What have they been up to in Lübeck recently

This talk will give an overview over three related research prototypes for ambient interactive systems. We start by introducing NEMO, the Network Environment for Multimedia Objects. NEMO is a smart media environment for semantically rich, personalised, and device-specific access to and interaction with multimedia objects. Next, a shared electronic whiteboard called ShareBoard is decribed. The goal of ShareBoard is to deliver a natural user interface to working with electronic whiteboards. Integrated within ShareBoard are input devices to recognise the movement of users in the surrounding space and for sensing 3D-gesture. ShareBoard can make use of media objects in NEMO. Last, we introduce the Modular Awareness Construction Kit. MACK is a framework for developing context aware, ambient intelligent systems that blend seamlessly with the users’ everyday route, enabling unobtrusive in-situ interaction and facilitating enhanced cooperation and communication. In the future, MACK is to deliver contextual information to both NEMO and ShareBoard

Ocurrencia de individuos bisexuados y con anomalías en flores y frutos en dos clones de Populus deltoides Marsh. cultivados en la Argentina

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Proxies for Privacy in Ambient Systems

The increased use of social-network services for sharing personal information has made it easier to gain awareness of each other. It has also increased the interest in privacy issues, especially since it is not always clear to the provider of information who gains access to personal data and to what end this data is being used. Many interesting ideas and proposals have appeared to address the issue of privacy vs. information sharing. One of the most interesting is perhaps the notion of minimising asymmetry of information flow. It is not obvious how this idea can be applied in the area of ambient assisted living since raising awareness of the situation of the information provider is a core feature for reaching the goal of enabling elderly and disabled people to stay in their own housing. The work described here argues how the asymmetry of information flow can be minimised without compromising on the quality of monitoring and with the added benefit of giving next-of-kin better access to expert evaluation of the situation of their family members. This paper also reports on some initiatives on location-aware systems and ambient assisted living and shows how the combined experiences gained from these projects have led to the development of the proposed model for minimising asymmetry by proxies in an ambient assisted living environment

Explanation Awareness and Ambient Intelligence as Social Technologies

This work focuses on the socio-technical aspects of artificial intelligence, namely how (specific types of) intelligent systems function in human workplace environments. The goal is first to get a better understanding of human needs and expectations when it comes to interaction with intelligent systems, and then to make use of the understanding gained in the process of designing and implementing such systems. The work presented focusses on a specific problem in developing intelligent systems, namely how the artefacts to be developed can fit smoothly into existing socio-cultural settings. To achieve this, we make use of theories from the fields of organisational psychology, sociology, and linguistics. This is in line with approaches commonly found in AI. However, most of the existing work deals with individual aspects, like how to mimic the behaviour or emulate methods of reasoning found in humans, whereas our work centers around the social aspect. Therefore, we base our work on theories that have not yet gained much attention in intelligent systems design. To be able to make them fruitful for intelligent systems research and development, we have to adapt them to the specific settings, and we have to transform them to suit the practical problems at hand. The specific theoretical frameworks we draw on are first and foremost activity theory and to a lesser degree semiotics. Activity theory builds on the works of Leont'ev. It is a descriptive tool to help understand the unity of consciousness and activity. Its focus lies on individual and collective work practise. One of its strengths, and the primary reason for its value in AI development, is the ability to identify the role of material artefacts in the work process. Halliday's systemic functional theory of language (SFL) is a social semiotic theory that sets out from the assumption that humans are social beings that are inclined to interact and that this interaction is inherently multimodal. We interact not just with each other, but with our own constructions and with our natural world. These are all different forms of interaction, but they are all sign processes. Due to the obvious time and spatial constraints, we cannot address all of the challenges that we face when building intelligent artefacts. In reducing the scope of the thesis, we have focused on the problem of explanation, and here in particular the problem of explanation from a user perspective. By putting social theories to work in the field of artificial intelligence, we show that results from other fields can be beneficial in understanding what explanatory capabilities are needed for a given intelligent system, and to ascertain in which situations an explanation should be delivered. Besides lessons learned in knowledge based system development, the most important input comes from activity theory. The second focus is the challenge of contextualisation. Here we show that work in other scientific fields can be put to use in the development of context aware or ambient intelligent systems. Again, we draw on results from activity theory and combine this with insights from semiotics. Explanations are themselves contextual, so the third challenge is to explore the space spanned by the two dimensions ability to explain and contextualisation. Again, activity theory is beneficial in resolving this issue. The different theoretical considerations have also led to some practical approaches. Working with activity theory helps to better understand what the relevant contextual aspects of a given application are and helps to develop models of context which are both grounded in the tradition of context aware systems design and are plausible from a cognitive point of view. Insights from an analysis of research in the knowledge based system area and activity theory have further lead to the amendment of a toolbox for requirements engineering, so called problem frames. New problem frames that target explanation aware ambient intelligent systems are presented. This is supplemented with work looking at the design of an actual system after the requirements have been elicited and specified. Thus, the socio-technical perspective on explanations is coupled with work that addresses knowledge representation issues, namely how to model sufficient knowledge to be able to deliver explanations

A Work Context Perspective on Mixed-Initiative Intelligent Systems

The issue of mixed-initiative intelligent systems has gained increasing interest in recent years. In particular, much attention has been paid on sharing the initiative between the user and the system on the tool level. In this paper, we are focusing on the problem of embedding the system into a workplace

Making use of abstract concepts - systemic-functional linguistics and ambient intelligence

One of the challenges for ambient intelligence is to embed technical artefacts into human work processes in such a way that they support the sense making processes of human actors instead of placing new burdens upon them. This successful integration requires an operational model of context. Such a model of context is particularly important for disambiguating abstract concepts that have no clear grounding in the material setting of the work process. This paper examines some of the strengths and current limitations in a systemic functional model of context and concludes by suggesting that the notions of instantiation and stratification can be usefully employed.10 page(s

Explanation Goals in Case-Based Reasoning

In this paper, we present a short overview of di#erent theories of explanation. We argue that the goals of the user should be taken into account when deciding what is a good explanation for a given CBR system. Some general types relevant to many Case-Based Reasoning (CBR) systems are identified and we use these goals to identify some limitations in using the case as an explanation in CBR systems

Activity Theory and ContextAwareness

Abstract. A lot of research has been done in the area of context-aware computing. Even though, the term context seems often not to be well defined. We attribute this problem partly to the fact that research often focuses on syntactical and technical issues of contextuality and does not take a knowledge level perspective on context. When including the knowledge level, some sort of analysis is required on what aspects need to be modelled. In this paper, we propose the use of an Activity Theory (AT) based approach on modelling components, and outline how it can be combined with the AmbieSense context modelling framework we have proposed earlier.

Explanations and Case-Based Reasoning in Ambient Intelligent Systems

Abstract. Interacting with intelligent systems in general and ambient intelligent systems in particular, requires that these systems have the ability to build a trust relationship with the users. The ability to explain its own behaviour is one of the most important abilities that such a system can exhibit to gain trust. We argue that explanations are not just an addition to an ambient intelligent system rather it is an approach to the design and implementation of such a system. Explanations are useful both for the reasoning process itself and as a means of communicating with the users. In this paper, we present a knowledge intensive approach for identifying different contexts and generating a course of action depending on the context found. We explore the use of explanations both as a means of reasoning and as a means of communication with the user.