"Drawing Hands" lithograph (1948) by Dutch artist M. C. Escher
One important ingredient of all these technologies which are relying on sensors to understand a portion of our world to make decisions and take actions over it is that they require enough "Ambient Intelligence" to achieve all this. State of the art systems are starting to do some interesting things but there is a lot to do yet. I have contributed to the development of reasoning and learning systems, which can exhibit some degree of intelligence whilst supervising a smart home and also to user-centred and adaptive interfaces. I have devoted a substantial part of my work to this area (see Handbook and also my publications). I also founded and help to run already for many years a workshop (AITAmI) to stimulate progress in this area.
I have sustained through the years, see for example [1] and [2], that for this systems to be succesful, i.e., being massively addopted by society, a significant part of that Ambient Intelligence should be the type that allows systems to be sensitive to human needs and preferences.
[1] Ambient Intelligence: The Confluence of Ubiquitous/Pervasive Computing and Articial Intelligence, JC Augusto. Intelligent Computing Everywhere, Alfons Schuster (Ed.). Pages 213-234. Springer Verlag, 2007
[2] Intelligent Environments: a manifesto. Juan C. Augusto, Vic Callaghan, Achilles Kameas, Diane Cook, Ichiro Satoh. Human-centric Computing and Information Sciences, 3:12, 2013. 2013. Springer.
"Intelligent" Environments