IET International Conference on Intelligent Environments (IE 08) | July 2008

Special session organizer:
Professor Sajid Hussain, Acadia University, Canada

Co-organizer:
Dr Peter Graham, Associate Professor, University of Manitoba, Canada

Sensor networks are used in various pervasive and ubiquitous applications. These networks usually consist of a large number of sensors that are deployed at remote and inaccessible places. As most of the sensors are wireless, energy-efficient data dissemination and communication protocols are needed; otherwise, batteries will rapidly drain and network connectivity and coverage will become unacceptable. On one hand, we want the sensor nodes to be active and monitor the environment. On the other hand, we want the sensor nodes to conserve their energy by sleeping significant amount of time. Further, depending on the application, robustness and responsiveness can be very critical.

The objective of this special session is to provide an opportunity for academic researchers and industry practitioners to present and discuss experiences, emerging applications, and research results for data dissemination and communication protocols in sensor networks.

Topics include but not are limited to the following:

Energy-efficient data dissemination
Databases and query optimization
Routing protocols
Medium Access Control (MAC) protocols
Connectivity and coverage
Topology and Sleep Scheduling
Robustness
Security, privacy, and trust
Smart homes
Software design and architectures
Intelligent agent architectures
Machine learning and distributed data mining
Pervasive and ubiquitous systems and services
Industrial experience and emerging applications

Instructions for Manuscripts

Authors are requested to submit a PDF file for their manuscript following the submission guideline available at http://conferences.theiet.org/ie08/author.htm . All manuscripts should be submitted through the conference submission system and choosing the workshop title. The papers should also be emailed to the workshop organizer for reference. All manuscripts should be received by the conference deadline for paper submission which is the 15 February 2008.

For more information please contact:
Professor Sajid Hussain, sajid.hussain@acadiau.ca, Acadia University, Canada.
Dr Peter Graham, pgraham@cs.umanitoba.ca, University of Manitoba, Canada

Special Session on Architecture and Intelligent Environments

Special session organizer:
Prof. Dimitris Papalexopoulos, School of Architecture N.T.U.A. Greece

Ambient Intelligence (AmI) is proposing a new paradigm for Architecture? Living the historical aided process of transformation from the Industrial Paradigm to an Informational one de we rethink Modernity as "what changes the crisis into value and promotes a new aesthetic"? In what respect the challenge of "intelligent environments" is liveable? Intelligent Environment is a word that must signify much more than Environment technologically Augmented".

We can have WIFIs, RFIDs, and many other technological devices but does that means that we have an intelligent environment? Certainly not; the technological elements of innovation per se may bring a safer and most efficient environment but we should not use the word intelligence in this context. Intelligence means to reinforce and enlarge the critical capabilities of individual, to make innovative creative and open choices. It is exactly within this conception that architecture becomes a key element in making intelligent (real intelligent!) environments. Architecture is the area of human knowledge that is capable of putting together elements of technological, constructive, spatial and above all aesthetic work to create an environment to be used to enrich and enlarge the possibilities and potentials of individuals AmI components are disseminated to space, from the small scale to the large geographical one. They could be fixed to one place or mobile, integrated to the building fabric or clipped on. AmI components are located. Even when they are mobile, their trajectories are conditioned by the structure of the supporting space. The functionality of an AmI system is related to the functionality of the space that hosts it. The development of AmI environments integrates space requirements and, at the same time, architectural design must shelter activities augmented with AmI.

An open list of questions arises:

How existing spaces are redefined and how new spaces are designed?
Interaction design seems to be an important issue for architectural thinking, linked to the design of dispositifs prompting, but not defining in detail.
How do we deal with instable space identities?
How do we represent and construct the "not yet defined in its details"?
How do we define the constructability of evolving intelligent environments?
How AmI redefines the traditional concept of space and time?

