Symposium on "Artificial Societies for Ambient Intelligence" (ASAmI'07)

Newcastle, UK
http://asami07.cs.rhul.ac.uk/

The vision of Ambient Intelligence (AmI) is a society based on unobtrusive, often invisible interactions amongst people and computer-based services in a global computing environment. Services in AmI will be ubiquitous in that there will be no specific bearer or provider but, instead, they will be associated with a variety of objects and devices in the environment, which will not bear any resemblance to computers. People will interact with these services through intelligent and intuitive interfaces embedded in these objects and devices, which in turn will be sensitive to what people need.

For a large class of the envisaged AmI applications, the added value of these new services is likely to be for people in ordinary social contexts. Such applications beg for technologies that are transparent, so that their functional behaviour can be understood easily. Put simply, transparency should bring AmI interactions closer to the way people think rather than the way machines operate.

Another challenge posed by the AmI vision is that the electronic part of the ambience will often need to act intelligently on behalf of people. The conceptual components of ambience will need to be both reactive and proactive, behaving as if they were agents that act on behalf of people. It would be more natural, in other words, to use the agent metaphor in order to understand components of an intelligent ambience. An agent in this context can be a software (or hardware) entity that can sense and affect the environment, has knowledge of the environment and its own goals, and can proactively plan to achieve its goals or those of its user(s), so that the combined interactions of the electronic and physical environment provide a desirable outcome for one or more people.

If we assume that agents are abstractions for the interaction within an ambient intelligent environment, one aspect that we need to ensure is that their behaviour is regulated and coordinated, so that the system as a whole functions effectively. For this purpose, we need rules that take into consideration the social context in which these interactions take place, and the whole system begs for an organisation similar to that envisaged by artificial agent societies. The society is there not only to regulate behaviour but also to distribute responsibility amongst the member agents.

Important Dates

This one-day Symposium has the following important dates:

Submission Deadline: 8 January 2007 (Hard Deadline)
Notification: 5 February 2007
Camera Ready Copy Due: 23 February 2007
Convention Date: 3rd-5th April 2007