A distributed dynamic reconfigurable system for ambient intelligence

Abstract

The concept of Ambient Intelligence has been developed during a series of ISTAG (Information Societies Technology Advisory Group) and other meetings as a guiding vision to give an overall direction to Europe's Information Societies Technology program. Ambient Intelligence is essentially an elaboration of Mark Weiser's vision of Ubiquitous but Calm Computing which stresses the importance of social and human factors as well as developing the base technologies on which aspects of the vision are founded. Although Ambient Intelligence covers a large range of concerns, both human and technical, there are some technologies which might be excluded. They are characterised by Mark Weiser's statement about Ubiquitous computing: "Ubiquitous computing is roughly the opposite of virtual reality. Where virtual reality puts people inside a computergenerated world, ubiquitous computing forces the computer to live out here in the world with people.". Seen in this light, Ambient Intelligence is the limit of a process which introduces the technology into people's lives in such a way that the introduction never feels like a conscious learning curve: no special interface is needed because human experience is already a rich 'Manual' of ways of interfacing to changing systems and services. Somehow, we need to create technology that leverages this powerful human resource rather than trying to suppress it by requiring humans to participate in inflexible interaction protocols of the sort supported by current call center technology. A distributed system for ambient intelligence needs to solve several problems, the main one being task allocation and resource management. In particular, one can suppose to subdivide a wide area monitoring system in several elementary logical tasks to be allocated to physical processors that can be constituted by standard PCs, but also intelligent sensors or embedded processors. This paper analyses the problem of distribution of intelligence in detail and proposes a novel technique for dynamic task allocation and reconfiguration in a distributed system. A formalization of task allocation problem is proposed and a system that is able to automatically download and run logical modules onto physical processors is described. Proposed results demonstrate the validity of this approach.

Ambient Intelligence: A New Multidisciplinary Paradigm

“…The idea is to define what intelligence means in terms of real-time data mining, creating on-the-fly updatable models of the scene, and then generate patterns of intelligence able to migrate over the hardware layer built for the pervasive network [27].…”

“…Intelligent units or agents can be thought of controlling all aspects of an AmI system, from the sensing, to the understanding of information, to the elaboration and execution of behavior in the augmented environment, more or less transparently, with the aim of aiding the user. It would be pointless to describe all the efforts of the multiagent community, worth a note is the research at MIT (the oxygen project) [12], but also and [19], [27], and [30], who implemented distributed solutions.…”