La complexité et l'ampleur des scénarios de l'Intelligence Ambiante impliquent que des attributs tels que l'expressivité de modelisation, la flexibilité de representation et de deploiement et la facilité de configuration et de developpement deviennent des caracteristiques centrales pour les systèmes de gestion de contexte. Cependant, les ouvrages existants semblent explorer ces attributs orientés-developpement a un faible degré.Notre objectif est de créer un intergiciel de gestion de contexte flexible et bien configurable, capable de répondre aux différents scenarios. A cette fin, notre solution est construite a base de techniques et principes du Web Semantique (WS) et des systèmes multi-agents (SMA).Nous utilisons le WS pour proposer un noveau meta-modèle de contexte, permettant une modelisation expressive et extensible du contenu, des meta-proprietés (e.g. validité temporelle, parametres de qualité) et des dépendances (e.g. les contraintes d'integrité) du contexte.De plus, une architecture a base de SMA et des composants logiciels, ou chaque agent encapsule un aspect fonctionnel du processus de gestion de contexte (acquisition, coordination, diffusion, utilisation) est developpée.Nous introduisons un nouveau moyen de structurer le deploiement d'agents selon les dimensions du modèle de contexte de l'application et nous elaborons des politiques déclaratives gouvernant le comportement d'adaptation du provisionnement contextuel des agents. Des simulations d'un scenario d'université intelligente montrent que un bon outillage construit autour de notre intergiciel peut apporter des avantages significatifs dans la génie des applications sensibles au contexte. / The complexity and magnitude of Ambient Intelligence scenarios imply that attributes such as modeling expressiveness, flexibility of representation and deployment, as well as ease of configuration and development become central features for context management systems.However, existing works in the literature seem to explore these development-oriented attributes at a low degree.Our goal is to create a flexible and well configurable context management middleware, able to respond to different scenarios. To this end, our solution is built on the basis of principles and techniques of the Semantic Web and Multi-Agent Systems.We use the Semantic Web to provide a new context meta-model, allowing for an expressive and extensible modeling of content, meta-properties (e.g. temporal validity, quality parameters) and dependencies (e.g. integrity constraints).In addition, we develop a middleware architecture that relies on Multi-Agent Systems and a service component based design. Each agent of the system encapsulates a functional aspect of the context provisioning processes (acquisition, coordination, distribution, use).We introduce a new way to structure the deployment of agents depending on the multi-dimensionality aspects of the application's context model. Furthermore, we develop declarative policies governing the adaptation behavior of the agents managing the provisioning of context information.Simulations of an intelligent university scenario show that appropriate tooling built around our middleware can provide significant advantages in the engineering of context-aware applications.

