WoRIE 2013 - 3rd Workshop on the Reliability of Intelligent Environments (WoRIE 2013)

3rd Workshop on the Reliability of Intelligent Environments (WoRIE 2013) will be held within the 4th International Joint Conference on Ambient Intelligence (AmI-2013) in Dublin (Ireland) on December 3rd-5th, 2013
Intelligent Environments (IE) is rising as one of the technical fields with the highest potential to make an impact in daily human life during the near future. Developments in this area are achieved by a complex juxtaposition of complex technical fields. Software is related to the architecture of a building, sensors, a network for data transportation, and different levels of users. Many of these elements are error prone, software is notoriously difficult and even companies like NASA, Microsoft, Intel, BMW, which can afford powerful teams of experienced development teams have paid with lives, economic losses and reputation missing to detect software bugs within their products. Sensors are often unreliable, networks are sometimes unstable and users can put systems to the test in circumstances that were not initially foreseen. Developing this type of systems is therefore complex and given that some applications will be given the tremendous responsibility to take care of humans. Think for example on how much interest there is on the development of systems to support independent living. These systems are intended to give peace of mind to elderly people and their relatives trusting that the system will be able to do many things for them including safety related issues like detecting whether the occupant of the house has fallen or is unwell in some way. Other examples are unmanned cars and other autonomous systems which are supposed to perform tasks for us which can have disastrous consequences should something go wrong.
Our community should develop appropriate standards and specific methodologies to ensure we do our outmost to deliver safe systems given the current state of the art. Given the specific blend of components in our area of development we cannot just transfer developments in other areas (although of course they should be taken into account to inform the process). This event will aim to bring together developers and researchers to focus on all aspects of the development process that can contribute to make Intelligent Environment systems safer and to provide methodologies that can increase the confidence in these developments.