The master thesis project - Personal video: An Intelligent Presentation System (IPS) - was conducted at the Department of Communication Systems, Royal Institute of Technology (KTH), Stockholm, Sweden. The focus of this thesis is designing, building, and evaluating an intelligent environment for giving presentations which makes all the technologies of the existing devices invisible to the presenter, i.e., to remove difficulties of configuration, compatibility, etc. from hindering the user from being able to give their presentation. IPS is an application in a hot research field - Ambient Intelligence (AmI) which is influenced by user – centered design. Therefore, the goal of IPS is to improve the user’s experience. As compared to a traditional presentation system, IPS integrating several independent applications hence improving the user’s efficiency and offering greater user friendliness. In this thesis, a prototype of IPS was designed which combines an online presentation room booking system (running on a context server), a CGI presentation control module (running on a presentation server), and a cross platform control panel (which could be running on a PC, laptop, PDA, cellular phone, etc.). This prototype realized our goals of providing an intelligent and comfortable environment for both the presenters and the system a dministrators.

Les orthèses cognitives peuvent améliorer l'autonomie des traumatisés craniocérébraux (TCC) sévères, tout en intégrant en continu le processus de réadaptation cognitive aux AIVQ au sein de leur domicile. Dans une démarche de conception participative interdisciplinaire, nos travaux ont permis de passer de la pratique des ergothérapeutes à la spécification formelle de plans d'intervention et à l'implémentation de cette pratique dans des orthèses cognitives. Dans cette thèse, une approche reposant sur les personae illustre d'abord les dysfonctionnements chez les TCC, leurs besoins d'assistance, ainsi que les besoins de leurs aidants. Ensuite, deux modèles sont élaborés. Le premier « Gestion dynamique de la réadaptation cognitive » s'intéresse en particulier au choix, à l'adaptation et à l'application d'interventions cognitives fondées sur les données probantes. Le second modèle « Assistance préventive » permet, en situation de danger potentiel, d'assister un TCC de manière progressive et adaptée pour écarter ce danger. Ces modèles sont utilisés de deux manières. D'une part, leur implémentation sous forme d'ontologie OWL illustre comment l'assistance peut être rendue sensible au contexte, dynamique et personnalisée. D'autre part, ils guident la conception et l'implémentation de COOK, une orthèse cognitive pour la préparation de repas, et d'un système de sécurité autonome (SSA) dédié à la prévention et à la sécurité des TCC lors de la préparation de repas. Finalement, une architecture logicielle pour la construction d'orthèses cognitives et dérivée.COOK et SSA ont été déployés au sein d'une résidence pour TCC. Trois résidents peuvent maintenant cuisiner de manière autonome. / Severe traumatic Brain Injury (TBI) is considered a public health problem. ; Indeed, severe TBI causes significant cognitive, emotional and behavioral repercussions that impact the lives of these individuals, particularly their independence in Instrumental Activities of Daily Living (IADLs). Individuals who have experienced severe TBI frequently return to live in their homes despite the severe difficulties associated with their condition, though the need for assistance to perform IADLs frequently persists. The objective of this thesis is to design, represent, formalize and implement a context-aware and adaptive structure of cognitive assistance. This assistance is created according to the general needs of individuals with severe TBI for IADL performance. The proposed assistance will promote their independence to perform IADL in a home environment. The design of this cognitive assistance technology involves an interdisciplinary collaboration between occupational therapy and computer science, to evolve from the assistance provided by the clinicians to a formal computer science formulation and implementation. This design is based on a participative design approach that mainly involves TBI residents of a smart alternative housing unit.A prototype of a cognitive orthotic for meal preparation (COOK) was created and deployed within an alternative housing unit. Implementation of this cognitive orthotic lifted the prohibition on use of a stove for meal preparation that had previously been place on their residents. By allowing these residents to cook independently, COOK has contributed to helping them become more independent in cooking and more confident in their ability to do so.

