Due to the proliferation of Internet of Things (IoT) devices and the emergence of the Ambient Intelligence (AmI) paradigm, the need to facilitate the interaction between the user and the services that are integrated in Intelligent Environments has surfaced. As a result, Conversational Agents are increasingly used in this context, in order to achieve a natural, intuitive and seamless interaction between the user and the system. However, in spite of the continuous progress and advancements in the area of Conversational Agents, there are still some considerable limitations in current approaches. The system proposed in this paper addresses some of the main drawbacks by: (a) automatically integrating new services based on their formal specification, (b) incorporating error handling via follow-up questions, and (c) processing multiple user intents through the segmentation of the input. The paper describes the main components of the system, as well as the technologies that they utilize. Additionally, it analyses the pipeline process of the user input, which results in the generation of a response and the invocation of the appropriate intelligent services.

The emergence of the Ambient Intelligence (AmI) paradigm and the proliferation of Internet of Things (IoT) devices and services unveiled new potentials for the domain of domestic living, where the line between “the computer” and the (intelligent) environment becomes altogether invisible. Particularly, the residents of a house can use the living room not only as a traditional social and individual space where many activities take place, but also as a smart ecosystem that (a) enhances leisure activities by providing a rich suite of entertainment applications, (b) implements a home control middleware, (c) acts as an intervention host that is able to display appropriate content when the users need help or support, (d) behaves as an intelligent agent that communicates with the users in a natural manner and assists them throughout their daily activities, (e) presents a notification hub that provides personalized alerts according to contextual information, and (f) becomes an intermediary communication center for the family. This paper (i) describes how the “Intelligent Living Room” realizes these newly emerged roles, (ii) presents the process that was followed in order to design the living room environment, (iii) introduces the hardware and software facilities that were developed in order to improve quality of life, and (iv) reports the findings of various evaluation experiments conducted to assess the overall User Experience (UX)

With the proliferation of Intelligent Environments, the need for configuring their behaviors to address their users’ needs emerges. In combination with the current advances in Augmented and Virtual Reality and Conversational Agents, new opportunities arise for systems which allow people to program their environment. Whereas today this requires programming skills, soon, when most spaces will include smart objects, tools which allow their collaborative management by non-technical users will become a necessity. To that end, we present BricklAyeR, a novel collaborative platform for non-programmers, that allows to define the behavior of Intelligent Environments, through an intuitive, 3D building-block User Interface, following the Trigger-Action programming principle, in Augmented Reality, with the help of a Conversational Agent.

In today's fast-paced and demanding society, more and more people are suffering from stress-related problems; however, intelligent environments can be equipped with facilities that assist in keeping it under control. This paper presents CaLmi, a system for Intelligent Homes that aims to reduce the stress of its residents by: (a) monitoring its level through a combination of biometric measurements from a wearable device along with information about user's everyday life and (b) enabling the ubiquitous presentation of relaxation programs, which deliver multi-sensory, context-aware, personalized interventions.

Intelligent Conversational Agents are already employed in different scenarios, both in commerce and in research. In particular, they can play an important role in defining a new natural interaction paradigm between them and humans. When these Intelligent Agents take a human-like form (embodied Virtual Agents) in the virtual world, we refer to them as Virtual Humans. In this context, they can communicate with humans through storytelling, where the Virtual Human plays the role of a narrator and/or demonstrator, and the user can listen, as well as interact with the story. We propose that the behavior and actions of multiple, concurrently active Virtual Humans, can be the result of communication between them, based on a dynamic script, which resembles in structure a screenplay. This paper presents CasandRA, a framework enabling real-time user interaction with Virtual Humans, whose actions are based on this kind of scripts. CasandRA can be integrated in any Ambient Intelligence setting, and the Virtual Humans provide contextual information, assistance, and narration, accessible through various mobile devices, in Augmented Reality. Finally, they allow users to manipulate smart objects in AmI Environments.

The concept of Ambient Intelligence (AmI) is already playing an important role in enriching the educational experience. Such technologies offer students increased access to information within an augmented teaching environment, which encourages active learning and collaboration, enhancing their motivation to learn. Research work in this domain includes the learner-centered design and implementation of infrastructure technologies, prototypes of intelligent systems and applications, smart artifacts for learning and serious games. “Home game” is an innovative augmented table-top educational game that combines tangible interaction with a virtual environment, falling under the category of serious games. The system is structured into a set of mini-games (such as ‘Locate the room’ and ‘Find the wrong object’), which can be personalized for each player in terms of content and interaction paradigm, either automatically based on their profile settings or manually by the educators. Home Game is deployed in the Rehabilitation Centre for Children with Disabilities in Heraklion, Crete, Greece. The full paper will contain a detailed presentation of the User Interface and the learning analytics data that are displayed in each student’s personal dashboards, so as to facilitate educators in adjusting the learning process according the needs of each student. Furthermore, the results of an expert-based evaluation of the tool will be reported.

