With the emergence of ubiquitous computing era, it has become increasingly important for a middleware which takes full advantage of HCI factors to support user-centric services. Many kinds of studies on HCI-friendly middleware for supporting user-centric services have been performed. However, previous studies have problems in supporting HCI factors, which are needed for user-centric services. In this paper, we present an agent-based intelligent middleware, which is called AIM, that provides user-centric services in ubiquitous HCI environments. We describe the middleware requirements for user-centric services by analyzing various HCI-friendly middleware and design AIM middleware which effectively supports various HCI factors such as context information management, pattern inference of user's behavior, and dynamic agent generation, etc. We introduce service scenarios based on the user's modalities in smart spaces. Finally, prototype implementation is illustrated as a manifestation of the benefits of the introduced infrastructure.

For implementing the ubiquitous computing environments with smart home infrastructures, various research on the home network have been performed by several research institutes and companies. Due to the various home network middleware that are developed recently, the standardization of the home network middleware is being delayed and it calls for the middleware bridge which solves the interoperability problem among the heterogeneous middlewares. Now the research on the scheme for interoperability and the development of the various bridges are in progress, such as one-to-one bridge supporting interoperability between two middlewares and one-to-many bridge supporting interoperability among the multi-middlewares. However, existing systems and schemes does not consider the dynamic extensibility and performance that is particularly needed in the smart home environments. The middleware bridge should provide bridge extensibility with zero-configuration for non-expert users. It should also provide the load balancing scheme for efficient and proper traffic distribution. In this paper, we propose a Multi-Middleware Bridge(MMB) for dynamic extensibility and load balancing in home network environments. MMB provides bridge scalability and load balancing through the distributed system structure. We also verify the features such as interoperability, bridge extensibility, and the performance of the load balancing algorithm.