As the related to space AmI components redefine locality, a special interest is drawn to the Mediterranean space seen through modernity as crisis catalyst. One of the most important issues proposed to be treated is Energy and Disequilibrium, New Form of IT and Architecture in the Mediterranean.

For more information please contact: Dimitris Papalexopoulos, dplxs@otenet.gr , N.T.U.A., Athens, Greece.

Special Session on Intelligent Cities

Special session organizer:
Prof. Dr. Nicos Komninos, URENIO, Aristotle University, Greece

Intelligent cities belong to a new orientation of urban and regional planning focusing on the creation of environments that improve our cognitive skills, our capabilities for learning, research, and innovation.

Intelligent cities combine two fundamental dimensions: territorial systems of innovation and collaborative digital spaces. An intelligent city is a territory (community, district, cluster, city, region) in which the local system of innovation is enhanced by digital spaces and IT tools; digital interactions, devices, and information systems supplement the new urban functions of knowledge creation, transfer, application, and dissemination. The term describes a territory with: (1) developed knowledge-intensive activities or clusters of such activities, (2) embedded routines of social co-operation and institutions allowing knowledge and know-how to be created or acquired, (3) developed communication infrastructure, digital spaces, and online knowledge and innovation management tools; and (4) a proven ability to innovate, manage and resolve problems that appear for the first time, since the capacity to innovate and to manage uncertainty are critical factors for measuring intelligence.

The session welcomes papers that address key issues related to the creation and functioning of intelligent cities or clusters:

Review papers on the state of the art in intelligent cities research
Case studies on clusters and cities having designated as intelligent
Strategies for intelligent cities creation
Analysis of territorial systems of innovation functioning on physical and virtual spaces
Analysis of the connectivity between the physical, institutional, and digital layers of intelligent city functions
Architectures, components, information systems, and services for intelligent cities

For more information please contact: Professor Nicos Komninos, komninos@eng.auth.gr, Aristotle University, Greece

Special Session on Social and Psychological Dimensions of Designing and Experiencing Intelligent Environments in the Urban Context

Special session organizers:
Dr. Dimitris Charitos, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Greece

Everyday urban environments can be seen as complex spatial systems, which function as contexts for supporting communication. In the beginning of the 21st century, these environments are radically being re-ordered by technological systems and networks. These environments may also incorporate systems, which capture visual, auditory and other types of information regarding human activity and consequently utilize this input to affect the process of generating digital representations. Very recent advances in mobile, wireless, pervasive and ubiquitous computing technologies have begun to transform the potential for social interaction taking place within urban public space. We can therefore put forward the hypothesis that the incorporation of ICT systems results in an electronic enhancement of our everyday urban environment since our communication with these environments and with other individuals who exist and act within them is mediated by these systems.

The most advanced form of these mediated spaces incorporate intelligence thus affording a novel type of mediation. These intelligent environments could be regarded as spatial interfaces that expand in physical space and integrate with it, thus affording a hybrid (physical and mediated) spatial experience, in the context of which a novel form of social interaction may occur. Thus, the experience of interacting with/within an intelligent environment may affect the way that users perceive the relation between the physical world and the technologically mediated environment and consequently the way that they experience and conceive of urban public space and everyday life within it.
The significance of these changes for social life in a 21st century city is the main motivation for proposing this special session. The focus of the session is on investigating the emergence of intelligent environments and the impact that the implementation and use of such systems has on their users, from a social and psychological perspective and ultimately on mediated communication taking place within the context of these spaces. Particular emphasis is given to investigating the manner in which the urban spatial context, where situated communication occurs, is transformed by the introduction of these technologies. Indeed, when we refer to multi-user intelligent environment systems, these could be seen as communication environments, which function as systems supporting interpersonal computer-mediated communication; within the context of these environments, communication amongst locally or remotely located, networked individuals is mediated.
Intelligent environments are systems of situated, context-aware communication.

