Search results for "Ambient intelligence"
showing 10 items of 50 documents
Detection of User Activities in Intelligent Environments
2014
Research on Ambient Intelligence (AmI) focuses on the development of smart environments adaptable to the needs and preferences of their inhabitants. For this reason it is important to understand and model user preferences. In this chapter we describe a system to detect user behavior patterns in an intelligent workplace. The system is designed for a workplace equipped in the context of Sensor9k, a project carried out at the Department of Computer Science at the University of Palermo (Italy). © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2014.
Extracting Structured Knowledge From Sensor Data for Hybrid Simulation
2014
Obtaining continuous and detailed monitoring of indoor environments has today become viable, also thanks to the widespread availability of effective and flexible sensing technology; this paves the way for the design of practical Ambient Intelligence systems, and for their actual deployment in real-life contexts, which require advanced functionalities, such as for instance the automatic discovery of the activities carried on by users. Novel issues arise in this context; on one hand, it is important to reliably model the phenomena under observation even though, to this end, it is often necessary to craft a carefully designed prototype in order to test and fine-tune the theoretical models.
Mimicking biological mechanisms for sensory information fusion
2013
Current Artificial Intelligence systems are bound to become increasingly interconnected to their surrounding environment in the view of the newly rising Ambient Intelligence (AmI) perspective. In this paper, we present a comprehensive AmI framework for performing fusion of raw data, perceived by sensors of different nature, in order to extract higher-level information according to a model structured so as to resemble the perceptual signal processing occurring in the human nervous system. Following the guidelines of the greater BICA challenge, we selected the specific task of user presence detection in a locality of the system as a representative application clarifying the potentialities of …
An Ontology-Based Autonomic System for Ambient Intelligence Scenarios
2014
Pervasive computing and Ambient Intelligence (AmI) demonstrate that computer systems which directly interact with users are characterized by increasing size and complexity, so that the human user will still not be able to adequately manage them for a long time to come. As a response to this trend, the Autonomic Computing paradigm aims to design and develop systems able to self-configure and self-manage. The research reported here is part of an AmI project that proposes a multi-tier cognitive architecture for aggregating sensory information at different levels of abstraction. In such an architecture, a central reasoning component is able to understand the environmental state and the user’s p…
SmartBuildings: An AmI system for energy efficiency
2015
Nowadays, the increasing global awareness of the importance of energy saving in everyday life acts as a stimulus to provide innovative ICT solutions for sustainability. In this scenario, the growing interest in smart homes has been driven both by socioeconomic and technological expectations. One of the key aspects of being smart is the efficiency of the urban apparatus, which includes, among others, energy, transportation and buildings. The present work describes SmartBuildings, a novel Ambient Intelligence system, which aims at reducing the energy consumption of "legacy" buildings by means of artificial intelligence techniques applied on heterogeneous sensor networks. A prototype has been …
Intelligent Management Systems for Energy Efficiency in Buildings: A Survey
2014
In recent years, reduction of energy consumption in buildings has increasingly gained interest among researchers mainly due to practical reasons, such as economic advantages and long-term environmental sustainability. Many solutions have been proposed in the literature to address this important issue from complementary perspectives, which are often hard to capture in a comprehensive manner. This survey article aims at providing a structured and unifying treatment of the existing literature on intelligent energy management systems in buildings, with a distinct focus on available architectures and methodology supporting a vision transcending the well-established smart home vision, in favor o…
Human-ambient interaction through Wireless Sensor Networks
2009
Recent developments in technology have permitted the creation of cheap, and unintrusive devices that may be effectively employed for instrumenting an intelligent environment. The present work describes a modular framework that makes use of a class of those devices, namely wireless sensors, in order to monitor relevant physical quantities and to collect users' requirements through implicit feedback. A central intelligent unit extracts higher-level concepts from raw sensory inputs, and carries on symbolic reasoning based on them. The aim of the reasoning is to plan a sequence of actions that will lead the environment to a state as close as possible to the users' desires, taking into account b…
User Activity Recognition via Kinect in an Ambient Intelligence Scenario
2014
The availability of an ever-increasing kind of cheap, unobtrusive, sensing devices has stressed the need for new approaches to merge raw measurements in order to realize what is happening in the monitored environment. Ambient Intelligence (AmI) techniques exploit information about the environment state to adapt the environment itself to the users’ preferences. Even if traditional sensors allow a rough understanding of the users’ preferences, ad-hoc sensors are required to obtain a deeper comprehension of users’ habits and activities. In this paper we propose a framework to recognize users’ activities via a depth and RGB camera device, namely the Microsoft Kinect. The proposed approach takes…
Programming distributed applications with symbolic reasoning on WSNs
2015
Programming Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) is a complex task for which existing approaches adopt rigid architectures that are only suitable for specific application fields. In previous papers we introduced a programming methodology and a lightweight middleware based on high-level programming and executable code exchange for distributed processing on WSNs. In this paper, we show how high-level programming can be effectively used on WSNs to implement symbolic reasoning. In order to prove the feasibility of our approach, we present a Fuzzy Logic system where the value updates and the rule evaluations are performed in a distributed way. Through the proposed methodology, we discuss the developm…
A Fuzzy Adaptive Controller for an Ambient Intelligence Scenario
2014
The definition of effective energy saving strategies capable of satisfying users’ requirements for environmental wellness is a complex task that requires the definition of well-tuned optimization algorithms. Sensory information depends on the environments observed, hence the model adopted to describe it should be adaptive and dynamic. This chapter presents a methodology for the tuning of a fuzzy controller capable of minimizing energy consumption while maximizing the users comfort in an Ambient Intelligence Scenario. A meta-heuristic search algorithm produces different sets of fuzzy rules depending on the needs of the system. An ontology has been developed to describe the configurations of …