Introduction
Increasingly products and environments will be equiped with intellligence that can observe, anticipate and respond to the user. The challenge is to make these systems easy to program and easy to interact with.
The SRA Ambient Intelligence is investigating a new paradigm for bringing the flexibility of information technology to bear in every aspect of daily life. It foresees that people will be surrounded by deeply embedded and flexibly networked systems that provide easily accessible yet unobtrusive support for an open-ended range of activities, to enrich daily life and to increase productivity at work.
These systems will be quite different from current computer systems, as they will be based on an unbounded set of hardware artefacts and software entities, embedded in everyday objects or realized as new types of device. Cooperation between individual entities is a necessity, because isolated entities may not be able to perform their tasks with sufficient quality or efficiency, or not reach the required distributed control objectives. Objects should be seen as encapsulating entities, mixing hardware and software in any proportion and at any level of complexity: an object may thus be as simple as a sensor, or as complex as a portable device, or even an entire car or building, depending on the context.
However, such systems will only be viable if they support many diverse applications concurrently, and if they remain open towards unforeseen uses. Applications will execute on behalf of different stakeholders with potentially competing and conflicting interests. Their execution will involve many software entities across distributed and embedded devices. Users, applications and devices will compete for resources such as processing time, memory, communication bandwidth, and sensors/actuators, and they will need to be able to negotiate access. The multitude of devices and computational processes all require energy for their operation, but energy will be a particularly scarce resource that needs to be carefully managed not only at device-level but across entire ambient systems.
The supporting architectures should be open, distributed and scalable, naturally integrating heterogeneous devices ranging from tiny actuators to large computers. It will combine architectures, systems support, networking, data processing and tools to support timely reactivity and pro-activeness, reconfigurability, real-time adaptation, dependability, and context sensitivity.
Aims and mission
The overall aim is to develop a new generation of architectures for pervasive computing environments that supports at their core the evolutionary features in the world we inhabit today. The architecture that we envision promotes co-evolution of pervasive computing environments and their users, and of embedded digital infrastructures and their physical settings.
Our approach to enable ambient intelligent systems depends on highly distributed, reliable, and secure information systems that can evolve and adapt to radical changes in their environment, delivering information services that adapt to the people and the services that use them. These distributed systems must easily and naturally integrate devices, ranging from tiny sensors and actuators to hand-held information appliances. Such devices will be connected by short-range wireless networks, as well as by high-bandwidth local backbones. Data and services must be secure, reliable, and high-performance, even if part of the system is down, disconnected, under repair, or under attack. The system must configure, install, diagnose, maintain, and improve itself – this applies especially to the vast numbers of sensors that will be cheap, widely dispersed, and even disposable.
In order to make this possible we need to build an underlying architecture for pervasive environments that “opens up” to allow a diverse set of stakeholders to control, manage and influence the process of change in order to create sustainable future environments. We approach our vision with a programme of research in which fundamental innovation activities that address the need for new principles, models, methods, and tools are interwoven with experience projects that study contexts of use in different settings.
Research topics
To scope our SRA we will concentrate on a set of core challenges and research topics that we consider most important for the realization of this vision. The core challenges related to the state of the art that we identify are:
• Embedded Networking. Embedded devices vary largely in their wireless communication requirements and therefore interoperability across different technologies needs to be investigated. In addition there is still a need for new protocols that meet the requirements of very low-power and low-resource embedded devices.
• Competition. Experimental ubiquitous computing environments typically support a very small number of ‘assumed to be friendly’ applications but future ambient systems will only be viable if they support many diverse applications executing on behalf of different users with potentially competing and conflicting interests. Users, applications and devices will compete for scarce resources in a dynamic heterogeneous environment, posing resource management challenges at a new scale of complexity.
• Adaptability. The sheer number of entities that make up ambient intelligent systems implies that access to resources will be extremely competitive. Hence, these systems will have to embody adaptability on an entirely new scale. For example, communication will need to become adaptive to sustain high densities of devices, and computations may need to split and migrate to adapt to available energy and communication.
• Integrated development. Ubiquitous computing systems and applications are developed ad hoc as we lack the abstractions, tools, methods and development frameworks required to easily integrate infrastructure components.
• Dependability (i.e. availability, reliability, integrity and maintainability) as embedded systems are business or safety critical in almost every human endeavour;
• Low-power microelectronics. As the devices will be integrated in the environment, small size and energy efficiency will be essential. This requires the development of technologies in the areas of low-power RF, mixed-signal microelectronics, energy scavenging, System on chip, and MEMS.
Cross-disciplinary techniques, methodologies and paradigms, for both functional and non-functional requirements, will be vital for the design, test, simulation, abstraction, compilation, programming and run-time support of these architectures. This includes the analysis and optimization of networking protocols and distributed data processing, the study of energy-efficient architectures and circuits, and the supporting design and test environments.
We approach our vision with a programme of research in which fundamental innovation activities that address the need for new principles, models, methods, and tools are interwoven with experience projects that study contexts of use in different settings. The particular scientific methods to be used will range from mathematical modelling (e.g. for resource optimization problems), simulation (e.g. of network protocols), hardware/software prototyping (e.g. of smart devices), and system measurements to scenario design, contextual analysis, and system evaluation in situ.
Application areas
The exploitation is expected to have immediate utility in an abundance of industrial, medical, civil and safety applications. Among the application domain are for instance
• Health systems: for better individual health monitoring and tools for health professionals
• Safety and security: monitoring safety-critical systems and providing digital safeguards
• Transport: improving safety, efficiency and comfort
• E-inclusion: supporting people with special needs, and including all sectors of society
• E-work: new methods of work, team work, and mobile workers
• Socialisation: nurturing and strengthening social relationships
• Sanctuary: improve people’s environments to afford more relaxation and personal sanctuary
International context
The SRA is fundamentally relevant to EU framework from a scientific and technical perspective, as well as from a societal and strategic viewpoint. It adheres completely to the strategic objectives of the EU IST. It is also in line with the vision of several Bsik initiatives, such as Smart Surroundings, Freeband and Multimedia.
