aime 2012 - The Second International Workshop on Interactive Ambient Intelligence Multimedia Environments

Interactive Ambient Intelligence Multimedia Environments (AIME) has the vision of enhancing our everyday environment and our interaction with its objects by sensing, computing, and communication capabilities. Major characteristics of such environments are the increasing number of intelligent devices (ubiquity), their complexity, and their integration into the background (transparency). As pervasive devices grow in complexity and sophistication, they become harder and harder to use, particularly because of their tiny display screens and limited interfaces. At the same time, devices will disappear or blend into the background and will be invisible to the user. However, because of this transparency, users fail to develop an adequate mental concept for AIME and its interaction concept. The reasons for this are the integration of the infrastructure into the background and the missing or invisible user interfaces.
To overcome these challenges, new interaction models are required. How can one interact with tiny devices that do not provide their own user interfaces? Or how to find and access devices that are invisible to the user? How to access physical devices in an unfamiliar environment without having knowledge about the technical infrastructure such as device’s physical address or IP address? Identifying and activating the right device or service from a huge amount of existing devices to perform a specific task is a challenge for users of these environments.
Some researchers have suggested fully automated and intelligent interaction to overcome the above-mentioned challenges. However, when analyzing implicit interaction approaches, some other challenges come up. Major challenges are lack of control and over-automation. Several works have reported already that people do not accept a full-adaptive and over-automated environment. Instead, users prefer to always be in control. Therefore, concepts for natural interaction are needed that allow implicit interaction while avoiding loss of control and over-automation. In such environments, multimedia play two key roles: they support new ways of interaction that apply to multiple human senses, and they diffuse the presentation of content in the environment of the user.
Facing these challenges is a community-spanning effort, necessitating the pooling of resources and experiences of different research groups. While workshops related to Ambient Intelligence and Human Factors exist, the unique requirements of natural user interaction with and within Ambient Intelligence require an interdisciplinary approach. As it is very difficult for academic groups to cover different aspects of Ambient Intelligence, such as real-life deployments, or to run living labs with large user groups, participation and input from industry are needed.