ATLANTIS AMBIENT AND PERVASIVE INTELLIGENCE – serie

This book presents recent developments is the field of human aspects in Ambient Intelligence. This field, and the associated workshop series, addresses multidisciplinary aspects of AmI with human-directed disciplines such as psychology, social science, neuroscience and biomedical sciences. The aim of the workshop series is to get researchers together from these human-directed disciplines or working on cross connections of AmI with these disciplines. The focus is on the use of knowledge from these disciplines in AmI applications, in order to support humans in their daily living in medical, psychological and social respects. The book plays important role to get modellers in the psychological, neurological, social or biomedical disciplines interested in AmI as a high-potential application area for their models. From the other side, the book may make researchers in Computer Science and Artificial and Ambient Intelligence more aware of the possibilities to incorporate more substantial knowledge from the psychological, neurological, social and biomedical disciplines in AmI architectures and applications.

Human action analyses and recognition are challenging problems due to large variations in human motion and appearance, camera viewpoint and environment settings. The field of action and activity representation andrecognition is relatively old, yet not well-understood by the students and research community. Some important but common motion recognition problems are even now unsolved properly by the computer vision community. However, in the last decade, a number of good approaches are proposed and evaluated subsequently by many researchers. Among those methods, some methods get significant attention from many researchers in the computer vision field due to their better robustness and performance.This book will cover gap of information and materials on comprehensive outlook – through various strategies from the scratch to the state-of-the-art on computer vision regarding action recognition approaches. This book will target the students and researchers who have knowledge on image processing at a basic level and would like to explore more on this area and do research. The step by step methodologies will encourage one to move forward for a comprehensive knowledge on computer vision for recognizing various human actions.

As a socially disruptive technology, Ambient Intelligence is ultimately directed towards humans and targeted at the mundane life made of an infinite richness of circumstances that cannot fully be considered and easily be anticipated. Most books, however, focus their analysis on, or deal largely with, the advancement of the technology and its potential only. This book offers a fresh, up–to–date, and holistic approach to Ambient Intelligence. As such, it addresses the interdisciplinary andtransdisciplinary aspects of the rapidly evolving field of Ambient Intelligence by seamlessly integrating and fusing it with artificial intelligence, cognitive science and psychology, social sciences, andhumanities. It is divided into two main parts: Part 1 is about different permutations of enabling technologies as well as core computational capabilities, namely context awareness, implicit and natural interaction, and intelligent behavior. It details the existing and upcoming prerequisite technologies, and elucidates the application and convergence of major current and future computing trends. Part 2 is an accessible review and synthesis of the latest research in the human-directed sciences and computing and how these are intricately interrelated in the realm of AmbientIntelligence. It deals with the state–of–the–art human–inspired applications which show human-like understanding and exhibit intelligent behavior in relation to a variety of aspects of human functioning – states and processes. It describes and elaborates on the rich potential of Ambient Intelligence from a variety of interrelated perspectives and the plethora of challenges and bottlenecks involved in making Ambient Intelligence a reality, and also discusses the established knowledge and recent discoveriesin the human–directed sciences and their application and convergence in the ambit of Ambient Intelligence computing. This seminal reference work isthe most comprehensive of its kind, and will prove invaluable to students, researchers, and professionals across both computing and the human-directed sciences.

Recent advances in ICT have given rise to new socially disruptive technologies: AmI and the IoT, marking a major technological change which may lead to a drastic transformation of the technological ecosystem in all its complexity, as well as to a major alteration in technology use and thus daily living. Yet no work has systematically explored AmI and the IoT as advances in science and technology (S&T) and sociotechnical visions in light of their nature, underpinning, and practices along with their implications for individual and social wellbeing and for environmental health. AmI and the IoT raise new sets of questions: In what way can we conceptualize such technologies? How can we evaluate their benefits and risks? How should science–based technology and society’s politics relate? Are science-based technology and society converging in new ways?  It is with such questions that this book is concerned. Positioned within the research field of Science and Technology Studies (STS), which encourages analyses whose approaches are drawn from a variety of disciplinary perspectives, this book amalgamates an investigation of AmI and the IoT technologies based on a unique approach to cross–disciplinary integration; their ethical, social, cultural, political, and environmental effects; and a philosophical analysis and evaluation of the implications of such effects. An interdisciplinary approach is indeed necessary to understand the complex issue of scientific and technological innovations that S&T are not the only driving forces of the modern, high–tech society, as well as to respond holistically, knowledgeably, reflectively, and critically to the most pressing issues and significant challenges of the modern world. This book is the first systematic study on how AmI and the IoT applications of scientific discovery link up with other developments in the spheres of the European society, including culture, politics,policy, ethics and ecological philosophy. It situates AmI and the IoT developments and innovations as modernist science–based technology enterprises in a volatile and tense relationship with an inherently contingent, heterogeneous, fractured, conflictual, plural, and reflexive postmodern social world.The issue’s topicality results in a book of interest to a wide readership in science, industry, politics, and policymaking, as well as of recommendation to anyone interested in learning the sociology, philosophy, and history of AmI and the IoT technologies, or to those who would like to better understand some of the ethical, environmental, social, cultural, and political dilemmas to what has been labeled the technologies of the 21st century.

