“Intelligent Environments are becoming one of the hot topics for industrial and academic research. Intelligent Environments are public and private spaces such as cars, shopping malls, work, homes and even our own bodies which respond “thoughtfully” to our needs. Such environments are constituted by numerous networked embedded computing appliances offering functionalities related to the individual appliances in addition to the range of collective functionalities offered through communities of coordinating appliances.
Commonly such spaces would contain embedded intelligent agents enabling these environments to personalise themselves in response to the occupant’s presence and behaviour as well as aiding the normal activities related to work, education, entertainment or healthcare. Over the last decade a number of research areas have contributed to the concept of intelligent environments, such areas include ubiquitous computing, pervasive computing, embedded intelligence, intelligent user interfaces, human factors, intelligent buildings, mobile communications, domestic robots, intelligent sensors and ambient intelligence”.
Source: IEE International Workshop on Intelligent Environments
University of Essex, Colchester, UK
28 – 29 June 2005