This thesis aims to investigate the eect context could have to interaction between a user and a spoken dialogue system. It was assumed that using context-dependent voice commands instead of absolute semantic voice commands would make the dialogue more natural and also increase the usability. This thesis also investigate if introducing context could aect the user's privacy and if it could expose a threat for the user from a user perspective. Based on an extended literature review of spoken dialogue system, voice recognition, ambient intelligence, human-computer interaction and privacy, a spoken dialogue system was designed and implemented to test the assumption. The test study included two steps: experiment and interview. The participants conducted the dierent scenarios where a spoken dialogue system could be used with both context-dependent commands and absolute semantic commands. Based on these studies, qualitative results regarding natural, usability and privacy validated the authors hypothesis to some extent. The results indicated that the interaction between users and spoken dialogue systems was more natural and increased the usability when using context. The participants did not feel more monitored by the spoken dialogue system when using context. Some participants stated that there could be a theoretical privacy issues, but only if the security measurements were not met. The paper concludes with suggestions for future work in the scientic area. / Denna uppsats har som mal att undersoka vilken eekt kontext kan ha pa interaktion mellan en anvandare och ett spoken dialogue system. Det antogs att anvandbarheten skulle oka genom att anvanda kontextberoende rostkommandon istallet for absolut semantiska rostkommandon. Denna uppsats granskar aven om kontext kan paverka anvandarens integritet och om den, ur ett anvandarperspektiv, kan utgora ett hot. Baserat pa den utokade litteraturstudien av spoken dialogue system, rostigenkanning, ambient intelligence, manniska-datorinteraktion och integritet, designades och implementerades ett spoken dialogue system for att testa detta antagande. Teststudien bestod av tva steg: experiment och intervju. Deltagarna utforde olika scenarier dar ett spoken dialogue system kunde anvands med kontextberoende rostkommandon och absolut semantiska rostkommandon. Kvalitativa resultat angaende naturlighet, anvandbarhet och integritet validerade forfattarens hypotes till en viss grad. Resultatet indikerade att interaktionen mellan anvandare och ett spoken dialogue system var mer naturlig och mer anvandbar vid anvandning av kontextberoende rostkommandon istallet for absolut semantiska rostkommandon. Deltagarna kande sig inte mer overvakade av ett spoken dialogue system vid anvandning av kontextberoende rostkommandon. Somliga deltagare angav att det, i teorin, fanns integritetsproblem, men endast om inte alla sakerhetsatgarder var uppnadda. Uppsatsen avslutas med forslag pa framtida studier inom detta vetenskapliga omrade.

Ce travail présente une architecture logicielle concrète dédiée aux besoins et caractéristiques des systèmes d'Intelligence Ambiante (AmI). Le modèle comportemental proposé, appelé Higher-order Agent (HoA), capture simultanément l'évolution de l'état mental de l'agent ainsi que l'état de son plan d'actions. Les expressions du plan sont écrites et composées en utilisant un langage algébrique formel, nommé AgLOTOS. Les plans sont construits automatiquement et à la volée, comme un système de processus concurrents, déduits des intentions de l'agent et de ses préférences d'exécution. Basé sur une sémantique de plans et d'actions concurrentes, un service de guidance est aussi proposé afin d'assister l'agent dans le choix de ses prochaines exécutions. Cette guidance permet d'améliorer la satisfaction des intentions de l'agent au regard des plans concurrents possibles et en fonction du contexte actuel de l'agent. La "localité" et le "temps" étant considérés comme des informations contextuelles clés dans l'activité de l'agent, nous les prenons en compte au travers de deux fonctions utilitaires originales conçues à partir des expériences des exécutions d'action et pouvant être combinées suivant les préférences stratégiques de l'agent. La structure compositionnelle des expressions AgLOTOS est mise à profit pour permettre des révisions ciblées du plan de l'agent, Les révisions des sous-plans sont donc réalisées automatiquement en fonction des mises à jour apportées aux intentions, tout en maintenant la consistance du comportement de l'agent. Un cas d'étude est développé afin de montrer comment l'agent peut agir, même s'il subit des changements inattendus de son contexte, en fonction de ses expériences passées qui révèlent certains cas de d'échecs. / This work presents a concrete software architecture dedicated to ambient intelligence (AmI) features and requirements. The proposed behavioral model, called Higher-order Agent (HoA) captures the evolution of the mental representation of the agent and the one of its plan simultaneously. Plan expressions are written and composed using a formal algebraic language, namely AgLOTOS, so that plans are built automatically and on the fly, as a system of concurrent processes. Due to the compositional structure of AgLOTOS expressions, the updates of sub-plans are realized automatically accordingly to the revising of intentions, hence maintaining the consistency of the agent. Based on a specific semantics, a guidance service is also proposed to assist the agent in its execution. This guidance allows to improve the satisfaction of the agent's intentions with respect to the possible concurrent plans and the current context of the agent. Adopting the idea that "location" and "time" are key stones information in the activity of the agent, we show how to enforce guidance by ordering the different possible plans. As a major contribution, we demonstrate two original utility functions that are designed from the past-experiences of the action executions, and that can be combined accordingly to the current balance policy of the agent. A use case scenario is developed to show how the agent can act, even if it suffers from unexpected changes of contexts, it does not have many experiences and whose past experiences reveals some failure cases.

