CfP: 3rd European Workshop on Smart Products: Building Blocks of Ambient Intelligence

[Apologies if you receive multiple copies of this message] C A L L F O R P A P E R S 3rd European Workshop on Smart Products: Building Blocks of Ambient Intelligence Held in Conjunction with The European Conference on Ambient Intelligence (AmI'09) November 18-21, Salzburg, Austria. Aim and Scope The vision of Ambient Intelligence is based on the increasing technological advances in embedding computational power, information and sensing capabilities into everyday objects and environments. Despite the current availability of technology, there is a notorious absence of large scale settings. This absence raises questions about the complexity and effort required with current approaches to building intelligent living and working spaces. Future ambient intelligent infrastructures must be able to configure themselves and grow from the available, purposeful objects (be it software services or consumer appliances) in order to become effective in the real world. The use of embedded systems to control devices, tools and appliances has been common practice for almost two decades now. With every new generation, these controllers provide an ever increasing list of capabilities in the form of assistance, information, and customisation. However, it is the addition of communications, and advanced interaction and sensing capabilities that changes the perspectives of what such systems can do: gather information from other sensors, devices and computers on the network, or enable user-oriented customization and operations through short-range communication. This combination of capabilities enables what we call Smart Products. We refer to Smart Products as real-world objects, devices or software services bundled with knowledge about themselves and their capabilities, their environment and their users, enabling new ways of interacting with humans and the environment autonomously. These properties make Smart Products not only intelligible to users, but also smart to interpret user's actions and adapt accordingly. The fundamental questions in this workshop are: * What knowledge and learning techniques can we embed into Smart Products to make them more adaptable and intelligible to users? * What technologies, knowledge, and inference techniques can enable Smart Products to situate their behavior in an environment with other products? * How to enable context-aware human-to-product interaction using interaction capabilities built into the product or the environment? * How federations of Smart Products can reify agentive behavior and compose functionality to become the generative blocks of ambient intelligence? * How to enable the large-scale deployment of Smart Products and support the whole product lifecycle? * What kind of interfaces, business models, and scenarios will Smart Products create, address and modify? The research areas involved are many, including Knowledge Modelling and Embedding, Human Computer Interaction, Economics, Artificial Intelligence, Software and Knowledge engineering, and many more. We look forward in this workshop to bring together different areas of expertise to help us shape a vision of creating living and working environments out of Smart Products. Submissions We invite all researchers who want to contribute, to participate by submitting an original position paper of up to 4 pages, following the Springer Proceedings format. (Please visit the website for more information: http://www.ami-blocks.org/.) We strongly encourage members of EU projects dealing with Smart Products to participate in this workshop, to discuss highly innovative and state-of-the-art research challenges and results. The workshop papers will be published in the adjunct proceedings volume of AmI'09 (http://www.ami-09.org/). Relevant topics include (but are not limited to) the following: * Design of Smart Products * AI planning for service composition * Semantic-based discovery * Dynamic adaptation of products * Design of user-centered ambient computing * Smart Product federations * End-User service composition * Interactive communication with Smart Products * Development of ubiquitous computing applications * Dynamic adaptation of products * Semantic representations for Smart Products * Infrastructure for Smart Products * Application cases throughout the whole product lifecycle: assembly, vending, maintenance, end-user operation, etc. URL: http://www.ami-blocks.org/ Important Dates: Deadline: 19.10.2009 *FIRM DEADLINE* Notification: 27.10.2009 Workshop: 18.11.2009 Organizing Committee: * Fernando Lyardet, SAP Research, Germany. * Erwin Aitenbichler, Darmstadt University of Technology, Germany. * Max Mühlhäuser, Darmstadt University of Technology, Germany Program Committee: * Stephan Haller, SAP Research (Zürich), Switzerland. * Melanie Hartmann, Darmstadt University of Technology, Germany. * Gerd Kortuem, Lancaster University, United Kingdom. * Kristof Van Laerhoven, Darmstadt University of Technology, Germany. * Kris Luyten, Hasselt University, Belgium. * Wolfgang Maass, Furtwangen University, Germany. * Florian Michahelles, ETH (Zürich), Switzerland. * Max Mühlhäuser, Darmstadt University of Technology, Germany. * Daniel Schreiber, Darmstadt University of Technology, Germany. * Stamatis Karnouskos, SAP Research (Karlsruhe), Germany. * Frèdèric Thiesse, University of St. Gallen, Switzerland. * Geert Vanderhulst, Hasselt University, Belgium.