Intelligent Spaces

This book sets out a vision ofpervasive IT through intelligent spaces and describes some ofthe progress that has been made towards its realisation. The context for intelligent spaces (or iSpaces) is the world where information and communication technology (lCT) disappears as it becomes embedded into physical objects and the spaces in which we live and work. The ultimate vision is that this embedded technology provides us with intelligent and contextually relevant support, augmenting our lives and our experience of the physical world in a benign and non­ intrusive manner. The enormous advances in hardware, system design, and software that are being achieved enable. this vision. In particular, the performance advances and cost reductions in hardware components - processors, memory, storage, and communications - are making it possible to embed intelligence and communications ability into lower cost objects. The Internet is a living experiment in building complex, distributed systems on aglobal scale. In software, there have been solid advances in creating systems that can deal with complexities on the scale required to interact with human activity, in limited domains at least. The ultimate vision is challenging, and there are many obstacles to its realisation.

Intelligent Spaces: The Application of Pervasive ICT sets out a vision where Information & Communication Technology (ICT) moves from the PC on the desktop out into the physical world, and becomes pervasive. The world about us will appear to have real intelligence embedded in it, creating what we term "Intelligent Spaces" or "iSpaces", which will augment and support virtually every human activity.

An iSpace consists of

• The physical world in which the user exists, in his/her relevant context.

• The interface between the digital world and the physical world. This contains embedded sensors to gather data, labels to identify objects, actuators to control things/appliances in the physical world, together with support software to facilitate non-intrusive two-way communication across the interface,

• The digital world in which digital knowledge and intelligent systems are available to intelligently analyse data gathered from the physical world, and to influence and support our actions in that physical world.

Intelligent Spaces: The Application of Pervasive ICT describes the vision and how it has already been demonstrated in a number of applications ranging from the home, healthcare and traffic systems to monitoring glaciers. It identifies many of the technical, human and business issues which need to be researched before the benefits can become widespread, and describes possible solutions to them. Academic & industrial researchers in Computer Science, IT & Communications, as well as practitioners will find this key reading as it delivers practical & implementable current research.