ユビキタス環境において動的なコンテクストに応じて知識情報をフィルタリングする推論エージェントの開発

近年，ユビキタスコンピューティングとセマンティックWebが注目されている．今後はユビキタス環境においてもメタデータの利用が想定され，それを介し，様々なものが膨大なセマンティックWebの意味ネットワークに接続されることになるだろう．我々はこれをユビキタスセマンティクスと呼んでいる．ユビキタスセマンティクスにおいては膨大な知識が存在する一方で，大半の知識は過渡的なものであると考えられる．またユーザのリアルタイムな要求を満たすためには，有用な知識を効率良く取得して推論することが必要である．そこで我々はユビキタス環境において動的に変化するユーザのコンテクストに追従して，必要な知識情報をフィルタリングすることで，ユーザへの即応性を実現する推論エージェントを提案する．また，アプリケーションとしてレシピ推薦システムを開発し，有用性を検証する

Hardware and software in smart decision rooms

Since the last decade research in Group Decision Making area have been focus in the building of meeting rooms that could support the decision making task and improve the quality of those decisions. However the emergence of Ambient Intelligence concept contributes with a new perspective, a different way of viewing traditional decision rooms. In this paper we will present an overview of Smart Decision Rooms providing Intelligence to the meeting environment, and we will also present LAID, an Ambient Intelligence Environment oriented to support Group Decision Making and some of the software tools that we already have installed in this environment

Pro-active Meeting Assistants : Attention Please!

This paper gives an overview of pro-active meeting assistants, what they are and when they can be useful. We explain how to develop such assistants with respect to requirement definitions and elaborate on a set of Wizard of Oz experiments, aiming to find out in which form a meeting assistant should operate to be accepted by participants and whether the meeting effectiveness and efficiency can be improved by an assistant at all

Pro-active Meeting Assistants: Attention Please!

This paper gives an overview of pro-active meeting assistants, what they are and when they can be useful. We explain how to develop such assistants with respect to requirement definitions and elaborate on a set of Wizard of Oz experiments, aiming to find out in which form a meeting assistant should operate to be accepted by participants and whether the meeting effectiveness and efficiency can be improved by an assistant at all. This paper gives an overview of pro-active meeting assistants, what they are and when they can be useful. We explain how to develop such assistants with respect to requirement definitions and elaborate on a set of Wizard of Oz experiments, aiming to find out in which form a meeting assistant should operate to be accepted by participants and whether the meeting effectiveness and efficiency can be improved by an assistant at all

Формирование профиля пользователя на основе аудиовизуального анализа ситуации в интеллектуальном зале совещаний

This paper discuss the problem of personal adjustment of smart room devices and forming of a user profile based on processing of multichannel audio and video streams, which register of the current situation and meeting participants behavior in the meeting room. Estimation of preference of device usage, user interface, participant role and their activity during meeting allows us to automate the processes of smart room preparation as well as manage multimedia presentation and record devices during events. 212 records were made during several meetings in the smart room with the help of the developed system of audio and video speaker localization. The accumulated experimental data allowed us to estimate the places in the room, from which the participants asked questions most of the time. The accuracy of camera pointing on speaker in the presentation zone as well as in the rows of sits estimated by participant’s face size and its position in frame during whole recording equals 90% approximately.Рассматривается проблема персонифицированной настройки оборудования интеллектуального зала и формирования профиля пользователя на основе многоканальной обработки аудио- и видеопотоков, регистрирующих текущую ситуацию и поведение участников мероприятия в зале совещаний. Компьютерное зрение предпочтений по использованию оборудования, пользовательскому интерфейсу, роли и активности участников во время мероприятий позволяет автоматизировать процессы подготовки интеллектуального зала, управления мультимедийным презентационным и записывающим оборудованием в ходе выступлений. С помощью разработанной системы аудиовидеолокализации выступающих в ходе нескольких совещаний в интеллектуальном зале в автоматическом режиме было сделано 212 записей. Накопленные экспериментальные данные позволили оценить места в зале, с которых чаще всего задаются вопросы. Точность наведения видеокамеры на выступающего в зоне презентаций, а также в рядах кресел оценивалась по размеру и положению его лица в кадре на протяжении всей съемки и в среднем составила 90%

An Overview of Smartrooms and Collaborative Work Environments. From Research Issues to User Acceptance in the Oil and Gas Industry

