Ambient Intelligence

By pushing back the technological limits always further, the concept even of computer or information system changes: of an activity of treatment exclusively centered on the user, data processing becomes ambient intelligence . Because technology makes it possible to manufacture tiny and omnipresent computers (Nano-data processing), it opens with almost all the objects of the everyday life, the capacity to start a spontaneous exchange of information, without interaction with their user.

It is a model basically different from the computing systems that we know at the 20th century century and of the concept of computer which was usually attached to him. This new concept will introduce deep changes into the world of the company and that of the daily life and which will ineluctably impose a capital evolution of the activities and data-processing trades.

If Internet devoted the advent of the conventional planetary networks, the next change, that which will support the development of the ambient intelligence and of a diffuse data processing prepares on another ground: that of the Networks of objects without wire and with very large scales. The characteristic of these new networks rests on a mode being freed from the chain of fixed antennas. A network whose active nodes or antennas would be consisted the terminals themselves (i.e. communicating objects). These systems of telecommunication would be able to be self-managed (a principle similar to that of the Peer to peer, adapted perfectly to the implementation of a very capillary network where the communicating objects will have become omnipresent).

Elementary components of the ambient intelligence

the ambient intelligence implements four building blocks:

the Ubiquity: capacity for the user to interact, anywhere, with a multitude of inter-connected apparatuses, sensors, activators, and overall with the electronic systems " enfouis" (embedded software) around him. All that through adapted networks and a very distributed data-processing architecture.

the Attentivité: the faculty of the system with " sentir" permanently the presence and localization of the objects, the apparatuses and the people to take into account the context of use. All kinds of sensors are necessary to this end: biometric cameras, microphones, radars, sensors, as well as the technology of the chips and readers with radio frequency (RFID) for the identification.

the natural Interaction: the access to the services must be able to be made in the most natural/intuitive way possible. With the difference the traditional interface of the data-processing universe (called WIMP, “ Windows, Icons, Small and Pointing device ”, (windows, icons, menus and device of pointing), the man-machine interface is multimode. It is articulated around the voice recognition, gestural or the handling of real objects.

the Intelligence: the faculty of analysis of the context and the dynamic adaptation to the situations. The system must learn while being based on the behaviors from the users in order to answer them as well as possible. That implies storage capacities, of treatment and algorithms of modeling.

Europe put on the ambient intelligence by 2010

More than 7 billion Euros, devoted to the research programs STI (Information Society Technologies) and financed for half by the European Union and reserved for information technologies. It is the component of the 6th PCRD (European Outline programme of research and development over the period 2002-2006). These programs gather rather heteroclite topics, like nano-electronics, the microsystems, the wireless networkings, broad band Internet, of technologies of sensors or of the methods of calculating distributed.

This research has a unifying point: they take part all in the long-term development of a vision or of a concept which one names in Europe “Intelligence Ambient”, a less literal translation of the concept born Outre-Atlantique under the initial term of “Ubiquitaire Data processing”, “Pervasifs Systems” or “Computer évanescent”.

The ambient intelligence opens concrete prospects for European industry, to reinforce its position in fields like the mobile communications, consumer electronics, the hidden Logiciels (embedded software) or micro-electronics.

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