Ambient Intelligence (AmI) technologies are expected to be sensitive, responsive, adaptive, transparent, ubiquitous, and intelligent. The three first features greatly rely on the context-aware computing, but transparency and ubiquity depend on the area of ubiquitous computing. But it is intelligence which becomes a critical feature as it makes AmI systems more sensitive, responsive, adaptive, transparent and ubiquitous. The main reason is that the intelligence feature helps in understanding user environments and, consequently, in providing them with adaptive assistance. This explains why AmI entails contributions from different areas of AI, especially from multi-agents systems (MAS).

There is a natural relationship between AmI and MAS. Indeed, AmI proposes the development of context aware systems equipped with devices that can recognize context and act accordingly. Agents provide an effective way to develop such systems since agents are reactive, proactive and exhibit an intelligent and autonomous behavior. Within agent-based AmI applications, agents react to humans based on information obtained by sensoring and their knowledge about human functioning.

The complexity of AmI systems turn their development into a challenging work demanding adequate tools that assist throughout a well-established software development process. Both tools and process should be able to adapt themselves to the diversity of AmI devices and communication technologies from an implementation point of view.

The aim of this special session is affording the opportunity for researchers interested in this subject, the development of AmI Systems, to meet and discuss on the contributed solutions that mainly use the capabilities of multi-agent systems.

Organizers

Antonio Fernández-Caballero - University of Castilla-La Mancha (Spain)
Elena María Navarro Martínez - University of Castilla-La Mancha (Spain)

Scientific Comittee (To be extended)

Javier Jaén-Martínez- Universidad Politécnica de Valencia (Spain)
Mª Teresa López-Bona- University of Castilla-La Mancha (Spain)
Diego López-de-Ipiña- University of Deusto (Spain)
Rafael Martínez-Tomás- National Distance Education University (Spain)
Paulo Novais- Universidade do Minho (Spain)
Juan Pavón- University Complutense Madrid (Spain)