Cette thèse porte sur la conception de systèmes multi-agents ambiants pour faciliter l'autonomie et l'accessibilité aux espaces publics, en particulier aux personnes âgées. Le vieillissement de la population et l'accroissement des situations de handicap liées à la progression en âge, appellent une approche nouvelle de l'accessibilité des espaces publics urbains. Dans ce contexte, cette thèse propose la conception d'un dispositif outillé d'assistance aux personnes âgées dans leurs activités quotidiennes à l'extérieur qui s'adapte à l'environnement ouvert et évolutif de son usager. Pour permettre son acceptabilité, ce dispositif d'assistance ambiant s'appuie sur une démarche de conception centrée utilisateur, interdisciplinaire et collaborative. Un prototype a été réalisé et il offre une assistance en temps réel aux activités quotidiennes par apprentissage. En effet, il permet de détecter des anomalies dans le comportement, de notifier des alertes ou de proposer des recommandations. / The purpose of my thesis is to design and develop an ambient multi-agent system for seniors to increase their autonomy and their accessibility to public spaces. The ageing of the population and the increase of disability situations linked to age, call for a new approach to the accessibility of urban public spaces. In this context, this thesis provides a personalized system to assist elderly in their daily outdoor activities. It takes into account the openness and the evolution of the environment to which the system should adapt. In order to ensure its acceptability, this ambient sociotechnical system is based on a user-centered interdisciplinary collaborative design approach. A prototype has been implemented and it offers assistance in daily external activities thanks to learning. In fact, the system detects unusual situations and acts accordingly (notifications, alerts or recommendations).

Le récit est un outil de communication qui permet aux individus de donner un sens au monde qui les entoure. Il représente une plate-forme pour comprendre et partager leur culture, connaissances et identité. Le récit porte une série d'événements réels ou imaginaires, en provoquant un ressenti, une réaction ou même, déclenche une action. Pour cette raison, il est devenu un sujet d'intérêt pour différents domaines au-delà de la Littérature (Éducation, Marketing, Psychologie, etc.) qui cherchent d'atteindre un but particulier au travers de lui (Persuader, Réfléchir, Apprendre, etc.).Cependant, le récit reste encore sous-développé dans le contexte informatique. Il existent des travaux qui visent son analyse et production automatique. Les algorithmes et implémentations, par contre, restent contraintes à imiter le processus créatif derrière des textes littéraires provenant de sources textuelles. Ainsi, il n'existent pas des approches qui produisent automatiquement des récits dont 1) la source est constitué de matériel non formatées et passé dans la réalité et 2) et le contenu projette une perspective qui cherche à transmettre un message en particulier. Travailler avec des données brutes devient relevante vu qu'elles augmentent exponentiellement chaque jour grâce à l'utilisation d'appareils connectés.Ainsi, vu le contexte du Big Data, nous présentons une approche de génération automatique de récits à partir de données ambiantes. L'objectif est de faire émerger l'expérience vécue d'une personne à partir des données produites pendant une activité humaine. Tous les domaines qui travaillent avec des données brutes pourraient bénéficier de ce travail, tels que l'Éducation ou la Santé. Il s'agit d'un effort interdisciplinaire qui inclut le Traitement Automatique de Langues, la Narratologie, les Sciences Cognitives et l'Interaction Homme-Machine.Cette approche est basée sur des corpus et modèles et comprend la formalisation de ce que nous appelons le récit d'activité ainsi qu'une démarche de génération adaptée. Elle a est composé de 4 étapes : la formalisation des récits d'activité, la constitution de corpus, la construction de modèles d'activité et du récit, et la génération de texte. Chacune a été conçue pour surmonter des contraintes liées aux questions scientifiques posées vue la nature de l'objectif : la manipulation de données incertaines et incomplètes, l'abstraction valide d'après l'activité, la construction de modèles avec lesquels il soit possible la transposition de la réalité gardée dans les données vers une perspective subjective et la rendue en langage naturel. Nous avons utilisé comme cas d'usage le récit d'activité, vu que les pratiquant se servent des appareils connectés, ainsi qu'ils ont besoin de partager son expérience. Les résultats obtenus sont encourageants et donnent des pistes qui ouvrent beaucoup de perspectives de recherche. / Stories are a communication tool that allow people to make sense of the world around them. It represents a platform to understand and share their culture, knowledge and identity. Stories carry a series of real or imaginary events, causing a feeling, a reaction or even trigger an action. For this reason, it has become a subject of interest for different fields beyond Literature (Education, Marketing, Psychology, etc.) that seek to achieve a particular goal through it (Persuade, Reflect, Learn, etc.).However, stories remain underdeveloped in Computer Science. There are works that focus on its analysis and automatic production. However, those algorithms and implementations remain constrained to imitate the creative process behind literary texts from textual sources. Thus, there are no approaches that produce automatically stories whose 1) the source consists of raw material that passed in real life and 2) and the content projects a perspective that seeks to convey a particular message. Working with raw data becomes relevant today as it increase exponentially each day through the use of connected devices.Given the context of Big Data, we present an approach to automatically generate stories from ambient data. The objective of this work is to bring out the lived experience of a person from the data produced during a human activity. Any areas that use such raw data could benefit from this work, for example, Education or Health. It is an interdisciplinary effort that includes Automatic Language Processing, Narratology, Cognitive Science and Human-Computer Interaction.This approach is based on corpora and models and includes the formalization of what we call the activity récit as well as an adapted generation approach. It consists of 4 stages: the formalization of the activity récit, corpus constitution, construction of models of activity and the récit, and the generation of text. Each one has been designed to overcome constraints related to the scientific questions asked in view of the nature of the objective: manipulation of uncertain and incomplete data, valid abstraction according to the activity, construction of models from which it is possible the Transposition of the reality collected though the data to a subjective perspective and rendered in natural language. We used the activity narrative as a case study, as practitioners use connected devices, so they need to share their experience. The results obtained are encouraging and give leads that open up many prospects for research.