They bring human-computer communication and human-computer-human communication back into the context of our physical world, instead of expecting humans to adapt to the needs of a computer environment. In order to understand the social ramifications of these mediated spaces, it is important to:

investigate the impact that the kind of interpersonal communication they support has on our everyday experience within the urban context;
propose conceptual models for understanding the use and impact of such systems;
study the use and impact of these systems from a user perspective, regarding either the personal or the interpersonal aspect of this use.

The proposed special session welcomes contributions that will spark discussions on the personal and social implications and effects of using urban intelligent systems, which may consequently be useful for informing the design of such interactive environmental experiences.

Instructions for Manuscripts

Authors are requested to submit a PDF file for their manuscript following the submission guideline available at http://conferences.theiet.org/ie08/author.htm. All manuscripts should be submitted through the conference submission system and choosing the workshop title. The papers should also be emailed to the workshop organizer for reference. All manuscripts should be received by the conference deadline for paper submission which is 15 February 2008.

For more information please contact: Dr. Dimitris Charitos, vedesign@otenet.gr, UOA, Greece

Special Session on Middleware for Intelligent Environments

Special session organizer:
Dr. Diego López de Ipiña, University of Deusto, Spain

Middleware eases the management, development and deployment of context-aware services within physical spaces by isolating programmers and users from the low-level details and complications of pervasive distributed computing environments. Most traditional distributed systems are unaware of context, are static and composed of homogeneous devices. On the contrary, Middleware for Intelligent, Environments must address challenging issues such as:

Mobility
Disconnection
Dynamic introduction and removal of devices
Lack of a central controller
Very large scales (millions of entities)
Ad-hoc p2p structures
Unreliability of components and communications
Lack of common complete knowledge (evolution of the environment)
Heterogeneity, i.e. different devices (embedded, PC-based) connected to different networks (wireless or wired), with different latency and bandwidth.

Thus, middleware for Intelligent Environments should, among other aspects, provide mechanisms for handling disconnection, address fault-tolerance, tackle scalability, adapt to the issues related to diversity, enable evolution, discovery and reasoning or be self-healing.

In this session novel middleware approaches to solve the above mentioned issues will be welcomed. Some possible examples are:

Peer to peer and centralised novel architectures for IEs
Autonomic Computing-aware middleware
Semantic Web technologies to model context, discover and interact with intelligent services
Web 2.0 and Ubiquitous Web as approaches to design mobile middleware for IEs
Middleware for mobile embedded devices and wireless sensor networks
Extensions to standard middleware platforms to accommodate IE issues: OSGi, UPnP, Semantic Web Services, agents, and so on.

For more information please contact: Dr. Diego López de Ipiña, dipina@eside.deusto.es, University of Deusto, Spain

Special Session on Peer-to-Peer and Ambient Networks

Special session organizer:
Professor Angelica Reyes, Technical University of Catalonia, Spain

In a ubiquitous environment where everything is networked and intelligent, the services become the centre of everything. The way the user accesses the services should be transparent, it means having invisible devices, until they are needed.

Ambient Networks are a solution for sensitive, adaptive and all pervasive environments, where components (devices, things, etc.) of the intelligent environment are connected to the personal, local and global network. In this way, Ambient Networks provide networking solutions to highly mobile users considering a mix of current and future wireless technologies.

Because of peer-to-peer models aim to provide scalability and self-configuration features in this kind of environments, peer-to-peer networks are fundamental for the Ambient Networks development. In fact, Ambient Networks could be composed in the same way as peers join a peer-to-peer network. Moreover, peer-to-peer resources and services management approaches could work too in an Ambient Network environment.

Authors are invited to submit paper in the areas related to this special session.

