AMIGO

Ambient Intelligence for the networked home environment

Project Coordinator CTIT: dr. ir. Marten J. van Sinderen

Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science (EEMCS)

Tel.: Tel.: +31 53 489 3677

Project website: http://www.hitech-projects.com/euprojects/amigo/

Project Summary

To research and develop open, standardized, interoperable middleware and intelligent user services for the networked home environment, which offers users intuitive, personalized and unobtrusive interaction by providing seamless interoperability of services and applications.

To build open development and run-time environments for software and services providing the next generation of methodologies, interoperable middleware and tools to support developers- through all phases of the software life-cycle, from requirements analysis until deployment and maintenance - in the production of networked and distributed software systems and services, embedded software and value-added user services. The Amigo project will particularly focus on:

o	The research and development of open source software and interoperable middleware for a distributed, networked home environment, which contains classes of devices from the consumer electronics, personal computing, mobile communication and home automation domains.

o	Developing high-level methods and concepts for dynamic integration addressing autonomy and composability aspects.

Support standards for interoperability, composability and integration in the middleware under development. Giving out the developed middleware and basic intelligent user service components as open source software together with architectural rules and documentation will also greatly support interoperability.

o	The research and development of open and interoperable intelligent user services which will combine context awareness, user interfacing and profiling to keep the user in control, avoid cognitive saturation of the user, respect user privacy and address security issues.

Traditionally home automation, consumer electronics, mobile communications and personal computing were strictly separate domains all having their own industrial players, with their own business plans, standardization efforts and form factors. By introducing the networked home, also called the connected home, that is a home in which several pieces of equipment are connected using an infrastructure, the traditional separation of activities is no longer valid. This networked home environment leads to many new opportunities. The most important one is Ambient Intelligence, with the complete integration of technology into our environment so people can freely and interactively use it. However, general end-user acceptance of home networking is not yet in place. To get broad user acceptance and fast market introduction two elements need to be resolved:

o	Installation and use of the networked home system must be simple and user-friendly, that is the usability of the system must be high

Attractive services must be present which clearly offer an advantage over what is offered by today’s non-networked systems. Many of these new services will use context and user information in a way that is not possible in present non-networked systems. Within the Amigo project these services are called intelligent user services as they make the system ‘intelligent’ from the end-user view.

The Amigo project will focus on the usability of a networked home system by developing open, standardized, interoperable middleware. The developed middleware will guarantee automatic dynamic configuration of the devices and services within this home system by addressing autonomy and composability aspects. The second focus of the Amigo project will be on improving the end-user attractiveness of a networked home system by developing interoperable intelligent user services and application prototypes. The Amigo project will further support interoperability between equipment and services within the networked home environment by using standard technology when possible and by making the basic middleware (components and infrastructure) and intelligent user services available as open source software together with architectural rules for everyone to use.

Amigo publications

Project duration: 2004-2007

Project budget: 24 M-€ / 12 M-€ funding

Number of person/years: 100 fte total

Project Coordinator: Philips

Participants: Philips, Fagor, France Telecom, Fraunhofer, Ikerlan, INRIA, Italdesign, Knowledge, Microsoft, Telematica Instituut, ICCS, Telefonica ID, Thomson, UPB, VTT. CTIT is subcontractor of the Telematica Instituut.

Project budget CTIT:

Number of person/years CTIT: ca. 1 fte/year

Involved groups: Information Systems (IS), Software Engineering (TRESE)

CTIT Strategic Research Orientation: ASSIST - Applied Science of Services for Information Society Technologies