This book presents workshop proceedings from the 14th International Conference on Intelligent Environments, held in Rome in June 2018. It consists of nine tutorials and some 60 papers. This review cannot go into a detailed report of each paper; indeed, just listing the titles would make for a long and not very informative read. Thus, the review attempts to give the flavor of each workshop and the scope of the tutorials. Specific papers mentioned serve only as illustrative examples and are not singled out as either especially good or bad. Many of the papers describe implemented systems, often of a quite preliminary nature; systems architecture is also a frequent topic.
The tutorials, some of which appear only as abstracts, cover: a contact-sensitive sensor module; using the semantic web for organizing heterogeneous data; ontologies for sensor data applications; smart building management, a topic that recurs in one of the papers in the workshop on smart offices; computing in the fog; object memories in instrumented spaces, where semantic information on objects is stored; social interaction with cloud network robots; business process management: approaches and techniques applied to smart environments; and human behavior in computing.
Some of the proceedings include an introduction by the workshop organizers. The first workshop covered, Citizen-Centric Smart Cities Solutions (CCSCS 2018), has a brief introduction in the form of an overview. The workshop emphasizes the interactions between citizens and sensing devices in the environment. One paper addresses the important issue of inferring conclusions from unbalanced data, for example, datasets that are predominantly male. Another gives a review of the engineering of intelligent environments.
The next workshop, Intelligent Systems for Agriculture Production and Environment Protection (ISAPEP 2018), covers remote sensing for monitoring, for example, following crop growth or hive status, with an emphasis on providing a low-cost solution for the latter.
The 3rd International Workshop on Smart Sensing Systems (IWSSS 2018) looks at human activity recognition, emergency detection, and applications to tourism. UMAP, a cloud-based positioning infrastructure system, appears in two of the papers, as the main topic of one and as part of a system for more accurately pinpointing the location of an agent in the other.
In the next workshop, Legal Issues in Intelligent Environments (LIIE 2018), recurring topics include who owns the data and who has access. An intriguing issue of intellectual property law discussed in one paper is the status of the weights in a deployed neural network. Echoing the papers in other workshops, there is a paper on privacy in tourist applications. Because the law often trails technological practice, these issues are not amenable to clear-cut legal decisions.
The 1st International Workshop on Personalized Health & Intelligent Workplaces Transforming Ergonomics (pHIWTE 2018) is next. Typically, the papers outline systems in which personal devices are used to monitor the stresses and activities of workers, with a view to reducing stressful actions. This section is followed by papers from the 4th Symposium on Future Intelligent Educational Environments and Learning (SOFIEEe 2018). This workshop’s central issue is that the advent of social networks has to be accommodated in an environment where traditional learning management systems reflect an instructor-driven paradigm. Instructors need to be more flexible in managing student interactions because they may be delivered by different applications.
The Smart Offices and Other Workplaces (SOOW 2018) workshop does exactly what the title suggests. Topics include comfort and energy saving. Tourism support reappears here, too. The 9th Workshop on Intelligent Environments Supporting Healthcare and Well-Being (WISHWell 2018) features applications that address living alone, emotions in the workplace, detecting self-injuring behavior, and independent living. The IBM Watson Tone Analyzer service, which is used to detect emotions, turns up in two of the applications described here.
Finally, the 7th International Workshop on the Reliability of Intelligent Environments (WoRIE 2018) addresses such things as user expectations. The example of an enchanted house without shocking surprises versus a haunted one with shocking surprises is a felicitous image. Another example is the interaction between a system such as Siri and people suffering from dysarthria, a speech disorder, where the system does better than one might expect. UMAP makes another appearance here in a presentation on localization accuracy.
Each full paper has a comprehensive bibliography. It is unfortunate that not every workshop proceeding has an introduction. On the other hand, there is both a (welcome) subject index and an author index. As a snapshot of the state of smart environments, the book provides a rich set of topics for the interested practitioner or researcher. Students looking for a research area will find much to think on here.