For more information please contact: Professor Sajid Hussain,

Special Session on Data sharing in Context-aware environment

Special session organizer:
Dr. Amal El Nahas The German University in Cairo, Egypt

Special session Co-organizer: Dr Peter Graham, University of Manitoba, Canada

An Intelligent Environment is an environment that is context aware. In a context aware environment, mobile users discover their surrounding services, exchange and share relevant data. Data sharing among users occur either in an infrastructure-based fashion, a peer-to-peer ad-hoc fashion, or a hybrid fashion combining both approaches. This special session includes, but is not limited, to the following topics:

Service discovery
Content sharing in wireless environment
Collaborative networks
Modeling and retrieval of context
Context aware applications

Instructions for Manuscripts

Authors are requested to submit a PDF file for their manuscript following the submission guideline available at http://conferences.theiet.org/ie08/author.htm. All manuscripts should be submitted through the conference submission system and choosing the special session title. The papers should also be emailed to the special session organizer for reference. All manuscripts should be received by the conference deadline for paper submission which is 15 February 2008.

For more information please contact: Dr. Amal El Nahas, amal.elnahas@guc.edu.eg, The German University in Cairo, Egypt and Dr Peter Graham, University of Manitoba, Canada, pgraham@cs.umanitoba.ca

Special Session on Digital Lifestyles and Intelligent Environments: Designing for the Real World
Special session organizer: Dr. Michael Gardner, Chimera, Institute for Social & Technical Research, University of Essex, UK

This vision of a pervasive and ambient intelligence home environment implies an extensive integration of computing technologies into our everyday lives to the extent that we could be said to be living a truly "digital lifestyle" - where devices, services and applications work together seamlessly supporting even richer, more engaging and deeply connected experiences. This can potentially offer many benefits, with more empowering, productive, energy efficient, safer and comfortable environments that adapt to individual needs and can save money and make life more enjoyable. However, there are also many pitfalls which can lead to poor system design, acceptability and usability.

This raises several challenges in how we can better understand peoples technological needs, behaviours and attitudes, to develop ways that they find acceptable for interacting with and controlling their environments, and ways of evaluating and assessing the impact of these new pervasive technologies within intelligent environments. Living digitally poses a number of challenges to users on a variety of social and cultural levels, including increased technological complexity which can be difficult to understand, the potential breaking of work/ home boundaries and health concerns about wireless devices.

The role of the user in product innovation is now of much greater importance. Standard waterfall development models are being superseded by the need for much more flexibility in the roles and processes used in R&D development and evaluation. This is increasingly important in pervasive computing in the development of user-sensitive and adaptive services. The user's ability to conceptualise, customise and control these environments in order to meet their needs, is often key to their overall success.

The main focus for this special session will be on how we can design better intelligent environments by taking a more user-centred approach and by working in real-world settings. This typically requires a multi-disciplinary approach and an appreciation of how we can adapt existing tools and methodologies to work within new intelligent environment settings.

The scope for this special session will include an appreciation of the consumption of digital technologies including key user studies, the social and cultural challenges, and the environmental context of consuming digital technologies. This will then extend to considering what is involved in generating, validating, and testing new innovative Digital Lifestyles propositions, based on an understanding of user behaviour in pervasive and ambient computing environments. A key part of this will be the use of new tools and methods within the design and evaluation processes, which can encompass product development, customer segmentation and personas, scenario based analysis, user-led innovation, behavioural methods and probes, and tools/techniques to support the testing of concepts in a pervasive environment. Finally, we will also be considering how best to bridge to the technological world. For example, this can include the use of ontologies as one means of formalising the model of the underlying systems, and epistemology to capture the users perceived model, which will then be linked to the agent and user interface aspects of pervasive computing.

Instructions for Manuscripts

Authors are requested to submit a PDF file for their manuscript following the submission guideline available at http://conferences.theiet.org/ie08/author.htm . All manuscripts should be submitted through the conference submission system and choosing the workshop title. The papers should also be emailed to the workshop organizer for reference. All manuscripts should be received by the conference deadline for paper submission which is 15 February 2008.

For more information please contact: Dr. Michael Gardner, mgardner@essex.ac.uk, University Of Essex, UK