Introduction
The vision of Ambient Intelligence is based on the increasing technological advances in embedding computational power, information and sensing capabilities into everyday objects and environments. Despite the current availability of technology, there is a notorious absence of large scale settings. This absence raises questions about the complexity and effort required with current approaches to building intelligent living and working spaces. Future ambient intelligent infrastructures must be able to configure themselves and grow from the available, purposeful objects (be it software services or consumer appliances) in order to become effective in the real world.
The use of embedded systems to control devices, tools and appliances has been common practice for almost two decades now. With every new generation, these controllers provide an ever increasing list of capabilities in the form of assistance, information, and customization. However, it is the addition of communications capabilities that changes the perspectives of what such systems can do: gather information from other sensors, devices and computers on the network, or enable user-oriented customization and operations through short-range communication. This combination of capabilities brings what we call Smart Products. We refer to Smart Products as real-world objects, devices or software services bundled with knowledge about themselves and their capabilities, enabling new ways of interacting with humans and the environment autonomously. These properties make Smart Products not only intelligible to users, but also smart to interpret userís actions and adapt accordingly.
The fundamental questions in this workshop are how federations of Smart Products can reify agentive behavior and compose functionality to become the generative blocks of ambient intelligence. Another aspect of importance is what kind of interfaces, business models and scenarios Smart Products will create, address and modify.