Ambient Intelligence

2006.10.21 07.15 | Nowadays, the researches on ambient intelligent are addressed to understand user’s physical and mental states, and to assist them proactively in performing activities, reaching goals and mastering everyday life.

This characterizes a new mode of natural interaction between people and their environment: Ambient intelligence enables the environment to become aware of the human that interacts with, in terms of his goals, needs and even moods, then to proactively help the human to reach his goals.

• Meshup

Scientific findings indicate that emotion is an essential element of our intelligence, and plays an significant role in decision making, perception, learning, and more --- that is, it influences the very mechanisms of rational thinking. Therefore, the ambient intelligence systems should also have the ability to recognize, to understand, even to possess and express emotions. “The question is not whether intelligent machines can have emotions, but whether machines can be intelligent without any emotions.” (M. Minsky)

To perceive and understand human mental state by intelligent systems via affective expressions is the key step to ambient assisted living. The objective of this cross-discipline workshop is to enable fruitful discussions on Affective Computing, Ambient Intelligence and their application in assisting our everyday life.

Contributions related (but not limited) to the following topics are welcomed:

• Affective computing and emotional agents
• Human-computer interaction and perception emulation
• Theories, models, and architectures of emotional systems
• Biological hypotheses about emotional systems
• Supporting technologies, Software engineering for AAL
• Affective computing devices, hardware and communication support
• The design and implementation of experiments on natural emotion expressions
• The psychological measurement of the degree of emotional expression and state
• The collection of multi-channel affective data, including video, audio, physiological measurement, and psychological measurement
• The technology for analyzing and understanding emotional states
• The technology for synthesizing and generating emotional expressions
• The researches to combine emotion and rational thinking, decision making
• The systems that can recognize and respond to the emotions of their users and systems that can express emotions
• Applications of emotion understanding and expression in ambient assisted living

Contributions should address the relation between AAL and Affective Computing. Some questions of interest are:

• How is emotion embedded and processed in AAL?
• What impacts in affective computing and interaction can we expect from emotional systems in AAL?
• How can emotion improve decision-making?
• How is computing useful in emotional behavior?