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.

Ubiquitous computing names the third wave in computing, where the personal computing era appears when technologyrecedesinto the backgroundof our lives. The widespread use of new mobile technology implementing wireless communicationssuch as personal digital assistants (PDAs) and smart phones enables a new type of advanced applications. In the pastyears,themainfocusofresearchinmobileserviceshasaimedattheanytime-anywhere principle (ubiquitous computing). However, there is more to it. The increasing demand for distributed problem solving led to the development of multi-agent systems. The latter are formed from a collection of independent software entities whose collective skills can be applied in complex and real-time domains. The target of such systems is to demonstrate howgoaldirected,robustandoptimalbehaviorcanarise frominteractionsbetweenindiv- ual autonomous intelligent software agents. These software entities exhibit characteristics like autonomy, responsiveness, pro-activeness and social ability. Their functionality and effectiveness has proven to be highly depended on the design and development and the - plication domain. In fact, in several cases, the design and developmentof effective services shouldtakeintoaccountthecharacteristicsofthecontextfromwhichaserviceisrequested. Contextis the set of suitable environmentalstates and settings concerninga user, which are relevant for a situation sensitive application in the process of adapting the services and - formation offered to the user. Agent technology seems to be the right technology to offer the possibility of exploringthe dynamic context of the user in order to provideadded-value services or to execute more and complex tasks.

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.

Intelligent Agents for Automatic Service Composition in Ambient Intelligence.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 13th European Conference on Ambient Intelligence, AmI 2017, held in Malaga, Spain, in April 2017. The 16 revised full papers presented together with 4 short papers and 1 keynote paper were carefully reviewed and selected from 48 submissions. The papers cover topics such as: Enabling technologies, methods and platforms; objectives and approaches of ambient intelligence and internet of things; from information design to interaction and experience design, and application areas of AmI and IoT.

The scope of this volume is to give to the reader a wide scenario of recent works characterized by a synergistic combination of Soft Computing area with recent trends of Distributed Artificial Intelligence and Ambient Intelligence. The editors present two basic paradigms: the emergence of computational intelligence as a mature and integrated science, and the power of the agent paradigm in realizing complex and distributed environments. This book explores these emerging areas inviting well-known authors whose expertise is widely recognized.

The aim of the book is to introduce new developments in Ambient Intelligence from researchers of several countries. The book includes different works in the area of Ubiquitous Computing, e-Health, Ambient Assisted Living, Distributed Computing and Context Aware Computing that have been selected by an international committee. The studies have been presented in the 9th International Symposium on Ambient Intelligence held in Toledo in June 2018.

PAAMS, the International Conference on Practical Applications of Agents and Multi-Agent Systems is the international yearly tribune to present, to discuss, and to disseminate the latest developments and the most important outcomes related to real-world applications. It provides a unique opportunity to bring multi-disciplinary experts, academics and practitioners together to exchange their experience in the development of Agents and Multi-Agent Systems. This volume presents the papers that have been accepted for the 2011 edition. These articles capture the most innovative results and this year’s trends: Finance and Trading, Information Systems and Organisations, Leisure Culture and Interactions, Medicine and Cloud Computing, Platforms and Adaptation, Robotics and Manufacturing, Security and Privacy, Transports and Optimisation paper.

Held in Sophia Antipolis (France) from September the 20th to September the 22nd 2006, the first edition of the AmI.d conference tackled the latest research challenges within AmI ecosystems, presented AmI applications as well as security solutions. This volume gathers all the papers selected by the Program Committee. Authors from renowned universities and industry research centres contributed to draw a comprehensive state-of-the-art in AmI applications and security research.