Smart home is a topic that emerged in the 90s to improve the quality of human life. The evolutions of ambient intelligence, recent technology advancements, internet, and smart devices have had a large impact in smart home environment. In the traditional smart home environment, devices are connected physically in the environment and there are interoperability issues between the devices, because the environment is heterogeneous and the devices do not allow to communicate with the outside world such as the internet.In this master thesis we propose a conceptual design of a platform for better home entertainment experience. Smart phone, smart TV and a personal computer are the most important devices in this platform design. The platform provides a high degree of interaction and integration among devices within the environment. The proposed platform model helps software architects and engineers to have an early involvement in the design process. We proposed the platform to be implemented with the help of hybrid cloud computing model. Our suggested platform design is able to overcome the deficiencies of the previous models and approaches in this domain. We conducted direct interviews with seven computer science teachers at Malmö University for the evaluation of our platform design. The results show that the platform design can be physically implemented with the specified devices, the clouds are better than the traditional approaches and hybrid cloud model is more acceptable in terms of security and economy. We encourage software architects, developers and project supervisors to adopt this proposed platform model in physical smart home environment.

Avec l'apparition des paradigmes des systèmes ubiquitaires ou omniprésents et de l'intelligence ambiante, on assiste à l'émergence d'un nouveau domaine de recherche visant à créer des environnements ou écosystèmes intelligents pouvant offrir une multitude de services permettant d'améliorer la qualité de vie, l'état physique et mental, et le bien-être social des usagers. Dans cette thèse, nous nous focalisons sur la problématique de la représentation sémantique des connaissances et du raisonnement dans le cadre des systèmes à intelligence ambiante et des robots ubiquitaires. Nous proposons deux modèles sémantiques permettant d'améliorer les fonctions cognitives de ces systèmes en termes de gestion du contexte. Au premier modèle, de type ontologique, sont associés un langage de règles et un raisonnement réactif pour la sensibilité au contexte. Pour prendre en compte le caractère dynamique du contexte et assurer une prise de décision cohérente, le mode de raisonnement retenu garantit deux propriétés essentielles : la décidabilité et la non-monotonie. Le deuxième modèle, également de type ontologique, complète le modèle précédent en termes d'expressivité pour la représentation de contextes non-triviaux et/ou liés au temps. Il s'appuie sur des relations n-aires et une représentation narrative des événements pour inférer des causalités entre événements et reconnaitre des contextes complexes non-observables à partir d'événements passés et courants. Les modèles proposés ont été mis en oeuvre et validés sur la plateforme ubiquitaire d'expérimentation du LISSI à partir de trois scenarii d'assistance cognitive et de reconnaissance de contexte / With the appearance of the paradigms of ubiquitous systems and ambient intelligence, a new domain of research is emerging with the aim of creating intelligent environments and ecosystems, that can provide multiple services that can improve quality of life, the physical and mental status and the social wellness of the users. In this thesis, we address the problem of semantic knowledge representation and reasoning, in the context of ambient intelligent systems and ubiquitous robots. We propose two semantic models that improve the cognitive functions of these systems, in terms of context recognition, and context adaptation. The first one is an ontology-based model, which is associated with a rule language to model reactive reasoning process on contextual knowledge. To take into account the dynamicity of context and insure coherent decision-making, this process guarantees two essential properties: decidability and non-monotonic reasoning. The second model is also an ontology-based model that completes the previous model in terms of expressiveness for semantic representation of non-trivial contexts with temporal dimension It is based on n-ary relations and a narrative representation of events for inferring causalities between events, and therefore to build the chronological context of a situation as from past and current events. The proposed models have been implemented on the ubiquitous experimental platform of LISSI, and validated through three scenarios for cognitive assistance and context recognition