Les environnements de travail collaboratif sont des environ-nement de travail technologiquement enrichis, conçus pour faciliter une activité collaborative (que cette collaboration soit colocalisée ou distante). Ces "smartrooms" sont le produit d'expertises pluri-disciplinaires, puisant dans les domaines du facteur humain, de l'interaction homme machine, et de l'informatique ubiquitaire. Dans cet article, nous présentons une vue d'ensemble de la littérature sur les smartrooms et leur mise en place dans l'industrie pétrolière. Si la littérature académique met avant tout l'accent sur les aspects techniques et humains de conception, la littérature industrielle nous présente quant à elle les enjeux organisationnels et économiques de ces environnements, et dévoile un retour d'expérience sur leur acceptation par les utilisateurs.Collaborative Work Environments (CWE) are technologically in-strumented environments especially designed to support a collab-orative (co-located or remote) activity. Colloquially referred to as "smartrooms" from their research debut, such environments are the joint product of multidisciplinary expertises, as they draw from the fields of human factors, human computer interaction (HCI), pervasive computing, and various other fields. In this paper, we provide an overview of the literature on smartrooms in research and their application as collaborative work environments in the oil and gas industry. While the research literature provides with a broad view of the various topics and issues of smartroom design, the industrial literature focuses more on the organisational and human issues of setting up CWEs, providing valuable feedback on user acceptance and return on investment

Impact of Random Deployment on Operation and Data Quality of Sensor Networks

Several applications have been proposed for wireless sensor networks, including habitat monitoring, structural health monitoring, pipeline monitoring, and precision agriculture. Among the desirable features of wireless sensor networks, one is the ease of deployment. Since the nodes are capable of self-organization, they can be placed easily in areas that are otherwise inaccessible to or impractical for other types of sensing systems. In fact, some have proposed the deployment of wireless sensor networks by dropping nodes from a plane, delivering them in an artillery shell, or launching them via a catapult from onboard a ship. There are also reports of actual aerial deployments, for example the one carried out using an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) at a Marine Corps combat centre in California -- the nodes were able to establish a time-synchronized, multi-hop communication network for tracking vehicles that passed along a dirt road. While this has a practical relevance for some civil applications (such as rescue operations), a more realistic deployment involves the careful planning and placement of sensors. Even then, nodes may not be placed optimally to ensure that the network is fully connected and high-quality data pertaining to the phenomena being monitored can be extracted from the network. This work aims to address the problem of random deployment through two complementary approaches: The first approach aims to address the problem of random deployment from a communication perspective. It begins by establishing a comprehensive mathematical model to quantify the energy cost of various concerns of a fully operational wireless sensor network. Based on the analytic model, an energy-efficient topology control protocol is developed. The protocol sets eligibility metric to establish and maintain a multi-hop communication path and to ensure that all nodes exhaust their energy in a uniform manner. The second approach focuses on addressing the problem of imperfect sensing from a signal processing perspective. It investigates the impact of deployment errors (calibration, placement, and orientation errors) on the quality of the sensed data and attempts to identify robust and error-agnostic features. If random placement is unavoidable and dense deployment cannot be supported, robust and error-agnostic features enable one to recognize interesting events from erroneous or imperfect data

Intelligent agents meet semantic web in a smart meeting room

We describe a new smart meeting room system called EasyMeeting that explores the use of FIPA agent technologies, Semantic Web ontologies, logic reasoning, and security and privacy policies. Building on a pervasive computing system that we have developed previously, EasyMeeting can provide relevant services and information to meeting participants based on their situational needs. Our system exploits the context-aware support provided by the Context Broker Architecture (CoBrA). Central to CoBrA is an intelligent broker agent that maintains a shared model of context for all computing entities in the space and enforces the privacy policies defined by the users. We also describe the use of CoBrA ontologies, logic reasoning, and privacy protection mechanisms, and evaluate our initial user experience studies.

Cloud computing and context-awareness: A study of the adapted user experience

This thesis was submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy and awarded by Brunel University.Today, mobile technology is part of everyday life and activities and the mobile ecosystems are blossoming, with smartphones and tablets being the major growth drivers. The mobile phones are no longer just another device, we rely on their capabilities in work and in private. We look to our mobile phones for timely and updated information and we rely on this being provided any time of any day at any place. Nevertheless, no matter how much you trust and love your mobile phone the quality of the information and the user experience is directly associated with the sources and presentation of information. In this perspective, our activities, interactions and preferences help shape the quality of service, content and products we use. Context-aware systems use such information about end-users as input mechanisms for producing applications based on mobile, location, social, cloud and customized content services. This represents new possibilities for extracting aggregated user-centric information and includes novel sources for context-aware applications. Accordingly, a Design Research based approach has been taken to further investigate the creation, presentation and tailoring of user-centric information. Through user evaluated experiments findings show how multi-dimensional context-aware information can be used to create adaptive solutions tailoring the user experience to the users’ needs. Research findings in this work; highlight possible architectures for integration of cloud computing services in a heterogeneous mobile environment in future context-aware solutions. When it comes to combining context-aware results from local computations with those of cloud based services, the results provide findings that give users tailored and adapted experiences based on the collective efforts of the two