A fundamental assumption in most contemporary person re-identification research, is that all query persons that need to be re-identified belong to a closed gallery of known persons, i.e., they have been observed and a representation of their appearance is available. For several real-world applications, this closed-world assumption does not hold, as image queries may contain people that the re-identification system has never observed before. In this work, we remove this constraining assumption. To do so, we introduce a novelty detection mechanism that decides whether a person in a query image exists in the gallery. The re-identification of persons existing in the gallery is easily achieved based on the persons representation employed by the novelty detection mechanism. The proposed method operates on a hybrid person descriptor that consists of both supervised (learnt) and unsupervised (hand-crafted) components. A series of experiments on public, state of the art datasets and in comparison with state of the art methods shows that the proposed approach is very accurate in identifying persons that have not been observed before and that this has a positive impact on re-identification accuracy.

The proliferation of Internet of Things (IoT) devices and services and their integration in intelligent environments creates the need for a simple yet effective way of controlling and communicating with them. Towards such a direction, this work presents ParlAmI, a conversational framework featuring a multimodal chatbot that permits users to create simple “if-then” rules to define the behavior of an intelligent environment. ParlAmI delivers a disembodied conversational agent in the form of a messaging application named MAI, and an embodied conversational agent named nAoMI employing the programmable humanoid robot NAO. This paper describes the requirements and architecture of ParlAmI, the infrastructure of the “Intelligent Home” in which ParlAmI is deployed, the characteristics and functionality of both MAI and nAoMI, and finally presents the findings of a user experience evaluation that was conducted with the participation of sixteen users.

This paper explores the general concept of the classroom of the future from a technological perspective, and proposes a set of indicative key facilities that such an environment should incorporate. Over the years, there has been an abundance of related research work aiming to build a “smarter” classroom, initially incorporating distance learning, educational games, and intelligent tutoring systems. More recently, many approaches have revolved around the advancements in the domains of Ambient Intelligence and Internet of Things, resulting in the enhancement of the traditional classroom equipment and furniture with processing power and interaction capabilities (e.g. intelligent desk, smart whiteboard) and the integration of emerging solutions in teaching and learning methods (e.g. AR, VR). The proposed intelligent classroom though is a holistic approach towards a student-centric educational ecosystem, which will incorporate state-of-the-art technologies to support (among others) alternative pedagogies, learning through immersive hands-on experiences and collaboration via flexible class layouts. To that end, this paper reports the various ambient facilities of the classroom and the accompanying software, while a prototype of this environment is currently under development in the AmI Facility of FORTH-ICS.

The selection of clothes and accessories is part of the daily routine of individuals [1]; however, it is not a straightforward process for people with large inventories or limited time, while it is a challenging task for user with disabilities. In the recent past, the Internet-of-Things (IoT) and Ambient Intelligence (AmI) have been enhancing the domestic environment with new connected devices, appliances, and smart furniture, aspiring to assist independent living [2]. Building upon these developments, this work proposes Vesti-AmI; an intelligent wardrobe which, in cooperation with the existing technological infrastructure of the Intelligent Home, aims to assist people in getting ready for their various activities in a context-sensitive, user-friendly and intelligent manner. With respect to the target audience, the facilities of Vesti-AmI are foreseen to accommodate a wide variety of users, including adults, children, elderly people, and people with disabilities. Indicatively, Vesti-AmI permits end-users to: (i) browse clothing items manually or digitally, (ii) preview their choices on a Smart Mirror, (iii) retrieve and store clothing items (semi-)automatically, (iv) get outfit recommendations based on contextual information, and (v) keep their garments odor-, mold-, moisture-, and moth-free with the help of appropriate sensors and actuators that monitor the interior of the wardrobe. Vesti-AmI features a full-height hanging space appropriate for storing clothing like shirts or skirts, but also longer garments such as dresses. An electrically-powered closet rod automatically raises and lowers the clothes so as to bring them closer to the user, while a sophisticated mechanism permits the system to identify each hanging item and present it to the user upon request. The next two compartments contain shelves and drawers in order to provide organized storage solutions for folded clothes and accessories, and a custom-made in-closet steamer that permits users to freshen up their clothes. Sophisticated mechanisms permit the shelves and drawers to move in a vertical fashion (like a carousel), making the stored items easily accessible. Additionally, cameras hidden on the top of each drawer and shelf permit Vesti-AmI to be aware of their contents, while light and sound cues in combination with vibration feedback are employed to assist users (especially blind or visually challenged individuals) to locate the required items inside the wardrobe. In order to maximize time efficiency, an embedded "Smart Mirror" allows users to virtually try their clothes on in an immersive way. Vesti-AmI promotes multimodal interaction that includes touch interaction, air gestures and voice interaction, which can be used complementary to support all users (including those with disabilities). For example, voice interaction can be used by blind or visually challenged users to ask for certain items, while motion-based interaction and gestures can enable users to naturally select the outfit they wish to try on the “Smart Mirror”.