Ambient Assisting Computing

French research presented at the ACAAL workshop at IST 2006 seminar in Helsinki 22 November 2006. Wrote this 11/25/06. What has happened since?

The ACAAL

Patrick Olivier comes from UK and Linmi Tao from China. The spotlights are: Accessible and Inclusive ICT: from brain computer interfaces to Ambient Assisted Living networking; Cognition and Robotics: from embodied intelligence conference sessions to the iCub humanoid robot. We believe there is a long way between the workshop and the success of our proposal. There are several things in our mind.

I had an opportunity to listen to all the experts in the workshop. There were academics from Germany, China, France, UK, Romania and presentation from VTT representing the findings from the Finnsih Technical Research Institute. Comments from the audience represented insights from Greece, Italy and Atlanta, Ga., USA, and some more USA insigths. I think there was something very interesting surfacing. I still don't have and idea about how the next step is surfacing. The importance of getting the patients and people to be a part of the development effort was stressed in several occasions.

ICT provides a major opportunity to integrate people at risk of exclusion and empower individuals to fully participate in the knowledge society. ICT also offers important means to address the problems associated to the ageing population such as the associated rise of number of people with high disability rates¹, fewer family carers, and a smaller productive workforce. For many people, in particular for groups at risk of exclusion, e.g. the growing part of the population that is over 60, the complexity and lack of accessibility and usability of ICT is a major barrier.

Europe is facing the challenge of delivering quality healthcare to all its citizens, at affordable cost. Prolonged medical care for the ageing society, the costs of managing chronic diseases, and the increasing demand by citizens for best quality healthcare are major factors. Healthcare expenditure in Europe is already significant (8.5% of the GDP on average) and rising faster than the economic growth itself¹. The emerging situation calls for a change in the way healthcare is delivered and the way medical knowledge is managed and transferred to clinical practice. ICT are key to implement these changes in this information intensive domain.

Ambient Intelligence

Collaboration on the EU level is leaping forward. There are numerous work groups ready to team up for practical cooperation. I think this is very important for the inventiveness of European SMEs and larger enterprises. There are great opportunties in the fields of mobile and Internet convergence and fusion solutions. We should have a Google or Skype talk with Kurt Linderoos about what we can do and present from our side. I'll be blogging more about that in the coming days. It's about a month to the start of IST 2006 in Helsinki.

Nowadays, the researches on ambient intelligence are addressed to understand user’s physical and mental states, and to assist them proactively in performing activities, reaching goals and mastering everyday life.

This characterizes a new mode of natural interaction between people and their environment: Ambient intelligence enables the environment to become aware of the human that interacts with, in terms of his goals, needs and even moods, then to proactively help the human to reach his goals. Scientific findings indicate that emotion is an essential element of our intelligence, and plays an significant role in decision making, perception, learning, and more --- that is, it influences the very mechanisms of rational thinking.

Therefore, the ambient intelligence systems should also have the ability to recognize, to understand, even to possess and express emotions. “The question is not whether intelligent machines can have emotions, but whether machines can be intelligent without any emotions.” (M. Minsky)

To perceive and understand human mental state by intelligent systems via affective expressions is the key step to ambient assisted living. The objective of this cross-discipline workshop is to enable fruitful discussions on

• Affective Computing,
  
• Ambient Intelligence
  
• and their application in assisting our everyday life.

IST EVENT 2006

Workshop on Affective Computing for Ambient Assisted Living

November 21-23, 2006, Helsinki

Contact Information:
Prof. Linmi Taor>Dept. Computer, Tsinghua University
Beijing 100084, China
Tel: +86 10 6278 0697
eMail: linmi(@)tsinghua.edu.cn

http://www.consen.info/

Dear Helge Keitel (KK-NET), I am proud of your registration in our modest website. It will be very grateful, if you can allow me to skype you in order to present some opportunities of collaboration, in example for sharing our stand during the IST-2006 conference to be held in Helsinki; to launch the formation of a network for presenting some proposal for FP7 projects in the area of IST; other cooperation in the area of Open-Solutions, IST, RTD+I, CMS/CFM, KMS, etc. br, Ferran

en Ferran Cabrer i Vilagut
Skype: Ferran.Cabrer
CONSEN.org CONSEN (EEIG) Euro-Group
Euro-Cluster Pro-Information Society
MUFICATA s.l.<br>Natural Information Environments
T:+34 934238267 F:+34 934233430
Jaume Fabra 12 08004 Barcelona
------------------------
FP6 European Research Projects:
- TOSSAD.orgr>- SECURE-FORCE.eu
------------------------
COONDI COoperation ON DIversity
WEKOMS web2.0 for organizations on-Net
See you at IST-2006 21-23Nov06 HEL:r>Exhibit "MeshUp" and WorkShop "ACAAL"