the world, and analyzes both the likely impact of the technology on our lives, and its ethical implications. With a wide variety of separate disciplines all conducting research relevant to this field, this handbook encourages collaboration between disparate researchers by setting out the fundamental concepts from each area that are relevant to ambient intelligence and smart environments, providing a fertile soil in which ground-breaking new work candevelop.

The presentations of theinvitedspeakersandauthorsmainlyfocusedondevelopingandstudyingnew methods to cope with the problems posed by real-life applications of arti?cial intelligence.Paperspresentedinthetwentythirdconferenceintheseriescovered theories as well as applications of intelligent systems in solving complex real-life problems. We received 297 papers for the main track, selecting 119 of them with the highest quality standards. Each paper was revised by at least three members of the Program Committee.

Ambient Intelligence is one of the new paradigms in the development of information and communication technology, which has attracted much attention over the past years. The aim is the to integrate technology into people environment in such a way that it improves their daily lives in terms of well-being, creativity, and productivity. Ambient Intelligence is a multidisciplinary concept, which heavily builds on a number of fundamental breakthroughs that have been achieved in the development of new hardware concepts over the past years. New insights in nano and micro electronics, packaging and interconnection technology, large-area electronics, energy scavenging devices, wireless sensors, low power electronics and computing platforms enable the realization of the heaven of ambient intelligence by overcoming the hell of physics. Based on contributions from leading technical experts, this book presents a number of key topics on novel hardware developments, thus providing the reader a good insight into the physical basis of ambient intelligence. It also indicates key research challenges that must be addressed in the future.

The Symposium on Ubiquitous Computing and Ambient Intelligence (UCAmI) began as a workshop held in 2003 in San Sebastián (Spain) under the Spanish Artificial Intelligence Conference. This event gathered 32 attendees and 18 papers were p- sented. The second edition, already as a Symposium, took place in Granada (Spain) under the first Spanish Computer Science Conference (CEDI). Later, in 2006, a s- ond workshop was celebrated in Ciudad Real and, in 2007; the second Symposium was organized in Zaragoza by the CEDI conference. Now we continue to work on the organization of this event in Salamanca, a beautiful Spanish city. The European Community and the Sixth and Seventh Framework Programs - courage researchers to explore the generic scope of the AmI vision. In fact, some researchers have a crucial role in this vision. Emile Aarts from Philips describes - bient Intelligence as "the integration of technology into our environment, so that p- ple can freely and interactively utilize it". This idea agrees with the proposal of Mark Weiser regarding the Ubiquitous Computing paradigm.

"This book covers the cutting-edge aspects of AMI applications, specifically those involving the effective design, realization, and implementation of a comprehensive ambient intelligence in smart environments"--

Hugo de Man Professor Katholieke Universiteit Leuven Senior Research Fellow IMEC The steady evolution of hardware, software and communications technology is rapidly transforming the PC- and dot.com world into the world of Ambient Intelligence (AmI). This next wave of information technology is fundam- tally different in that it makes distributed wired and wireless computing and communication disappear to the background and puts users to the foreground. AmI adapts to people instead of the other way around. It will augment our consciousness, monitor our health and security, guide us through traffic etc. In short, its ultimate goal is to improve the quality of our life by a quiet, reliable and secure interaction with our social and material environment. What makes AmI engineering so fascinating is that its design starts from studying person to world interactions that need to be implemented as an int- ligent and autonomous interplay of virtually all necessary networked electronic intelligence on the globe. This is a new and exciting dimension for most elect- cal and software engineers and may attract more creative talent to engineering than pure technology does. Development of the leading technology for AmI will only succeed if the engineering research community is prepared to join forces in order to make Mark Weiser’s dream of 1991 come true. This will not be business as usual by just doubling transistor count or clock speed in a microprocessor or increasing the bandwidth of communication.