This work blends the domain of Precision Agriculture with the prevalent paradigm of Ambient Intelligence, so as to enhance the interaction between farmers and Intelligent Environments, and support their various daily agricultural activities, aspiring to improve the quality and quantity of cultivated plants. In this paper, two systems are presented, namely the Intelligent Greenhouse and the AmI seedbed, targeting a wide range of agricultural activities, starting from planting the seeds, caring for each individual sprouted plant up to their transplantation in the greenhouse, where the provision for the entire plantation lasts until the harvesting period.

Abstract— Considering the prevalence of Ambient Intelligence, this work aims to enhance the interaction between farmers and Intelligent Environments, in order to support their various daily Agricultural activities, aspiring to improve the quality and quantity of cultivated species. Towards this direction, the Greta system was designed and developed, following a user-centered design process, permitting farmers/agronomists to easily monitor and control an Intelligent Greenhouse via a set of useful and usable applications. Greta offers a progressive web app (PWAs) targeting PCs, handheld devices, and technologically-enhanced artifacts of Smart Homes, while it also delivers an Augmented Reality application that visualizes the greenhouse’s interior conditions in a sophisticated manner, and provides context-sensitive assistance regarding cultivation activities. In more detail, the system interoperates with the ambient facilities of an Intelligent Greenhouse allowing end-users to: monitor the conditions inside the greenhouse, remotely control the state of various actuators, be notified regarding the available/active automations, be aware of the optimal conditions for their plants to grow and receive relevant guidelines, be informed regarding any diseases, and communicate with experts for receiving treatment advice. This work describes the design methodology and functionality of Greta, and documents the results of a series of expert-based evaluation experiments.

ICS-FORTH has recently initiated AmI-Garden, a smart farming project in the framework of its Ambient Intelligence Research Programme. A small experimental IoT greenhouse has been constructed and equipped with polycarbonate cover sheets and all the necessary infrastructure and hardware (automatic window-roof opening/closing, sliding door, fan installation for heating/cooling, vegetable breeding lamps etc.). Inside the greenhouse, a network of wireless sensors is used to measure environmental conditions and parameters, such as air/soil temperature and moisture, sunlight level, soil conductivity, quality and level of chemical ions in irrigation water, etc. The sensors communicate through IoT gateways to the greenhouse’s data centre for storage and post-processing. The system comes with pre-installed agricultural scenarios, a set of activity flows based on environmental conditions that are ideal for each plant species and are monitored in the greenhouse as explained above. The scenarios currently contain parameters to predict common diseases of the plants, as well as unexpected changes in the greenhouse’s microclimate. For example, the irrigation process is built as an agricultural scenario using data from current plant status and past data in order to establish the optimal amount of water to irrigate. The parameters of this scenario are based on specific plant breed and environmental variables. The intelligence behind the scenarios is based on critical limits and thresholds to create cultivation rules. On top of this rule based process, event-driven activation of various automations in the greenhouse is provided, for example, automatic humidity/temperature control, soil fertilisation (hydro fusion) and precise irrigation. Various sets of raw data are produced and ingested into the system, as the life cycle of each one of the plants evolves, in order to be used as the main input for the system’s actuations based on the agricultural treatment scenarios.

Two dimensional paintings were exhibited in museums and art galleries in the same manner since at least three centuries. However, the emergence of novel interactive technologies provides the opportunity to change this status quo. By 2006, according to the Institute for Museum and Library Services, 43 % of museum visits in the U.S. were remote. According to the Institute for the Future, “Emerging technologies are transforming everything that constitutes our notion of “reality” – our ability to sense our surroundings, our capacity to reason, our perception of the world”. In the present age, that technology is becoming mixed to the fabric of reality to offer novel experiences in Cultural Heritage Institutions. This work presents the design and implementation of a technological framework based on ambient intelligence to enhance visitor experiences within Heritage Institutions by augmenting two dimensional paintings. Among the major contributions of this chapter is the support of personalized multi user access to exhibits, facilitating also adaptation mechanisms for altering the interaction style and content based on the requirements of each Heritage Institution’s visitor. A standards compliant knowledge representation and the appropriate authoring tools guarantee the effective integration of this approach in any relevant context. The developed applications have been deployed within a simulation space of the FORTH-ICS AmI facility and evaluated by users in the context of a pilot study.

Adaptation and content personalization in the context of multi user museum exhibits Conference Paper · June 2016 with 2 Reads Conference: 1st Workshop on Advanced Visual Interfaces for Cultural Heritage co-located with the International Working Conference on Advanced Visual Interfaces (AVI 2016), At Bari, Italy 1st Nikolaos Partarakis 4.18 · Foundation for Research and Technology - Hellas 2nd Margherita Antona 15.64 · Foundation for Research and Technology - Hellas 3rd Emmanouil Zidianakis 1.71 · Foundation for Research and Technology - Hellas 4th Constantine Stephanidis Abstract Two dimensional paintings are exhibited in museums and art galleries in the same manner since at least three centuries. However, the emergence of novel interaction techniques and metaphors provides the opportunity to change this status quo, by supporting mixing physical and digital Cultural Heritage experiences. This paper presents the design and implementation of a technological framework based on Ambient Intelligence to enhance visitor experiences within Cultural Heritage Institutions (CHIs) by augmenting two dimensional paintings. Among the major contributions of this research work is the support of personalized multi user access to exhibits, facilitating also adaptation mechanisms for altering the interaction style and content to the requirements of each CHI visitor. A standards compliant knowledge representation and the appropriate authoring tools guarantee the effective integration of this approach to the CHI context.

Augmented reality fitting rooms enrich customers’ experience and expedite the shopping procedure. This paper presents an Augmented Reality (AR) mirror which provides motion-based interaction to the users and suggests various outfits. The proposed system can be easily installed inside or at the window of a retail shop, enabling the users to stand in front of it and see themselves wearing clothes that the system suggests while they are able to naturally interact with the system remotely, using gestures, in order to like or dislike the recommended outfit. The users can also choose to post photos wearing the proposed clothes on their social media accounts, as well as to buy the clothes either directly from the store or on-line.

This paper reports on the design, development and evaluation of a framework which implements virtual humans for information provision. The framework can be used to create interactive multimedia information visualizations (e.g., images, text, audio, videos, 3D models) and provides a dynamic data modeling mechanism for storage and retrieval and implements communication through multimodal interaction techniques. The interaction may involve human-to-agent, agent-to-environment or agent-to-agent communication. The framework supports alternative roles for the virtual agents who may act as assistants for existing systems, standalone “applications” or even as integral parts of emerging smart environments. Finally, an evaluation study was conducted with the participation of 10 people to study the developed system in terms of usability and effectiveness, when it is employed as an assisting mechanism for another application. The evaluation results were highly positive and promising, confirming the system’s usability and encouraging further research in this area.