IOSPress

Ambient Intelligence (AmI) and Smart Environments (SmE) are two mutually complementary areas which are growing fast as multi-disciplinary fields with a huge potential to benefit society. A Smart Environment is a place that has been enriched with technology (sensors, processors, actuators, information terminals, and other devices interconnected through a network) to enhance the services that can provide to humans. The most widely realization of this idea are “Smart Homes” but equally hospitals, cars, classrooms, offices, streets and other places are being considered. Ambient Intelligence enhances the global behaviour of such a system by providing high level functionality which provides an added value to the typical services expected in a specific environment. Usually an analysis is performed in real-time over the events that are recorded within the smart environment which allows a timely interaction with the inhabitants of the environment to provide a service.

There is a wide range of assistance that an AmI system can aim to provide. Typical examples are actions aimed at preserving or increasing safety in a smart home inhabited by people of advanced age or with special physical or cognitive conditions which can increase their level of vulnerability or dependability. Smart Homes can be also used to encourage better life styles by comparing trends on the activities developed over a longer period of time against targets set by the house occupants. Economy (e.g., through a rational use of energy) and entertainment (e.g., by providing personalized T.V. or music services) depending on the types of activities and time of the day they are developed can be also considered. Equally cars can be transformed into a smart environment to assist drivers in difficult conditions, classrooms can be equipped to enhance the teaching-learning experience and offices can be supplemented with technology to support effective workgroup collaboration.

The first volume of this series has been accepted in Thomson Reuters'Conference Proceedings Citation Index, a Web of Science® database.

Juan C. Augusto (Editor-in-Chief)
Reader in Distributed and Ubiquitous Systems
Department of Computer Science
School of Science and Technology
Middlesex University, London
United Kingdom
J.Augusto@mdx.ac.uk

Emile Aarts
Philips
The Netherlands

Hamid Aghajan
Stanford University
USA

Michael Berger
Siemens
Germany

Vic Callaghan
University of Essex
United Kingdom

Diane Cook
Washington State University
USA

Anind Dey
Carnegie Mellon University
USA

Pertti Huuskonen
Nokia - NRC
Finland

Achilles Kameas
Hellenic Open University
Greece

Daniel Shapiro
Applied Reactivity
USA

Toshiyo Tamura
Chiba University
Japan

Sajal Das
University of Texas at Arlington
USA

Sylvain Giroux
Sherbrooke University
Canada

Peter Mikulecky
University of Hradec Kralove
Czech Republic

Jadwiga Indulska
University of Queensland
Australia

Michael Weber
University of Ulm
Germany