| Ambient systems are networked embedded systems integrated with everyday environments and supporting people in their activities. These systems will create a smart surrounding for people to facilitate and enrich daily life and increase productivity at work. These systems will be quite different from current computer systems, as they will be based on an unbounded set of hardware artefacts and software entities, embedded in everyday objects or realized as new types of device. The ubiquitous computing vision has over the last 10 years inspired research into computing systems and applications that become pervasively embedded in our everyday environments, and that bring the unique flexibility of digital technology to the activities around which our lives evolve. Caused by rapid progress in technology, this early research tended to focus on experimental prototypes of infrastructure, devices and applications. As the field is progressing, the most important research challenge and focus of this programme is to develop the fundamental architecture of ubiquitous computing environments. It is the ambition to move beyond prototypes toward sustainable systems for implementation of the ubiquitous computing vision. The ubiquitous computing research community at large has been very successful in advancing the infrastructure components for pervasive systems, and in exploring the design opportunities for novel applications. This work is compelling but has mostly remained centered around single devices as opposed to distributed systems composed of many devices. We still observe a very wide gap between the new design materials at hand (e.g. smart artefacts, ad hoc networks, location technologies) and the potential applications. For example, microporocessors and wireless radio can now be built into practically everything to create smart networked objects, but we lack the technology to integrate these in an open platform for a wide range of applications. Likewise, the components are in place for prototyping and exploring application ideas, but we lack the foundations for the principled study of ubiquitous systems and application designs. In order to meaningfully bridge the conceptual gap between "people interacting with ambient systems" and the "design of the infrastructure of ambient systems". The research effort will span the entire spectrum ranging from scenarios of use through architectural design and provision of platforms and tools. Scenario work is planned in the context of fitness and health, security and safety, work and leisure, providing the real-world contexts of use and interaction to frame the development of architectures. Our approach to enable ambient systems depends on highly distributed, reliable and secure information systems that can evolve and adapt to radical changes in their environment, delivering information services that adapt to the people and the services that use them. These distributed systems must easily and naturally integrate devices, ranging from tiny sensors and actuators to hand-held information appliances. Such devices will be connected primarily by short-range wireless networks, as well as by high-bandwidth local backbones. Data and services must be secure, reliable and high-performance, even if part of the system is down, disconnected, under repair or under attack. The system must configure, install, diagnose, maintain and improve itself - this applies especially to the vast numbers of sensors that will be cheap, widely dispersed and even disposable. |