Nous proposons donc un modèle original d'apprentissage constructiviste adapté pour un système d'AmI. Ce modèle repose sur une approche décentralisée, permettant de multiples implémentations convenant à un environnement hétérogène. Dans les environnements réels continus sans modélisation à priori, se pose la question de la modélisation des structures élémentaires de représentation et particulièrement le problème d'amorçage de l'apprentissage sensorimoteur (comme décrit par [Kuipers06]). Dans le cadre du modèle général proposé, nous explicitons ce problème particulier et proposons de le traiter comme une forme d'auto-organisation modélisée par un système multi-agent. Cette approche permet de construire des motifs d'interaction élémentaires à partir des seules données brutes, sur lesquels peut reposer la construction d'une représentation plus élaborée (voir [Mazac14]). Nous présentons enfin une série d'expérimentations illustrant la résolution de ce problème d'amorçage : tout d'abord grâce à un environnement simulé, qui permet de maitriser les régularités de l'environnement et autorise des expérimentations rapides ; ensuite en implémentant ce système d'apprentissage au sein d'un environnement d'AmI réel. Pour cela le modèle est intégré dans le système d'AmI développé par l'entreprise partenaire de cette thèse CIFRE. Puis nous présentons une possible application industrielle des résultats de cette première étape implémentée d'amorçage de l'apprentissage sensorimoteur. Nous concluons par l'analyse des résultats et des perspectives de ce type d'approche pour l'AmI et l'application en général de l'IA aux systèmes réels en environnements continus / The theory of cognitive development from Jean Piaget (1923) is a constructivist perspective of learning that has substantially influenced cognitive science domain. Within AI, lots of works have tried to take inspiration from this paradigm since the beginning of the discipline. Indeed it seems that constructivism is a possible trail in order to overcome the limitations of classical techniques stemming from cognitivism or connectionism and create autonomous agents, fitted with strong adaptation ability within their environment, modelled on biological organisms. Potential applications concern intelligent agents in interaction with a complex environment, with objectives that cannot be predefined. Like robotics, Ambient Intelligence (AmI) is a rich and ambitious paradigm that represents a high complexity challenge for AI. In particular, as a part of constructivist theory, the agent has to build a representation of the world that relies on the learning of sensori-motor patterns starting from its own experience only. This step is difficult to set up for systems in continuous environments, using raw data from sensors without a priori modelling.With the use of multi-agent systems, we investigate the development of new techniques in order to adapt constructivist approach of learning on actual cases. Therefore, we use ambient intelligence as a reference domain for the application of our approach

The future Internet will need to cater for an increasing number of powerful devices and entire groups of networks to roam in heterogeneous access networks. The current approach towards meeting such requirements, which is to retrofit mobility solutions to different layers of the protocol stack, has given rise to an increasingly fragmented network control layer. Furthermore, retrofitting solutions in an ad-hoc manner to the protocol stack does not provide consistent support from the network to different applications. This lack of a common control layer for facilitating roaming in heterogeneous networking environments represents a crucial challenge both technically and from a user perspective. To this end, a novel mobility architecture forms the basis and the first part of this dissertation. The work on investigating current network mobility solutions and improving these solutions if deemed necessary, in order to reuse within the novel mobility architecture constitutes the second part of this dissertation. The IETF standard protocol for network mobility was implemented and its performance was analysed on a real networking environment. This enabled to identify problems in the standard which affect the handover and routing performance. To address the identified routing and protocol header overheads of the standard network mobility protocol a novel optimal routing framework, OptiNets was proposed. To address the handover latency issues, optimizations to IPv6 network attachment were incorporated and also an access technology independent multiple interface Make-Before-Break handover mechanism was proposed. The viability of the OptiNets framework and the handover optimizations were demonstrated by analysis and by implementation. A more general external factor that affects the performance of mobile networks which is bandwidth scarcity of Wireless Wide Area Networks was addressed, by proposing a bandwidth fuelling architecture for on-board mobile networks. The feasibility of the bandwidth fuelling architecture was analysed by implementing a prototype and evaluating its performance.