Human action analyses and recognition are challenging problems due to large variations in human motion and appearance, camera viewpoint and environment settings. The field of action and activity representation andrecognition is relatively old, yet not well-understood by the students and research community. Some important but common motion recognition problems are even now unsolved properly by the computer vision community. However, in the last decade, a number of good approaches are proposed and evaluated subsequently by many researchers. Among those methods, some methods get significant attention from many researchers in the computer vision field due to their better robustness and performance.This book will cover gap of information and materials on comprehensive outlook – through various strategies from the scratch to the state-of-the-art on computer vision regarding action recognition approaches. This book will target the students and researchers who have knowledge on image processing at a basic level and would like to explore more on this area and do research. The step by step methodologies will encourage one to move forward for a comprehensive knowledge on computer vision for recognizing various human actions.

This book consists of a number of chapters addressing different aspects of activity recognition, roughly in three main categories of topics. The first topic will be focused on activity modeling, representation and reasoning using mathematical models, knowledge representation formalisms and AI techniques. The second topic will concentrate on activity recognition methods and algorithms. Apart from traditional methods based on data mining and machine learning, we are particularly interested in novel approaches, such as the ontology-based approach, that facilitate data integration, sharing and automatic/automated processing. In the third topic we intend to cover novel architectures and frameworks for activity recognition, which are scalable and applicable to large scale distributed dynamic environments. In addition, this topic will also include the underpinning technological infrastructure, i.e. tools and APIs, that supports function/capability sharing and reuse, and rapid development and deployment of technological solutions. The fourth category of topic will be dedicated to representative applications of activity recognition in intelligent environments, which address the life cycle of activity recognition and their use for novel functions of the end-user systems with comprehensive implementation, prototyping and evaluation. This will include a wide range of application scenarios, such as smart homes, intelligent conference venues and cars.

Trustworthy Ubiquitous Computing covers aspects of trust in ubiquitous computing environments. The aspects of context, privacy, reliability, usability and user experience related to “emerged and exciting new computing paradigm of Ubiquitous Computing”, includes pervasive, grid, and peer-to-peer computing including sensor networks to provide secure computing and communication services at anytime and anywhere.Marc Weiser presented his vision of disappearing and ubiquitous computing more than 15 years ago. The big picture of the computer introduced into our environment was a big innovation and the starting point for various areas of research. In order to totally adopt the idea of ubiquitous computing several houses were build, equipped with technology and used as laboratory in order to find and test appliances that are useful and could be made available in our everyday life. Within the last years industry picked up the idea of integrating ubiquitous computing and already available products like remote controls for your house were developed and brought to the market. In spite of many applications and projects in the area of ubiquitous and pervasive computing the success is still far away. One of the main reasons is the lack of acceptance of and confidence in this technology. Although researchers and industry are working in all of these areas a forum to elaborate security, reliability and privacy issues, that resolve in trustworthy interfaces and computing environments for people interacting within these ubiquitous environments is important. The user experience factor of trust thus becomes a crucial issue for the success of a UbiComp application. The goal of this book is to provide a state the art of Trustworthy Ubiquitous Computing to address recent research results and to present and discuss the ideas, theories, technologies, systems, tools, applications and experiences on all theoretical and practical issues.

System on chips designs have evolved from fairly simple unicore, single memory designs to complex heterogeneous multicore SoC architectures consisting of a large number of IP blocks on the same silicon. To meet high computational demands posed by latest consumer electronic devices, most current systems are based on such paradigm, which represents a real revolution in many aspects in computing.The attraction of multicore processing for power reduction is compelling. By splitting a set of tasks among multiple processor cores, the operating frequency necessary for each core can be reduced, allowing to reduce the voltage on each core. Because dynamic power is proportional to the frequency and to the square of the voltage, we get a big gain, even though we may have more cores running. As more and more cores are integrated into these designs to share the ever increasing processing load, the main challenges lie in efficient memory hierarchy, scalable system interconnect, new programming paradigms, and efficient integration methodology for connecting such heterogeneous cores into a single system capable of leveraging their individual flexibility. Current design methods tend toward mixed HW/SW co-designs targeting multicore systems on-chip for specific applications. To decide on the lowest cost mix of cores, designers must iteratively map the device’s functionality to a particular HW/SW partition and target architectures. In addition, to connect the heterogeneous cores, the architecture requires high performance complex communication architectures and efficient communication protocols, such as hierarchical bus, point-to-point connection, or Network-on-Chip. Software development also becomes far more complex due to the difficulties in breaking a single processing task into multiple parts that can be processed separately and then reassembled later. This reflects the fact that certain processor jobs cannot be easily parallelized to run concurrently on multiple processingcores and that load balancing between processing cores – especially heterogeneous cores – is very difficult.