TR2008-079

Ambient Intelligence As The Bridge To The Future of Pervasive Computing


TR Image
Dots are individual movements. Space on the vertical axis and time on the horizontal axis.
Abstract:

One prediction about this future of pervasive technology is that people will carry the tools needed to interface with technological resources sprinkled through out the environment. A problem with this vision is the dark side of the network effect: early adopters will end up carrying around interfaces for technology that largely does not yet exist, and building managers will question the value of installing technology with features that almost no one will be able to use. An intermediate solution is that certain buildings with specific needs for efficiency or security (such as hospitals) may become smart, with technology insinuated into particular spaces. Since many, or even most of the people in these spaces will not have the technology to interface directly with the new pervasive resources, we must think of the interaction idiom as initially being closer to the notion of smart environments. These environments will have to sense, interpret, and facilitate the actions of the inhabitants, possibly with very little help from technology attached to the people involved, or even their cooperation. We survey a body of work on perceptual tools for smart buildings, built on the sensor network model, and focused on the idea that statistical methods and population dynamics can provide valuable information even in situations where detection of individual instances of behavior may be difficult to detect. These are some of the tools which will fuel the building optimization applications that will justify the efforts of early adopters to build smart buildings studded with pervasive technology.

 

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    •  NEWS    FG 2008: 2 publications by MERL researchers and others
      Date: September 17, 2008
      Where: IEEE International Conference on Automatic Face and Gesture Recognition (FG)
      Brief
      • The papers "Ambient Intelligence as the Bridge to the Future of Pervasive Computing" by Wren, C.R. and Ivanov, Y.A. and "Recognizing Talking Faces from Acoustic Doppler Reflections" by Kalgaonkar, K. and Raj, B. were presented at the IEEE International Conference on Automatic Face and Gesture Recognition (FG).
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