The overall mission of the Smart Surroundings project is to investigate, define, develop, and demonstrate the core architectures and frameworks for future Ambient Systems. Ambient Systems are networked embedded systems integrated with everyday environments and supporting people in their activities. These systems will create a Smart Surrounding for people to facilitate and enrich daily life and increase productivity at work. These systems will be quite different from current computer systems, as they will be based on an unbounded set of hardware artefacts and software entities, embedded in everyday objects or realized as new types of device. The ubiquitous computing vision has over the last 10 years inspired research into computing systems and applications that become pervasively embedded in our everyday environments, and that bring the unique flexibility of digital technology to the activities around which our lives evolve. Caused by rapid progress in technology, this early research tended to focus on experimental prototypes of infrastructure, devices, and applications. As the field is progressing, the most important research challenge and focus of this project is to develop the fundamental architecture of ubiquitous computing environments. It is this project’s ambition is to move beyond prototypes toward sustainable systems for implementation of the ubiquitous computing vision. The ubiquitous computing research community at large has been very successful in advancing the infrastructure components for pervasive systems, and in exploring the design opportunities for novel applications. This work is compelling but has mostly remained centered around single devices as opposed to distributed systems composed of many devices. We still observe a very wide gap between the new design materials at hand (e.g. smart artefacts, ad hoc networks, location
technologies) and the potential applications. For example, microprocessors and wireless radio can now be built into practically everything to create smart networked objects, but we lack the technology to integrate these in an open platform for a wide range of applications. Likewise, the components are in place for prototyping and exploring application ideas, but we lack the foundations for the principled study of ubiquitous systems and application designs.

Smart Surroundings is a research project funded by the Bsik/Ministry of Economic Affairs of the Netherlands and is done in cooperation with University of Twente, Philips Research, Philips Semiconductors, Ericsson, TU Delft, Thales Research & Technology, TNO-FEL, Océ Technologies, Nedap, Roessingh, Research and Development, Utellus, TalkingHome and Lancaster University.

For more information contact Michael Beigl. Technical information can also be found at the Particle Web-Site