Intelligent Environments (IE) play an increasingly important role in many areas of our lives, including education, healthcare and the domestic environment. The term refers to physical spaces incorporating pervasive computing technology used to achieve specific goals for the user, the environment or both. This book presents the proceedings of the workshops of the 9th International Conference on Intelligent Environments (IE ‘13), held in Athens, Greece, in July 2013. The workshops which were presented in the context of this conference range from regular lectures to practical sessions. They provide a forum for scientists, researchers and engineers from both industry and academia to engage in discussions on newly emerging or rapidly evolving topics in the field. Topics covered in the workshops include artificial intelligence techniques for ambient intelligence; applications of affective computing in intelligent environments; smart offices and other workplaces; intelligent environment technology in education for creative learning; museums as intelligent environments; the application of intelligent environment technologies in the urban context for creating more sociable, intelligent cities and for constructing urban intelligence. IE can enrich user experience, better manage the environment’s resources, and increase user awareness of that environment. This book will be of interest to all those whose work involves the application of intelligent environments.

This book brings together contributions to the Fourth Artificial Life Workshop, held at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the summer of 1994.

The first comprehensive treatment of active inference, an integrative perspective on brain, cognition, and behavior used across multiple disciplines. Active inference is a way of understanding sentient behavior—a theory that characterizes perception, planning, and action in terms of probabilistic inference. Developed by theoretical neuroscientist Karl Friston over years of groundbreaking research, active inference provides an integrated perspective on brain, cognition, and behavior that is increasingly used across multiple disciplines including neuroscience, psychology, and philosophy. Active inference puts the action into perception. This book offers the first comprehensive treatment of active inference, covering theory, applications, and cognitive domains. Active inference is a “first principles” approach to understanding behavior and the brain, framed in terms of a single imperative to minimize free energy. The book emphasizes the implications of the free energy principle for understanding how the brain works. It first introduces active inference both conceptually and formally, contextualizing it within current theories of cognition. It then provides specific examples of computational models that use active inference to explain such cognitive phenomena as perception, attention, memory, and planning.

With emerging trends such as the Internet of Things, sensors and actuators are now deployed and connected everywhere to gather information and solve problems, and such systems are expected to be trustworthy, dependable and reliable under all circumstances. But developing intelligent environments which have a degree of common sense is proving to be exceedingly complicated, and we are probably still more than a decade away from sophisticated networked systems which exhibit human-like thought and intelligent behavior.This book presents the proceedings of four workshops and symposia: the 4th International Workshop on Smart Offices and Other Workplaces (SOOW'15); the 4th International Workshop on the Reliability of Intelligent Environments (WoRIE'15); the Symposium on Future Intelligent Educational Environments and Learning 2015 (SOFIEEe'15); and the 1st immersive Learning Research Network Conference (iLRN'15). These formed part of the 11th International Conference on Intelligent Environments, held in Prague, Czech Republic, in July 2015, which focused on the development of advanced, reliable intelligent environments, as well as newly emerging and rapidly evolving topics.This overview of and insight into the latest developments of active researchers in the field will be of interest to all those who follow developments in the world of intelligent environments.

Presents the research and applications on sensing technologies to monitor and control the structure and health of buildings, bridges, installations, and other constructed facilities.

This volume contains studies presented at the 4th International Workshop on the History of Speech Communication Research (HSCR 2021). The series of workshops was initiated in Dresden in 2015. The current workshop took place in Prague at the Institute of Phonetics, Charles University, amid the ever-changing pandemic circumstances – for the first time in a hybrid form. There are nine contributions, written by 12 authors from six countries. The contributions analyze the contextual background of particular personalities or investigate how specific research practices developed over time. Moreover, each contribution demonstrates a significant connection between various aspects of speech communication research and the wider social context. A special theme of this workshop was the link in linguistic signs between the form (sound) and the meaning (sense). The phonetic endeavour was often claimed to concern only the form, while meaning was delegated to someone else. This is not only one-sided, but also difficult to integrate into the large body of scientific knowledge, as the opening keynote emphasized.