Ambient Intelligence

“Ambient intelligence” (AmI) refers to both a theoretical and a practical orientation of technology, involving the most innovative areas of the ICT sector. Recognized as a powerful trend, Ambient Intelligence has an increasing impact in several domains of our contemporary society, the so-called “knowledge society”. Let us look at the two words “ambient” and “intelligence”. Today we often use the attribute intelligent or smart referring to artifacts that show “a behavior”, have “a memory”, appear to take nontrivial “initiatives”. Take, for instance, a smartphone, which is able, when there is an incoming call, to put up on the screen the image of our correspondent. The “intelligence” in the words “Ambient Intelligence” precisely refers to those special embedded capabilities of certain things around us, capabilities that we are not aware of until they come into action. The word ambient, means “existing in the surrounding space” and signals that there is a particular diffused property of such a space. It has an essential charateristic, which is neither explicit nor obtrusive, but widely exploited by our Knowledge Society: the capability to transmit information without the need of wires (wireless communications). Like its underlying technologies, Ambient Intelligence is an expanding, evolving concept, projected far into the future.