An Ambient Intelligent Mobile Persistent Browsing Experience (AIMPBE).

Ambient intelligence (AmI) refers to electronic environments that are sensitive and responsive to the presence of people. In an ambient intelligence world, devices work in concert to support people in carrying out their everyday life activities, tasks and rituals in easy, natural way using information and intelligence that is hidden in the network connecting these devices. As these devices grow smaller, more connected and more integrated into our environment, the technology disappears into our surroundings until only the user interface remains perceivable by users. The ambient intelligence paradigm builds upon ubiquitous computing and human-centric computer interaction design and is characterized by systems and technologies that are embedded, context-aware, personalised, adaptive and anticipatory (anticipate ones desires without conscious mediation). There however now a need for intelligent interfaces that can be deployed within ambient intelligent environments. Dynamic composition or on-the-fly aggregations of user interface components are central to these approaches but there is no design support to constrain the dynamic behaviour of these systems so the resulting interface is usable within various environments.

Ambient intelligence in practice involves the convergence of several computing research fields. The first is ubiquitous computing where the major contribution is the development of ad hoc networking capabilities that exploit highly portable low-cost computing devices. The second key area is intelligent systems research, which provides learning algorithms, pattern matching and situation assessment and the final element is context awareness. Context awareness is concerned with the tracking and pinpointing of various objects along with their social environmental interactions (Shadbolt, 2003).

Rationale/Context of the Research

This project will focus on the convergence of these three research fields through the pursuit of a mobile persistent web browsing framework name Ambient Intelligent Mobile Persistent Browsing Experience (AIMPBE). This framework will allow users to fire up an internet session on a particular device and move seamlessly between other devices while maintaining the session browsing experience. For example, a user may start browsing the web on their PDA. This could involve looking through standard HTML pages, PDF documents or online PowerPoint slides. Here in this example we will presume that the user is reading an academic paper in PDF format. Meanwhile AIMPBE is caching the user’s web session along with the associated objects and relaying these objects to a central repository. Should the user move from or with the PDA to another device (say a PC) belonging the user then the sensor network will identify this user as wishing to commence a new ‘continued’ session on the PC. A ‘new’ session is then started automatically on this PC which will display the PDF paper that the user was viewing seconds before on their PDA. The PDF paper will also be opened at the page that the user was viewing earlier. This aspect of the session will perhaps be determined through image recognition algorithms (this part is optional - depends on time and it is difficult....). This project therefore focuses on the following fields of ambient intelligence:

Brief Methodology

Anticipated Outcomes

The anticipated outcomes relate mainly to the development of a framework to assist in moving between active display devices and PDA’s. The research would also have the general objective of helping to provide guidance to developers implementing such systems. The project will also showcase some of the current research within the Wireless Sensors Technology Group within the Intelligent Systems Research Centre at Magee.

Resources Needed:

Please note that all these resources will be supplied.

References

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