In the vision of Ambient Intelligence, people are assisted in their everyday activities through the proactive, opportunistic support of non-intrusive computing devices offering intuitive interaction modalities. The usefulness and quality of delivered services can be improved considerably if the devices are able to adapt their behaviour according to sensed changes in their surrounding environment, both at the physical and logical levels. This interplay between context-awareness and dynamic software adaptability is key to the construction of applications that are smart with respect to user needs. Unfortunately, most current applications do not reach this level of adaptability, due to a lack of appropriate programming technology. Most applications exhibit fixed functionality and seldom do they sense their environment and adapt their services in a context-aware fashion. Many chances of delivering improved services to users and network peers are thus missed. This dissertation presents a programming model to ease the construction of applications that can react to changes in their execution context by adapting their behaviour dynamically. The starting point of our research is the development of novel language abstractions and the adaptation of existing abstractions to render context-aware, self-adaptable applications easier to develop. We demonstrate that a simple yet powerful computation model readily provides the needed support, leading to straightforward application code that is not concerned with context adaptation, behaviour that can be adapted dynamically to different contexts in a non-intrusive fashion, and context-aware applications with software architectures that are not biased towards context adaptation ---rather, they can be designed freely according to their domain. The proposed computation model is realised through the Ambience programming language, and its underlying open implementation, the Ambient Object System. A small-step operational semantics describes it formally. Much in the vein of prototype-based programming, the model has been designed with simplicity and concreteness in mind. It is highly dynamic, featuring dynamic (multiple) dispatch, dynamic inheritance, dynamic typing, and dynamic method scoping. Application logic adaptation is enabled by means of an intuitive, first-class reification of context that is straightforwardly connected to dynamic behaviour selection. We describe needed management techniques for such context, and a few programming guidelines on how to develop context-aware applications using our approach. The approach is validated by showing its application in a number of scenarios inspired on Ambient Intelligence.

The delivery of quality healthcare to all citizens at reasonable costs is an important challenge. With the increase in the aging population, the costs of managing chronic diseases increase. Today, healthcare services tend to shift from recovery to prevention. Remote healthcare monitoring is crucial for prevention and monitoring of chronic diseases since they require continuous and long-term monitoring. The advances in networking, mobile communications and medical device technologies offer a great potential to realize remote healthcare monitoring. However, seamless integration of multi-modal medical devices to the existing healthcare information systems is necessary for the automated use of medical device observations in related applications. The thesis addresses the automatic acquisition and use of multi-modal medical device observations in healthcare information systems. The interoperability of medical devices with healthcare information systems requires both physical connectivity and application level interoperability. Therefore, the thesis concentrates on both the medical device domain and the interoperability efforts on the existing healthcare information systems. It provides an interoperability solution based on ISO/IEEE 11073 and HL7 standards. This work is also realized the automatic acquisition and use of multi-modal medical device observations in an intelligent healthcare monitoring and decision support system which is developed as a part of the IST-027074 SAPHIRE project funded by the European Commission.

Potentially transformational ideas in several applications of human and computer interaction form the motivation for this work. It is targeted towards a systematic approach to the design of systems with complex, intelligent and interactive exchange of information between a system and the environment it is meant to monitor, and gather knowledge about. The Pahl and Beitz systematic design method is modified with the inclusion of generic sub-systems from Living Systems Theory, modeling and simulation tools and other adaptations within the context of the validation square to synthesize a design method for the design of systems with intelligent and interactive information flow. The validation of the proposed design method is carried out with the aid of an example wherein a motion capture system is designed based on the Nintendo Wii Remote(TM). Results include an evaluation of the performance of a prototype as well as the design method itself in the context of the requirements that the method must fulfill.