Introduction

 

Overall mission

The purpose of an ERCIM working group is to build and maintain a network of ERCIM researchers in a particular scientific field. Membership to the working groups is open to researchers affiliated to ERCIM member institutes, as well as non-ERCIM organisations. The main activities of ERCIM Working Groups are the organisation of workshops and the preparation of common project proposals. The workshops organized by the working groups are open to any researcher in the specific scientific field. The working groups are also the focus of internal mobility within ERCIM.

 

Goals

Ambient Intelligence represents a vision of the (not too far) future where "intelligent" or "smart" environments and systems react in an attentive, adaptive, and active (sometimes even proactive) way to the presence and activities of humans and objects in order to provide intelligent/smart services to the inhabitants of these environments.

Ambient Intelligence technologies integrate sensing capabilities, processing power, reasoning mechanisms, networking facilities, applications and services, digital content, and actuating capabilities distributed in the surrounding environment. While a wide variety of different technologies is involved, the goal of Ambient Intelligence is to either hide their presence from users, by providing implicit, unobtrusive interaction paradigms. People and their social situations, ranging from individuals to groups, be them work groups, families or friends and their corresponding environments (office buildings, homes, public spaces, etc) are at the centre of the design considerations.

The ERCIM Working Group SESAMI aims to facilitate the continued collaboration of researchers and practitioners working on the design, implementation and evaluation of Ambient Intelligence systems and applications, on the grounds of on–going, and potentially cross-domain, basic and applied, research and development. In this context, SESAMI will pursue novel insights on designing, implementing, managing and maintaining smart computational environments of any scale, in order to effectively enhance and go beyond traditional support of human activities for any given situation, context, role, mission, and task.