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.
We understand "Smart Products" as real-world objects, devices and software services bundled with knowledge about themselves and the ability to gather knowledge from their environment and other products. This vision enables new ways of narrowing the differences between virtual and physical worlds by defining a paradigm where both virtual and physical entities can seamlessly integrate their capabilities with people.
The fundamental questions in this workshop are:
- What knowledge and learning techniques can we embed into Smart Products to make them more adaptable and intelligible to users?
- What technologies, knowledge, and inference techniques can enable Smart Products to situate their behavior in an environment with other products?
- How to enable context-aware human-to-product interaction using interaction capabilities built into the product or the environment?
- How federations of Smart Products can reify agentive behavior and compose functionality to become the generative blocks of ambient intelligence?
- How to enable the large-scale deployment of Smart Products and support the whole product lifecycle?
- What kind of interfaces, business models, and scenarios will Smart Products create, address and modify?
- Which security challenges arise with Smart Products, and how can they be addressed?