Symposium on AFFECTIVE SMART ENVIRONMENTS

in the frame of the 2007 AISB Convention (Artificial and Ambient Intelligence)
Newcastle University, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK
http://www.di.uniba.it/intint/ase07.html

BCS-HCI group members will get the same discount as members of the AISB

Ambient Intelligence (AmI) is an emerging and popular research field with the goal to create "smart" environments that react in an attentive, adaptive and proactive way to the presence and activities of humans, in order to provide the services that inhabitants of these environments request or are presumed to need. AmI is increasingly affecting our everyday lives: computers are already embedded in numerous everyday objects like TV sets, kitchen appliances, or central heating, and soon they will be networked, with each other as well as with personal ICT devices like organizers or cell phones. Communication with ambient computing resources will be ubiquitous, bio-sensing will allow devices to perceive the presence and state of users and to understand their needs and goals in order to improve their general living conditions and actual well-being. According to the 'Computers As Social Actors' paradigm, interaction with technology is driven by rules that derive from social psychology. These aspects become even more relevant when media are not boxed in a desktop computer but are integrated pervasively in everyday life environments. An Affective Smart Environment should be able to grasp these factors and adapt its behavior accordingly. Imagining and designing this kind of environment requires combining knowledge and methods of ubiquitous and pervasive computing with those of affective and social computing. And as yet there exists little in the way of coherent models of interaction on which to base our design approaches to such environments.