Ambient Intelligence and Smart Environments (IOS Press) – serie

As computers are increasingly embedded into our everyday environments, the objects therein become augmented with sensors, processing and communication capabilities and novel interfaces. The capability for objects to perceive the environment, store and process data, pursue goals, reason about their intentions and coordinate actions in a holistic manner gives rise to the so-called Intelligent Environment (IE). In such environments, real space becomes augmented with digital content, thus transcending the limits of nature and of human perception. The result is a pervasive transparent infrastructure capable of recognizing, responding and adapting to individuals in a seamless and unobtrusive way. The realization of Intelligent Environments requires the convergence of different disciplines such as information and computer science, building architecture, material engineering, artificial intelligence, sociology, art and design. The 5th International Conference on Intelligent Environments (IE’09), held at the Polytechnic University of Catalonia, Castelldefels, Barcelona, Spain, provides a multidisciplinary forum for researchers and engineers from across the world to present their latest research and to discuss future directions in the area of Intelligent Environments. The IE’09 proceedings contain the complete conference program including full papers presented at special sessions and short papers from the doctoral colloquium and poster session. In addition, three thought provoking invited lectures on topics of current and future IE research are included.

The eventual aim when applying digital technologies in agriculture is to replace or reduce the human labor required for agricultural production. Large amounts of heterogeneous data are essential for integration studies of automated agriculture, and the digitalization of agriculture is helping to fulfill the demand for this data, but management of the data gathered presents its own challenges. That is where the Intelligent Environment (IE) paradigm comes into play to guide the design of the systems, techniques and algorithms able to analyze the data and provide recommendations for farmers, managers and other stakeholders.This book, Agriculture and Environment Perspectives in Intelligent Systems, is divided into 5 chapters. Chapter 1 explores the use of intelligent systems in Controlled Environment Agriculture (CEA) facilities; Chapter 2 reviews the adoption of intelligent systems in the research field of biomonitoring; Chapter 3 proposes an intelligent system to acquire and pre-process data for precision agriculture applications; Chapter 4 illustrates the use of intelligent algorithms to make more efficient use of scarce resources such as water; and Chapter 5 focuses on the generation of intelligent models to predict frosts in crops in south-eastern Spain. There is still a need to bridge the gap between the needs of farmers, environmental managers and stakeholders and the solutions offered by information and communication technology. This book will be of interest to all those working in the field.

Life expectancy is increasing, and we are all expected to work for longer as a result. A balance must be found between the demands of work and human capabilities, and this makes the prevention of workplace-related health problems more important than ever. Emerging technologies, such as smart textiles, wearable devices, and the Internet of Things have enabled the development of intelligent biomedical clothing and the integration of pervasive sensitive services into the environment, and together with ambient intelligence technology techniques and big data analytics, have fostered a proliferation of p-Health monitoring solutions. This book presents a collection of the most significant challenges and advances in the field of intelligent workspaces and personalized ergonomics, bringing together the most relevant results of various international research projects. The book is organized into three main sections: Personalized Ergonomics, which explores the need for practical and reliable risk assessment methods for the prevention of musculoskeletal disorders and the enhancement of the workplace; Pervasive Technology for Intelligent Workplaces, which identifies the opportunities and challenges of technology-based interventions and the security and privacy issues of the smart workplace; and Data Warehouse Governance and Analytics. The book concludes with a chapter on lessons learnt.The transformation of the working environment into a healthy and intelligent space will not only support ergonomists, employees and employers, but may also be the solution to the sustainability of our current social welfare systems, and the book will be of interest to all those concerned with workplace health.

The Internet of Things (IoT) can be defined as any network of things capable of generating, storing and exchanging data, and in some cases acting on it. This new form of seamless connectivity has many applications: smart cities, smart grids for energy management, intelligent transport, environmental monitoring, healthcare systems, etc. and EU policymakers were quick to realize that machine-to-machine communication and the IoT were going to be vital to economic development. It was also clear that the security of such systems would be of paramount importance and, following the European Commission’s Cybersecurity Strategy of the European Union in 2013, the EU’s Horizon 2020 programme was set up to explore available options and possible approaches to addressing the security and privacy issues of the IoT.This book presents 10 papers which have emerged from the research of the Horizon 2020 and CHIST-ERA programmes, and which address a wide cross-section of projects ranging from the secure management of personal data and the specific challenges of the IoT with respect to the GDPR, through access control within a highly dynamic IoT environment and increasing trust with distributed ledger technologies, to new cryptographic approaches as a counter-measure for side-channel attacks and the vulnerabilities of IoT-based ambient assisted living systems.The security and safety of the Internet of Things will remain high on the agenda of policymakers for the foreseeable future, and this book provides an overview for all those with an interest in the field.