Ambient intelligence refers to the vision of computationally augmented everyday environments that are sensitive, adaptive and responsive to humans and intelligently support their daily lives. Ambient ecologies are the infrastructures of ambient intelligence. To enable system developers to frame and manage the dynamic and complex interaction of humans with ambient ecologies consisting of a mixture of physical (real) and virtual (digital) objects, novel interaction paradigms are needed. Traditional interaction paradigms like the WIMP (windows, icon, menus, and pointing devices) paradigm for desktop computing operate in a closed world, unaware of the physical, social and cultural context. They restrict human perception and action to screen, mouse and keyboard with the assumption that human attention will be fully devoted to interaction with the computer. Emerging interaction paradigms for ambient intelligence are typically centered on specific devices, specific computing environments or specific human capabilities. Also, many of them are driven by technological advancements rather than viewing the human agent as their starting point. A principled, theoretical approach centered in the individual human agent, their situation and activities that are comprehensive and integrated while at the same time instrumental in the design of ambient ecologies has been lacking. This thesis introduces egocentric interaction as an approach towards the modeling of ambient ecologies with the distinguishing feature of taking the human agent’s body, situation and activities as center of reference, as opposed to the more common device-centric approaches in facilitating human-environment interaction. Egocentric interaction is encapsulated in a number of assumptions and principles such as situatedness, the proximity principle, the physical-virtual equity principle, perception and action instead of “input” and “output,” and activity-centeredness. A situative space model is proposed based on some of these principles. It is intended to capture what a specific human agent can perceive and not perceive, reach and not reach at any given moment in time. The situative space model is for the egocentric interaction paradigm what the virtual desktop is for the WIMP interaction paradigm: more or less everything of interest to a specific human agent is assumed and supposed to happen here. In addition, the conception and implementation of the easy ADL ecology based on egocentric interaction, comprising of smart objects, a personal activity-centric middleware, ambient intelligence applications aimed at everyday activity support, and a human agent literally in the middle of it all is described. The middleware was developed to address important challenges in ambient intelligence: (1) tracking and managing smart objects; (2) tracking a human agent’s situative spaces; (3) recognizing human activities and actions; (4) managing and facilitating human-environment interaction; and (5) to ease up the development of ambient intelligence applications. The easy ADL ecology was first simulated in immersive virtual reality, and then set up physically as a living laboratory to evaluate: (1) the technological and technical performance of individual middleware components, (2) to perform a user experience evaluation assessing various aspects of user satisfaction in relation to the support offered by the easy ADL ecology, and (3) to use it as a research test bed for addressing challenges in ambient intelligence. While it is problematic to directly compare the “proof-of-concept” easy ADL ecology with related research efforts, it is clear from the user experience evaluation that the subjects were positive with the services it offered. / easy ADL project

