Ambient Intelligence for the networked home environment

Smart Homes: The Amigo-approach

for creating intelligent services

Carsten Magerkurth, Fraunhofer IPSI

 Outline of the Talk

AMIGO General Project Information

User Requirements Study
Fundamental Balance for Smart Services
The AMIGO-Approach
Smart User Services
How to leave the User in Control
Conclusions

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 AMIGO Project Information
Ambient Intelligence for the Networked Home
Environment
Integrated Project in 6. Framework Program
of the European Commission, 2004-2008
Generic Goals
Middleware and Interoperability of devices, artifacts, services
Intelligent User Services
Three Application Domains
Home Care and Safety
Home Information and Entertainment
Extended Home Environments

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 Amigo Consortium
Germany

The Netherlands

Finland
France

Italy
Spain

Greece

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 Point of Departure:
User Requirements Study
Goal: To obtain feedback from potential users on the
usefulness and appropriateness of applications and
services
Method: Scenario-driven approach consisting of three
different parts:
Quantitative evaluation:
1.) preference ratings, 2.) Gallery session
Qualitative evaluation: 3.) focus groups
Subjects: n=45, 6 groups, 5 countries, 5 sites,
average population sample: ,, 20-55,
single, family

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 Point of Departure:
User Requirements Study
Results:
Be easy to use and to configure (no user programming)
Not being used for surveillance
Enable individual settings and preferences
Be configurable by the user or service provider
Be movable, in case of moving to other homes
Be extensible - easy to upgrade
Be flexible
Enable turning off individual features
Be modular
Be maintenance free (for the user)
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 Fundamental Balance for
Creating Smart Services
There is an interaction and balance/ trade-off between
being able to provide support for people based on
collecting and using sensor data and using them for
deciding, selecting, tailoring system functionality to
make the system smart
and
the right of people to be in control over which data are
collected and by whom and how they are used.

How can people know what is going on, when they are
not aware of it, when they dont see the sensors, the
computer?

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 Smart Environments:
Two Approaches
System-oriented, importunate smartness
- Mostly automatic behavior based on collected data,
- Intelligent Home (domotica, )
BUT: refrigerator ordering items
People-oriented, empowering smartness
- implies that the human is in the loop
and can take mature actions based
on suggestions, recommendations
BUT: how much feedback do we want/
can we process?

(Streitz, Rcker... Magerkurth: IEEE Computer 2005)

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 The AMIGO-Approach:
Tackling the Balance
Integration of system- and people-oriented approaches
System-oriented:
AMIGO applications are embedded in network of various
smart user services
E.g. Context Awareness, Privacy & User Modeling are inherent
features of AMIGO applications, provided by smart user
services for free
Applications have the power/ potential to reason and to exhibit
automatic behavior
People-oriented:
Dedicated User Profiling service
Privacy & Security as a filter between smart user services
Awareness, Notification, and UI services for integrating the
human in the loop

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 Example of Amigo
Home Network
Internet
Access Control
Firewall Wired backbone
For example Ethernet

Wireless infrastructure
Home Gateway For example WLAN

Home Control

Home control network Personal network

For example Powerline For example Bluetooth

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Amigo User Services

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 Amigo User Services

Context Management Service:

collects, uses and predicts context information.
provides the right information to adapt to the physical context
and the behavior of the persons and devices in the
environment.
User Modeling and Profiling Service:
extracts user preferences from user actions or utterances.
The goal is to adapt the system to these user preferences.
Awareness and Notification Service:
exploits information provided by different sources and
presents this information adapted to different stakeholders;
provides mechanisms for users to stay in touch with friends,
and have a feeling of being connected with them.

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 Amigo User Services

User Interface Service:

handles the devices to present the contents,
interaction modalities and explicit and implicit user
interactions.
Privacy and Security
orthogonal to these services.
works as a filter function for each Intelligent User
Service
provides rules for handling peoples privacy in
different contexts.

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 Amigo Aware Applications

Make Use of Intelligent User Services

Composition of services
Adaptation of the application to real-world context
Extension / wrapper for legacy applications

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 Amigo Aware Applications

Example Amigo Scenario (Scene 1):

Home Information and Entertainment:
Augmenting a traditional video game

.
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 Amigo Aware Applications

Example Amigo Scenario (Scene 1):

Home Information and Entertainment: Augmenting a
traditional video game
User Modeling: Provide favorite entertainment titles to media
center
Awareness: Remote mother is aware of sons activities
User Interface: Integration of novel interaction devices,
adaptation of ambient light & sound, multimodal interaction
Privacy and Security: Parental permission, grant friend
access to Amigo home network
Context Management: Basic functionality for information on
devices, device characteristics, human users, locations

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 What is the right balance for an
AMIGO Aware Application?

AMIGO provides the infrastructure for both

importunate and empowering smartness
But how much importunate and how much
empowering smartness do we want?
Benefits of proactive context aware behavior vs.
privacy issues and the effects of wrong decisions and
Minimization of user interaction
Dedicated user testing
Leaving the user in control / Privacy concerns
But users are willing to sacrifice privacy for benefits and
perceived control (even for small benefits)

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 How to leave the user in
control?
Customizing application behavior in User Modeling
Service
Automatic Controlled
Less user interaction More user interaction

User studies for appropriate default values

Highly detailed user profiles with traditional graphical
user interfaces for configuration
Service parameters (e.g. general privacy level) vs.
application parameters
sandbox for applications => Supporting privacy-
aware applications
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 Conclusions

Amigo provides a service architecture that

implements context awareness, user preferences, novel interaction
capabilities for Amigo aware applications
while at the same time ensuring interoperability to legacy
applications that can be subsequently and stepwise made Amigo
aware via proxy components
Privacy and Security is a global mechanism that pervades the
entire infrastructure
=>Enforcement of applications and intelligent user services to
adhere to privacy rules
Future Research Issues
How to keep the human in the loop / in control AND minimize user
interaction?
Self adapting applications that reason about the desired control/
privacy ratio => meta context awareness?

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 Further Information

AMIGO Website
www.amigo-project.org

Personal Contact Details

Carsten Magerkurth
Fraunhofer IPSI
AMBIENTE
magerkurth@ipsi.fraunhofer.de
www.ipsi.fraunhofer.de/ambiente

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