GRK MuSAMA (since 10/2006)

MuSAMA is a graduate school, where 14 young researchers collaborate  on the topic of self-organizing appliance ensembles.

MuSAMA is based on the hypothesis that ubiquitous machine intelligence, envisioned for our future everyday environments, will be provided by dynamic ensembles: Local agglomerations of smart appliances, whose composition is  prone to frequent, unforeseeable, and substantial changes. Members of such ensembles need to be able to cooperate spontaneously and without human guidance in order to achieve their joint goal of assisting the user. The resultant concept of autonomous cooperative assistance poses new challenges for the research on ubiquitous and ambient information technology.

MuSAMA website

Smart Appliance Lab (since 2006)

The "Smart Appliance Lab" or SmartLab is our testbed for an intelligent ambient environment. In this lab, we try to research new ways in Human Computer Interaction. Smart environments should adapt to the user's needs by assisting the users pro-actively with his task. This helps the user to focus on his actual task instead of operating the installed devices.

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The ECO framework (since 8/2005)

The ECO framework is a middleware that allows the  devices in a smart meeting room to cooperate by describing their own  capabilities, sending instructions to other devices etc.

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Mobile Situation-aware Assistance (MSA)

Mobile assistence systems are technical appliances, which proactively support humans while performing specific activities. A main challenge in the design of those systems is the recognition of activities, the identification of the user's current action by the system.

In our work we are combining sensors, allowing a partial observation of different szenarios and models, which provide rules for inferring a full image of the situation from partial and incomplete data.

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Marika

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Self-organizing device cooperation (2/2007 - 1/2009)

This is a decentralized, non-hierarchical approach  for controlling the devices in an ad-hoc smart meeting room.

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Modular synthesis of intention analysis (since 10/2006)

To enrich the use of the Team Intention Tracker in different domains, we we developed a tool suite that uses partial order planning for automatic generation of human behaviour models....

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Team Intention Tracker — TInT (since 2006)

Team Intention Tracker — TInT is a suite that provides the tools for team intention model definition and simulation of sensor data. It enables online and offline filtering (particle filters) of observed or simulated sensor measurements as well as learning of suitable statistics parameters using smoothing. Moreover TInT includes a visualization frontend and a bunch of lightweight evaluation tools for analysis and interpretation of intention recognition.

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Automatic Document Display Mapping (4/2005 - 2/2008)

Emerging multiple display infrastructures provide users with a large  number of semi-public and private displays. Selecting what  information to present on which display here becomes a real issue.
We propose to cast the Display Mapping problem as an optimization  task. We develop an explicit criterion for the global quality of a  display mapping and then use a distributed algorithm based on the  GRASP framework that is able to approximate the global optimum.

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Strategy Generation with Planning (4/2000 - 4/2003)

In this project we developed a system infrastructure supporting goal  oriented assistance with dynamic environments.  The different  individual components provide a semantic self-description, and thus  the technical infustructure is - with the help of a planning  assistant - able to act as a coherent system.

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Previous Projects

Relevant activities directed 1996 – 2004

• BMB+F Project DynAMITE (Dynamic Adaptive Multimedia IT Ensembles; 2003 – 2004)

• Interactive Multimedia Appliances Group Fraunhofer IGD Darmstadt (2002 – 2004)

• BMB+F Focus Project EMBASSI (Electronic Multimedia Operating and Service Assistance; 1999 – 2003)

• Mobile Multimedia Technologies Group, Fraunhofer IGD Rostock (1996 – 2002)