This thesis investigates the design of sociable technologies and is divided into three main parts described below. In the first part, we introduce sociable technologies. We review our the definition of technology and propose categories of technologies according to the motivation underlying their design: improvement of control, improvement of communication or improvement of cooperation. Sociable technologies are then presented as an extension of techniques to improve cooperation. The design of sociable technologies are then discussed leading to the observation that acquisition of social common sense is a key challenge for designing sociable technologies. Finally, polite technologies are presented as an approach for acquiring social common sense. In the second part, we focus on the premises for the design of sociable technologies. A key aspect of social common sense is the ability to act appropriately in social situations. Associating appropriate behaviour with social situations is presented as a key method for implementing polite technologies. Reinforcement learning is proposed as a method for learning such associations and variation of this algorithm are experimentally evaluated. Learning the association between situation and behaviour relies on the strong assumption that mutual understanding of social situations can be achieved between technologies and people during interaction. We argue that in order to design sociable technologies, we must change the model of communication used by our technologies. We propose to replace the well-known code model of communication, with the ostensive-inferential model proposed by Sperber and Wilson. Hypotheses raised by this approach are evaluated in an experiment conducted in a smart environment, where, subjects by group of two or three are asked to collaborate with a smart environment in order to teach it how to behave in an automated meeting. A novel experimental methodology is presented: The Sorceress of Oz. The results collected from this experiment validate our hypothesis and provide insightful information for the design. We conclude by presenting, what we believe are, the premises for the design of sociable technologies. The final part of the thesis concerns an infrastructure for the design of sociable technologies. This infrastructure provides the support for three fundamental components. First, it provides the support for an inferential model of context. This inferential model of context is presented; a software architecture is proposed and evaluated in an experiment conducted in a smart-environment. Second, it provides the support for reasoning by analogy and introduces the concept of eigensituations. The advantage of this representation are discussed and evaluated in an experiment. Finally, it provides the support for ostensive-inferential communication and introduces the concept of ostensive interface.

Animated agent technology has been rapidly developed to provide ubiquitously psychological and functional benefits for fulfilling communicative goals. However, the character motions of most character-centered models based on pre-stored movement, finite state machine and scripted conditional logic are generally restrictive. The major drawback lies in the lack of maturity of integrating the elements between personality, emotion and behaviour. To bridge the gap between cognitive and behavioural elements, we examine the connections between human personality, emotion, movement and cartoon modeling for the agent design. Human personality and emotional behaviour are the essences in the recognition of a believable synthetic character. Personality and emotion come from the storylines and result in characters’ motions. Cartoon animations successfully engage the audience and create emotional connections with the spectators. However, even a sophisticated animator often faces some difficulties while performing a very laborious task to simulate an emotion- and personality-rich character. This thesis focuses on exploring effective techniques to extract personality and emotion features for a high-level control of character movements. A hierarchical fuzzy rule-based system was constructed, in which personality and emotion were mapped into the body’s movement zones of a character. This facilitates agent designers to control the personality and emotion of a dynamic synthetic character. The system was then applied to a Narrative Intelligent system and extended to an Ambient Intelligent environment. An innovative storyboard-structured storytelling method was devised by using story scripts and action descriptions in a form similar to the content description of storyboards to predict specific personality and emotion. As software or device agents evolve into the Ambient Intelligence, new concepts for effective agent presentations and delegating control are necessary to minimise the human’s tasks and interventions in the complex and dynamic environment. A novel customizable personalised agent framework was developed by utilising the spirit of cartoon animation to match each user’s profile in the form of a cartoon reciprocal agent. As a result, users could explicitly modify personality and emotion values to change the psychology traits of the agent, which would affect their appearance and behaviour through body posture expression. An evaluation of the system was conducted to verify the effectiveness and the applicability in both Narrative and Ambient intelligent agent frameworks. The significance of this research is that applying higher cognitive factors to animated characters can lead to a better animation design tool and reduce strenuous animation production efforts in agent designs. It will also enable animated characters to embody more adaptive, flexible and stylised performance.

Darmstadt, Techn. Universiẗat, Diss., 2007. / Dateien im PDF-Format.

