Journal of Ambient Intelligence and Smart Environments - Volume 9, issue 1

Authors: Gomez, Carles | Prati, Andrea | Aghajan, Hamid | Augusto, Juan Carlos

Article Type: Editorial

DOI: 10.3233/AIS-160410

Citation: Journal of Ambient Intelligence and Smart Environments, vol. 9, no. 1, pp. 1-2, 2017

Article Type: Other

Citation: Journal of Ambient Intelligence and Smart Environments, vol. 9, no. 1, pp. 3-3, 2017

Authors: Poslad, Stefan | Muñoz, Andrés

Article Type: Editorial

Abstract: Buildings are becoming more intelligent as physical environments, whose operations can be more intuitively and automatically tagged, sensed and controlled to adapt to changing physical environment conditions and the human behaviour of its inhabitants. We can imagine that 10 years in the future, workplaces and habitats will be even more sensor-driven, automated and adaptive. Not only can smart environment improve the present and future buildings but they can also be used to catalog physical elements and their context such as the location and spatial view of objects in a bounded space to better understand the use of historical buildings too.

Keywords: Smart building, context-aware, automation, localization, future industry

DOI: 10.3233/AIS-160411

Citation: Journal of Ambient Intelligence and Smart Environments, vol. 9, no. 1, pp. 5-6, 2017

Authors: Fet, Ngewi | Handte, Marcus | Marrón, Pedro José

Article Type: Research Article

Abstract: Smart environments require context information about their inhabitants in order to dynamically adapt their functionality. The location of persons or entities in an environment is an important piece of the context information. To this end, several types of indoor localization systems have been developed, with fingerprinting-based systems being the most common. Fingerprinting-based indoor localization systems tend to achieve higher accuracy compared to other approaches such as signal propagation modeling. However, they also tend to have a higher effort/cost for deployment and maintenance. Changes in the configuration of the indoor space like moving of furniture, or defective signal sources can cause …the signal characteristic distribution in the environment to change significantly. This renders the fingerprint radio map (used for training the system) outdated, and causes a corresponding drop in localization performance over time. This paper proposes an approach for environment self-monitoring and autonomous recalibration using the system infrastructure, and demonstrates that it can reliably detect changes in signal distribution and recalibrate the radio map of the localization system. The proposed approach achieves localization performance of up to 93% of the optimum achievable through manual system recalibration. Show more

Keywords: Fingerprinting, localization, recalibration, smart infrastructure

DOI: 10.3233/AIS-160416

Citation: Journal of Ambient Intelligence and Smart Environments, vol. 9, no. 1, pp. 7-20, 2017

Authors: Falomir, Zoe

Article Type: Research Article

Abstract: In this paper, qualitative descriptors of images (QIDL + ), 3D scenes (QSn 3 D ) and movements (QMD ) are proposed to be applied to ambient intelligent systems for: (i) improving human-computer interaction and (ii) enhancing their reasoning capabilities. These qualitative descriptors align with human perception and are used to produce narratives. Moreover, logic descriptions are obtained in first order logic and Prolog syntax, which enables straightforward reasoning capabilities. Finally, some use case tests carried out at Cartesium – the intelligent building at Spatial Cognition centre, at the University of Bremen – …are provided to show the flexibility and applicability of these qualitative descriptors. The results provided are discussed in terms of usability, logic framework used and integration of descriptors. Show more

Keywords: Qualitative descriptors, logics, narrative, scene understanding, Ambient Intelligence, human-machine interaction

DOI: 10.3233/AIS-160418

Citation: Journal of Ambient Intelligence and Smart Environments, vol. 9, no. 1, pp. 21-39, 2017

Authors: Kymäläinen, Tiina | Kaasinen, Eija | Hakulinen, Jaakko | Heimonen, Tomi | Mannonen, Petri | Aikala, Maiju | Paunonen, Hannu | Ruotsalainen, Jouni | Lehtikunnas, Lauri

Article Type: Research Article

Abstract: This article introduces user experience research that has been carried out by evaluating a video-illustrated science fiction prototype with process control workers. Essentially, the prototype ‘A remote operator’s day in a future control center in 2025’ was aimed at discovering opportunities for new interaction methods and ambient intelligence for the factories of the future. The theoretical objective was to carry out experience design research, which was based on explicit ambient user experience goals in the nominated industrial work context. This article describes the complete creative prototyping process, starting from the initial user research that included evaluations of current work practices, …technological trend studies and co-design workshops, and concluding with user research that assessed the final design outcome, the science fiction prototype. The main contribution of the article is on the ambient user experience goals, the creation process of the video-illustrated science fiction prototype, and on the reflection of how the experience-driven prototype was evaluated in two research setups: as video sequences embedded in a Web survey, and as interviews carried out with expert process control workers. For the science fiction prototyping process, the contribution demonstrates how the method may employ video-illustration as a means for future-oriented user experience research, and how complementary user-centered methods may be used to validate the results. Show more

