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the Ambience Project

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Ambient Intelligence refers to an exciting new paradigm in information technology, in which people are empowered through a digital environment that is aware of their presence and context, and is sensitive, adaptive, and responsive to their needs, habits, gestures and emotions. 
It can be defined as the merger of two important visions and trends: "ubiquitous computing" and "social user interfaces". It builds on advanced networking technologies, which allow robust, ad-hoc networks to be formed by a broad range of mobile devices and other objects (ubiquitous- or pervasive computing). By adding adaptive user-system interaction methods, based on new insights in the way people like to interact with computing devices (social user interfaces), digital environments can be created which improve the quality of life of people by acting on their behalf. These context aware systems combine ubiquitous information, communication, and entertainment with enhanced personalization, natural interaction and intelligence. 

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  Ambience project goal

                            to jointly create networked Context Aware Environments (CAE) 

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Ambience Focus and tasks

The consortium will generate concepts of  Context Aware Environments (CAE), and will develop architectures, methods and tools that allow their development. 
Our tasks are:

  • To jointly create scenarios, define user- and system requirements, and create a system concept for Context Aware Environments in the home- and professional in-door domains
  • To develop a system architecture, as well as methods, tools, technologies and skills to integrate "awareness" (identification and tracking), "intelligence" (adaptivity), and natural interaction
  • To jointly merge the developed technologies into Context Aware Environments
  • To demonstrate and evaluate the concept(s)

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Ambient Intelligent environments can be characterized by the following basic elements: ubiquity, awareness, intelligence, and natural interaction. Ubiquity refers to a situation in which we are surrounded by a multitude of interconnected embedded systems, which are invisible and moved into the background of our environment. Awareness refers to the ability of the system to locate and recognize objects and people, and their intentions. Intelligence refers to the fact that the digital surrounding is able to analyze the context, adapt itself to the people that live in it, learn from their behavior, and eventually to recognize as well as show emotion. Natural Interaction finally refers to advanced modalities like natural speech- and gesture recognition, as well as speech-synthesis, which will allow a much more human-like communication with the digital environment than is possible today.

Ambient Intelligence throws challenging research questions in several areas of science and engineering. These questions are rather fundamental and their resolution requires multidisciplinary and multicultural research teams that combine input from such diverse areas as computer science, electrical engineering, interaction design, and human behavior research. This has been realized in the AMBIENCE project.

 

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Ambience project links
redball.gif (326 bytes) Project consortium and contact information

 

redball.gif (326 bytes) - Open technology seminar on Ambient Intelligence
Organised by VTT Electronics, CCC Software Professionals and NetHawk
January 10th, 2003, Oulu, Finland.

- EUSAI conference, 3+4 November 2003, Eindhoven
The first European Symposium on Ambient Intelligence

 

redball.gif (326 bytes) Dissemination/Exploitation

 

redball.gif (326 bytes) Public deliverables

 

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symposium Proceedings

Online version

redball.gif (326 bytes) Internal link. Sorry: for Ambience - participants only

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Ambience is a two year research program sponsored via Eureka under the ITEA programme

The URL of this page is:  http://www.extra.research.philips.com/euprojects/ambience
      Last updated  on 26 Jan 2004, (c) ITEA AMBIENCE  project, 2001-2003.