Τα μελλοντικά περιβάλλοντα υπολογισμού περιλαμβάνουν την ενσωμάτωση καθημερινών αντικειμένων, εφοδιασμένα με μικροσκοπικούς επεξεργαστές, αισθητήρες και κάρτες ασύρματων δικτύων. Τα έξυπνα αυτά αντικείμενα (τεχνουργήματα) μπορούν να εξερευνούν το περιβάλλον στο οποίο βρίσκονται και να επικοινωνούν μεταξύ τους. Η διαδραστικότητα με τον άνθρωπο μπορεί να παρέχει τη δυνατότητα αντιμετώπισης διαφόρων εργασιών με διαισθητικό τρόπο. Γίνεται αντιληπτό ότι μέσα σε ένα τέτοιο περιβάλλον, προκύπτουν σοβαρά ζητήματα που σχετίζονται με την ιδιωτικότητα των χρηστών. Αρχικά, εξαιτίας της αορατότητας των υπολογισμών που έχει σαν αποτέλεσμα οι χρήστες να μην τους αντιλαμβάνονται και έτσι να μην αισθάνονται ασφαλείς στο περιβάλλον αυτό. Επιπλέον, η παροχή ορισμένων υπηρεσιών απαιτεί τη μετάδοση και επεξεργασία προσωπικών δεδομένων και, ως εκ τούτου, εγκυμονεί κινδύνους για την προσωπική ζωή. Στην παρούσα εργασία ένα τέτοιο περιβάλλον (περιβάλλον περιρρέουσας νοημοσύνης) με τα παραπάνω χαρακτηριστικά, μοντελοποιείται μέσω των σφαιρών δραστηριοτήτων. Μια σφαίρα δραστηριοτήτων περιλαμβάνει όλη εκείνη την πληροφορία που απαιτείται για να εκτελεστεί μια συγκεκριμένη εργασία μέσα στο περιβάλλον. Στόχος της εργασίας είναι η μοντελοποίηση πολιτικών ιδιωτικότητας με κέντρο το χρήστη, η οποία μπορεί να πραγματοποιηθεί σε μια σφαίρα σε οποιοδήποτε περιβάλλον περιρρέουσας νοημοσύνης. Για να επιτευχθεί σημασιολογική ομοιογένεια, παρά την πιθανή ετερογένεια των πόρων ενός τέτοιου συστήματος, έχει σχεδιαστεί μια οντολογία για την αναπαράσταση αυτών των πολιτικών. Επιπλέον το σημασιολογικό αυτό πλαίσιο μοντελοποιεί τις βασικές αρχές και τους κανόνες αναφορικά με την προστασία των προσωπικών δεδομένων και την ιδιωτικότητα. Η προτεινόμενη οντολογία αξιολογείται βάσει αναγνωρισμένων κριτηρίων όπως είναι οι ερωτήσεις επάρκειας / Future computing environments involve integrating everyday objects equipped with tiny processors, sensors and wireless network cards. These smart objects (artifacts) may explore their environment and communicate with each other. Interactivity with humans may provide the ability of dealing with tasks in an intuitive way. It is clear that within this environment, serious issues related to the privacy of the users arise. Initially, due to the invisibility of all computations which results to the users being unaware of them. Moreover, the provision of certain services requires the transmission and processing of user’s personal data and thus poses a serious threat to their privacy. In the present project such an environment (ambient intelligence environment) with the above characteristics, is modeled through the concept of activity spheres. An activity sphere contains all the necessary information needed to realize a specific task within this environment. The aim of the project is to model a user-centered privacy policy which could be realized for a sphere in any ambient intelligence environment it is instantiated. To achieve semantic homogeneity, despite the possible heterogeneity of the resources within such an environment, an ontology has been designed. Furthermore, this semantic framework, models the fundamental principles and rules regarding personal data protection and privacy. The proposed ontology is evaluated by means of well-appreciated criteria such as competency questions

Cette thèse concerne à la gestion globale à base de modèle des flux énergétiques dans le bâtiment. L'objectif des systèmes de gestion de l’énergie proposés est d’aider les occupants à gérer leur système bâtiment en planifiant la consommation/production des différents équipements présents en fonction des tarifs, de la disponibilité de l'énergie et des usages de l'occupant. L’objectif de cette thèse est de proposer une approche de résolution multi-solveurs s'appuyant sur le paradigme multi-agent.Pour y parvenir, nous avons développé, dans un premier temps, un service multi-phase, qui représente plusieurs phases flexibles avec des niveaux de consommation différents, offrant un niveau de précision supérieure pour des équipements comme une machine à laver. Dans un second temps, notre travail a consisté à proposer une nouvelle approche d’optimisation combinant différents solveurs embarqués dans des agents logiciels. Le résultat est une approche d’optimisation hybride à base d’agents, s’appuyant sur des algorithmes PLNE et des méta-heuristiques. / This PhD focuses on the global energy management based on energetical flux models ofbuildings. The objective of the energy management system is to help the inhabitants to manage theirbuilding, by scheduling the consumption/production of the different appliances, taking into accountenergy costs, availability et inhabitants’ preferences. The PhD objective is to propose a resolution approach with several solvers inspired by the multi agent systems.A multi-phasis service representing several phasis has been developped. Each phasis is defined by its own consumption level. This type of service presents a better precision than singlephasis approaches to model some appliances. A new optimization approach has been developped. Itcombines different solvers embedded into software agents. The results is an hybrid approach forthe optimization based on the multi-agent system, using MILP algorithms and meta-heuristics.