Special issue: Intelligent agents and services for smart environments

Flávio Soares Corrêa da Silva, Stefania Bandini, F.S. Corrêa da Silva, S. Bandini
2009 Journal of Knowledge-based & Intelligent Engineering Systems  
A smart environment is a (physical or virtual) location endowed with autonomous behaviour. It can sense what occurs within itself and its surroundings, and adapts its actions accordingly. Intelligent multiagent systems and Semantic Web Services constitute relevant technologies to design and implement smart environments. They provide for decentralised and robust platforms upon which autonomous software modules can interact with themselves and with sensors and actuators, which in turn can relate
more » ... irectly to activities that occur within an environment. In turn, smart environments are also relevant applications and test beds for multiagent systems and for Semantic Web Services. Among the challenges related to the design and implementation of smart environments, we highlight: -Technical requirements related to real-time response using heterogeneous devices with possibly limited storage and processing capabilities. -Socio-technical requirements due to smart environments being inhabited by humans, who typically produce partially reliable information. -Ethical requirements related to smart environments interfering directly with social activities. Data collected by smart environments can raise, just to mention some concrete issues, privacy and ownership issues. The applications of smart environments are many and of great diversity. Some possible applications are: -Digital entertainment: many successful computer games provide for more immersive and therefore engaging experiences by interacting with users based on location-and context-sensitive information. We can have, for example, computer games in which the players are "tagged" by the individual (wireless) game controls they use, additional information about their behaviour is captured by multimodal sensors such as cameras and microphones, and a game responds to this information with multimodal output data (such as sounds, images and shaking) to build an immersive environment within which many players can interact. Such possibilities of interaction among players and between players and the game itself can be provided to players who are physically located within the same environment -e.g. the precincts of a theme park -or physically far apart -e.g. interacting through a virtual environment based on the WWW. -Arts and culture: in interactive performance arts and in digitally enhanced museum exhibits, smart environments can contribute to enhance the experience of the audience in many ways:
doi:10.3233/kes-2009-0172 fatcat:4idlqomnqbdm7far7t6uqyjx4m