Ambient Intelligence (AmI) represents the most modern evolution of Ambient Assisted Living (AAL). Initially intended as a way to assist at home elderly in an increasingly aging society, researchers have been increasingly interested in supporting any category of users in different kind of Smart Spaces. Smart Spaces are examples of Cyber-Physical Environments (which are in turn a category of Human-Machine Systems). The field has increasingly received interest from the industry too, with the recent success of Google Home, Apple Homekit, Amazon Alexa, NEST Thermostat and the availability of an increasing number of wireless connected devices (e.g., Zigbee compliant ones). Human interaction is a fundamental part of AmI, as users are involved in different steps:
Manual definition of rules. Recently IFTTT has been increasingly employed for that in conjunction with the abovementioned technologies.
Validation of rules automatically extracted by means of machine learning techniques.
Active involvement in the smart space at runtime to decide whether to apply or not specific rules, or to correct AmI system decisions.
The future introduction level of Ambient Intelligence research efforts strongly depend on how much they will be able to make more comfortable human life, without being considered invasive in terms of privacy and final user required effort at both configuration time and runtime. At runtime in particular, humans are involved in a Human-in-the-loop fashion due to the need of helping AmI systems to autocorrect themselves, and to follow long-term changes in human behavior.
The aim of this special track is to gather research work in the field of final user interaction with AmI systems, which is a fundamental aspect for encouraging the employment of research results in the market.
The topics include, but are not limited to:
Ambient intelligence
Sustainable design
HCI, UX, IdX
Wearables, IoT
Artificial intelligence
Virtual/Mixed reality
Mobile computing
Architecture and interaction design
Design and reliability of systems
Cybersecurity
Data Analysis and Visualization
Tangible User Interfaces
Vocal User Interfaces
Rule definition languages
Chairs:
Francesco Leotta, Sapienza Università di Roma, Italy
Andrés Muñoz Ortega, UCAM Universidad Católica San Antonio de Murcia, Spain