What are Distributed Artificial Intelligence, Adaptive Pervasive Computing, Collective Inteligence, and Smart Cities?
Distributed artificial intelligence refers to complex distributed systems in which a multitude of intelligent components needs to interact and coordinate in order to reach consensus over a course of actions or a common goal.
Pervasive computing generally refers to those ICT technologies, applications, and services, that are increasingly populating our everyday environments and that open up the possibility for the ubiquitous fruition of advanced services.
The ICT landscape, yet notably changed by the advent of ubiquitous wireless connectivity, is further re-shaping due to the increasing deployment of pervasive computing technologies. Via RFID tags and alike, objects will carry on digital information of any sort. Wireless sensor networks and camera networks will be spread in our cities and buildings to monitor physical phenomena. Smart phones and alike will increasingly sense and store notable amounts of data related to our personal and social activities, other than feeding (and being fed by) the Web with spatial and social real-time information.
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This evolution, in accord with the "Internet of Things" vision, is contributing to the shaping of integrated and dense infrastructures for the pervasive provisioning of general-purpose digital services. If all their components will be able to opportunistically and adaptively connect with each other, such infrastructures can be used to enrich existing services with the capability of autonomously adapting their behavior to the physical and social context in which they are invoked, and will also support innovative services for enhanced interactions with the surrounding physical and social worlds. Users will play an active role, by contributing data and services and by making available their own sensing and actuating devices. This will make pervasive computing infrastructures as participatory and capable of value co-creation as the Web, eventually acting as globally shared substrates to externalize and enhance our physical and social intelligence, and make it become collective and more valuable.
In other words, our everyday urban environment are becoming smarter and smarter (one could say we are going to live in Smart Cities and we are going to become Collectively Intelligent.
Indeed, we are already facing the release of various early pervasive services trying to exploit the possibilities opened by these new scenarios, and making both us and out environment smarter. These incliude, e.g. smart environmental displays reacting to users' presence; car navigation systems providing real-time traffic information; smart phones applications for interacting with close friends or to enrich what we see around with dynamically retrieved digital information.
Pushing these application scenarios forward, one can envision the future release of advanced services like:
- Pervasive and interactive adaptive display services. Many digital displays already surround us, from wall-mounted public displays pervading urban and working environments to personal displays of wearable devices and domestic hardware. These, along with sensors enabling to access information about users' around and the state of the physical environment, will form the basis of a general, user-centric, infrastructure for the release of adaptive information services. That is, users will finally take full advantage of such displays, being no longer passive subjects of what the displays show, and rather having the displayed information be specifically tuned to their own situations and needs.
- Real-time traffic control and information services. By exploiting an infrastructure of sensors densely deployed over cities and streets, of wireless inter-vehicle communications, and of actuable traffic lights and traffic signs, many useful services will be possibly released. Other than those for sensing the current traffic situation to adapt recommended route, these could include services for detecting free parking slots in real-time, support effective car sharing, and for actuating traffic lights and signs to actively control and manage traffic evolution.
- Social and augmented reality services. Given the increasing communication and sensorial capability of smart phones, along with the mentioned increasing diffusion of embedded environmental sensors and public displays, it will be possible for future wearable devices to reach very detailed levels of awareness about the surrounding social and physical situations. And, consequently, to transfer such levels of awareness to their users via some personal interfaces, as a sort of 6th sense that will enable users to effectively orient in the environment and, in it, to interact, exchange information and content, socialize, and increas his levels of participation to the urban life up to levels unthinkable before.
Yet, the road towards the effective and systematic exploitation of these and further future scenarios calls for a radical rethinking of current service models and frameworks, to accommodate a number of emerging requirements and desirable characteristics.