Intelligent Environments

WS lectures 2002/03, Antonio Krüger , Andreas Butz

Course Material

Lecture dates: Wednesdays from 11:15 to 12:45, first lecture will be held on October 23.

Tutorial: 2 hours weekly.

Tutorial dates: On arrangement.

Assessment: 6 Leistungspunkte.

Description:

  The continuing miniaturization of computer technology will lead to  more intelligent every day things. Computers will disappear from our  desktops and their computing power will be hidden in the environment. The new research field that looks intensively at this development is called "Ubiquitous Computing".

Besides technological challenges "Ubiquitous Computing" opens new questions regarding the role of the user who interacts with computers that are hidden behind the scenes. Instead of having a well defined interface (e.g. keyboard and mouse on a Desktop computer) that can be used to harness the computational power, users will be using different in- and output media that depend heavily on the user's actual context.

The course will not only focus on the technologies needed to realize the vision of ubiquitous computing, but also on the issues of the interaction with such intelligent environments. Today's user interaction tools will play only a minor role in intelligent environments. Instead, "tangible interfaces" will be of more importance, which incorporate available everyday things into the user interface to the intelligent environment.

Another important topic covered here is the adaptivity of the intelligent environment to different users and their goals.  We will discuss applicable AI-techniques, e.g. knowledge representation, planning formalisms and the modelling of user characteristics. Finally, we will also give insights into running projects that assist users in intelligent environments.

The tutorials will focus on practical work. Details will be discussed during the first lecture.

Links:

Intelligente instrumentierte Umgebungen (last year's lecture on the same topic, in German)
Course material (link to be activated)

Related Literature:

•    Conference Proceedings: Gregory D. Abowd, Barry Brumit, Steven Shafer (Eds), UBICOMP 2001, Ubiquitous Computing , LNCS 2001, Springer, 2001.
•    Conference Proceedings: Gaetano Boriello, Lars Erik Holmquist (Eds), Ubicomp 2002, Ubiquitous Computing, LNCS 2498, Springer, 2002. http://link.springer.de/link/service/series/0558/tocs/t2498.htm
•    AI-Foundations:  David Poole, Alan Mackworth, Randy Goebel: Computational Intelligence, Oxford Press, 1998.

Contact:

Antonio Krüger , Bau 36.1 Raum 106 , Telefon: (0681 302) 4137, krueger@cs.uni-sb.de    
Andreas Butz , Bau 36.1 Raum 125, Telefon: (0681 302) 2474, butz@cs.uni-sb.de
   

last update: 08.10.2002