Ambient Intelligence

In collaboration with the group of Maarten van der Steen from Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Hayley Hung and Gwenn Englebienne from my group at UvA, carried out a unique experiment using a wireless sensor network. The experiment addresses two simple questions:

• Can we detect social interactions by sensing proximity and/or motion?
• Can we detect the wearers’ status (professor, student..) by sensing proximity and/or motion?

This experiment is quite unique, if only due to the size of the wireless network, consisting of over 200 mobile nodes. To the best of our knowledge, an equivalent experiment of this size has not been conducted before, ever. 70 of the mobile nodes logged accelerometer data. We want to check if we can discriminate between the different wearers from their activity patterns.

Data was gathered during the event ‘30 Years of Informatics Education in Amsterdam’, which was held in ‘De Rode Hoed’. The joint meeting featured talks by both past and present researchers of both VU University Amsterdam and the University of Amsterdam, addressing the past, present and future of the field.

With the presentation ‘Beyond Ubicomp – Computing is Changing the Way we Live’ Albrecht Schmidt from Stuttgart University closed a successful AmI-11, the international conference on ambient intelligence, that I organized this week in Amsterdam.

With in total more then 220 people visiting AmI-11 (more than 140 visited the 9 workshops, of which a large part participated also in the conference) it was a very lively event, with demos, industry and posters. The theme of the conference being ‘Shaping the Next Decade’, it became clear that ambient intelligence is now more than just interconnected smart devices but has really entered everybody’s life and has tremendous social impact. Therefore the position of the human and the social place of the new technology was stressed by both the opening speech of Emile Aarts, Philips, and in the plenary of Margareth Morris of Intel Labs. We also had a great time at the boat ride and the dinner in De Waag.