Description of the workshop

Description of Thematic Area

The InterLink Working Group 2 “Ambient Computing and Communication Environments” is concerned with identifying new challenges, developing a research agenda for future work and facilitating international collaboration in the thematic area briefly characterized as follows.
The evolution towards a future information and knowledge society is characterized by the development of personalized individual, as well as collective, services that exploit new qualities of infrastructures situated in smart environments and based on a range of ubiquitous and pervasive communication networks providing ambient computing at multiple levels. The underlying vision of pervasive and ambient computing assumes very large numbers of "invisible" small computing devices embedded into the physical environment. They will interact with and being used by multiple users in a wide range of dynamically changing situations. In addition, this heterogeneous collection of devices will be supported by an “infrastructure” of intelligent sensors (and actuators) embedded in our homes, offices, hospitals, public spaces, leisure environments providing the raw data (and active responses) needed for a wide range of smart services. Furthermore new and innovative interaction techniques will move towards the integration of tangible and mixed reality interaction. It is anticipated that this technology will be part of all artefacts that will be built in the future or will be added in order to augment existing artefacts. Thus, we will be provided with a computing, communication, sensing and interaction substrate for systems and services that can be characterized as "smart ecosystems".

Description of Workshop Content and Goals

The goal of the third workshop is to bring together experts in order to create a “white paper” identifying deficits and proposing a research agenda for future work. This workshop is a follow-up to two previous workshops held in 2007 in France and Germany. In these workshops, it was agreed by the invited experts that especially the following two areas need special attention:

• The concept of socially aware ambient intelligence and means for its realization
  
• The conflict of data provision vs. control and human attention involving the resulting issues of privacy, trust, identity, etc.
  

• How to develop valid methods of detecting complex human behaviour in social group activities?
•  How to create the right mix and level of augmenting and personalizing architectural physical space, especially in public environments?
  
• What are the affordances that facilitate social awareness and connectedness in ambient environments?
  
• How to resolve the apparent conflicts of personalization and service collision for multiple people populating the same space?
  
• How can the new ways of implicit interaction with unobtrusive disappearing computers be extended for multiple people, to groups and to crowds?
  
• How can the experimental and laboratory based prototypes be scaled up for real life applications in homes, offices, hospitals, public spaces, etc.? This involves not only a quantitative but rather a qualitative change because it includes the extension to communities, cities and even societies.
  
• What is the future of “privacy and trust” in local and global large-scale ambient environments with zillions of sensors tracking and monitoring basically all our activities? Will “privacy and trust” degenerate from moral and legal rights to a commodity and items of trading and bargaining?
  
• How can we resolve the conflict between providing personal data – often without conscious attention and decision – and still maintaining control over collection, distribution, interpretation and usage by third parties?