Keywords: Industry 4.0, science fiction prototyping (SFP), (ambient) user experience (UX) design, user-centered design (UCD), process control work

DOI: 10.3233/AIS-160417

Citation: Journal of Ambient Intelligence and Smart Environments, vol. 9, no. 1, pp. 41-57, 2017

Article Type: Other

Citation: Journal of Ambient Intelligence and Smart Environments, vol. 9, no. 1, pp. 59-59, 2017

Authors: Bikakis, Antonis | Stavropoulos, Thanos G. | Meditskos, Georgios

Article Type: Editorial

Abstract: Artificial Intelligence provides a rich set of methods and tools for implementing the Ambient Intelligence vision, i.e. to transform our environments into smart spaces assisting as with our everyday tasks in an intelligent, seamless and non-obtrusive way. Among them, Semantic Web technologies, such as RDF, ontology languages and others, can be used to address several of the challenges that come with this vision, mainly with respect to modelling, sharing and reasoning with context information. This thematic issue demonstrates their capabilities by presenting three different Semantic Web-based solutions for mobile and computing environments.

Keywords: Ambient Intelligence, pervasive computing, mobile computing, Semantic Web technologies

DOI: 10.3233/AIS-160412

Citation: Journal of Ambient Intelligence and Smart Environments, vol. 9, no. 1, pp. 61-62, 2017

Authors: Apajalahti, Kasper | Hyvönen, Eero | Niiranen, Juha | Räisänen, Vilho

Article Type: Research Article

Abstract: Advanced automation is needed in future mobile networks to provide adequate service quality economically and with high reliability. In this paper, a system is presented that takes into account the network context, analyses uncertain information, and infers network configurations by means of probabilistic reasoning. The system introduced in this paper is an experimental platform integrating a mobile network simulator, a Markov Logic Network (MLN) model, and an OWL 2 ontology into a runtime environment that can be monitored via a Resource Description Framework (RDF) – based user interface. In this approach, the OWL ontology contains a semantic representation of the …relevant concepts, and the MLN model evaluates elements of uncertain information. Experiments based on a prototype implementation demonstrate the value of semantic modelling and probabilistic reasoning in network status characterization, optimization, and visualization. Show more

Keywords: Network management, 5G, semantic modelling, probabilistic reasoning, ontologies, Markov Logic Networks

DOI: 10.3233/AIS-160419

Citation: Journal of Ambient Intelligence and Smart Environments, vol. 9, no. 1, pp. 63-76, 2017

Authors: Soylu, Ahmet | Giese, Martin | Schlatte, Rudolf | Jimenez-Ruiz, Ernesto | Kharlamov, Evgeny | Özçep, Özgür | Neuenstadt, Christian | Brandt, Sebastian

Article Type: Research Article

Abstract: An increasing number of sensors are being deployed in business-critical environments, systems, and equipment; and stream a vast amount of data. The operational efficiency and effectiveness of business processes rely on domain experts’ agility in interpreting data into actionable business information. A domain expert has extensive domain knowledge but not necessarily skills and knowledge on databases and formal query languages. Therefore, centralised approaches are often preferred. These require IT experts to translate the information needs of domain experts into extract-transform-load (ETL) processes in order to extract and integrate data and then let domain experts apply predefined analytics. Since such a workflow …is too time intensive, heavy-weight and inflexible given the high volume and velocity of data, domain experts need to extract and analyse the data of interest directly. Ontologies, i.e., semantically rich conceptual domain models, present an intelligible solution by describing the domain of interest on a higher level of abstraction closer to the reality. Moreover, recent ontology-based data access (OBDA) technologies enable end users to formulate their information needs into queries using a set of terms defined in an ontology. Ontological queries could then be translated into SQL or some other database query languages, and executed over the data in its original place and format automatically. To this end, this article reports an ontology-based visual query system (VQS), namely OptiqueVQS, how it is extended for a stream-temporal query language called STARQL, a user experiment with the domain experts at Siemens AG, and STARQL’s query answering performance over a proof of concept implementation for PostgreSQL. Show more

Keywords: Visual query formulation, ontology-based data access, temporal data, stream sensor data, data retrieval, usability

DOI: 10.3233/AIS-160415

Citation: Journal of Ambient Intelligence and Smart Environments, vol. 9, no. 1, pp. 77-95, 2017