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Building Intelligence Into Intelligent Buildings
Research into intelligent environments and smart houses tends to
focus on dedicated applications or general infrastructures for
building intelligent environments. There have been few projects
that considered how ordinary people would be able to configure
and program the intelligent environments that they
inhabit. There are many jokes about the inability of ordinary
people to program their VCR and if we are not careful, similar
jokes may be told in the near future about people who are unable
to manage the smart houses that they live in. It is therefore
important to develop programming abstractions that allow people
to adapt the intelligent environment to their current
needs. Ideally, smart houses should go beyond programming and
become really intelligent environments, i.e., they should
observe the behaviour of their inhabitants and use these
observations to adapt the environment to satisfy the anticipated
future needs of the inhabitants.
The purpose of the BIIIB project (pronounced "B3B") is to
investigate a combination of sensor networks and artificial
intelligence techniques, which allows the smart house to observe
and identify patterns in the user's behaviour. Whenever a user
requests a particular action from the smart house, e.g.,
switching on the lights in a particular room, the intelligent
environment will attempt to identify a unique pattern of
preceding sensor events, which will allow the smart house to
automatically switch on the lights for the user in the
future. This means that existing installations, such as light
switches, define the API for the smart house and that the user
programs her smart house simply by living in it. The project
will examine the applicability of different technologies for
this purpose, including sensors, sensor networks and artificial
intelligence techniques. The BIIIB project will develop simple
prototypes that demonstrate the feasibility of the techniques
and technologies developed in the project.
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