Ambient Intelligence (AmI) is a new paradigm in information technology aimed at empowering people’s capabilities by the means of digital environments that are sensitive, adaptive, and responsive to human needs, habits, gestures, and emotions. This futuristic vision of daily environment will enable innovative human-machine interactions characterized by pervasive, unobtrusive and anticipatory communications. Such innovative interaction paradigms make ambient intelligence technology a suitable candidate for developing various real life solutions, including in the health care domain. This survey will discuss the emergence of ambient intelligence (AmI) techniques in the health care domain, in order to provide the research community with the necessary background. We will examine the infrastructure and technology required for achieving the vision of ambient intelligence, such as smart environments and wearable medical devices. We will summarize of the state of the art artificial intelligence methodologies used for developing AmI system in the health care domain, including various learning techniques (for learning from user interaction), reasoning techniques (for reasoning about users’ goals and intensions) and planning techniques (for planning activities and interactions). We will also discuss how AmI technology might support people affected by various physical or mental disabilities or chronic disease. Finally, we will point to some of the successful case studies in the area and we will look at the current and future challenges to draw upon the possible future research paths.

Quantum computing is a fascinating research area at the intersection of computer science, physics, and engineering, which is catching the attention of both the academic and corporate worlds by promising a revolution in computing performance, due to a massive and intrinsic parallelism enabled by "interfering, super-positioning, and entangling" different pieces of information. Although it was initially thought of as a way to efficiently simulate quantum mechanics on a computer, today, research on quantum computing is focusing on the so-called quantum advantage or quantum supremacy-the design of quantum algorithms offering significant speedup compared to the best possible algorithm on a classical computer-to spur the development of new breakthroughs in different application domains, such as chemistry, medicine, and financial services, just to name a few. This research is particularly significant because the quantum computation is no longer a theoretical utopia since, currently, real quantum computers can be accessed and programmed through an Internet connection, and everyone can try their hand at implementing wellestablished quantum algorithms, such as Shor's and Grover's algorithms (Shor 1994; Grover 1996), or designing completely new quantum algorithms. In this pioneering scenario, the recent implementation of quantum algorithms for machine learning has led to a flurry of increasingly sophisticated results that show how quantum computers could be efficient in solving problems in the field of artificial intelligence faster than their classical counterparts (

Nowadays most people can get enough energy to maintain one-day activity, while few people know whether they eat healthily or not. It is quite important to analyze nutritional facts for foods eaten for those who are losing weight or suffering chronic diseases such as diabetes. This paper proposes a novel type-2 fuzzy ontology, including a type-2 fuzzy food ontology and a type-2 fuzzy markup language (FML)-based ontology, for diet assessment. In addition, we also present a type-2 FML (FML2) to describe the type-2 fuzzy ontology and the FML2-based diet assessment agent, including a type-2 knowledge engine, a type-2 fuzzy inference engine, a diet assessment engine, and a semantic analysis engine. In the proposed approach, first, the nutrition facts of various kinds of food are collected from the Internet and the convenience stores. Next, the domain experts construct the type-2 fuzzy ontology, and then the involved subjects are requested to input the different food eaten. Finally, the proposed FML2-based diet assessment agent displays the diet assessment of the food eaten based on the constructed type-2 fuzzy ontology. Using the generated semantic analysis, people can obtain health information about what they eat, which can lead to a healthy lifestyle and healthy diet. Experimental results show that the proposed approach works effectively where the proposed system can provide a diet health status, which can act as a reference to promote healthy living. C

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Ontologies are recognized as a fundamental component for enabling interoperability across heterogeneous systems and applications. Indeed, they try to fit a common understanding of concepts in a particular domain of interest to support the exchange of information among people, artificial agents, and distributed applications. Unfortunately, because of human subjectivity, various ontologies related to the same application domain may use different terms for the same meaning or may use the same term to mean different things, raising the so-called heterogeneity problem. The ontology alignment process tries to solve this semantic gap by individuating a collection of similar entities belonging to different ontologies and enabling a full comprehension among different actors involved in a given knowledge exchanging. However, the complexity of the alignment task, especially for large ontologies, requires an automated and effective support for computing high-quality alignments. The aim of this paper is to propose a memetic algorithm to perform an efficient matching process capable of computing a suboptimal alignment between two ontologies. As shown by experiments, the memetic approach is more suitable for ontology alignment problem than a classical evolutionary technique such as genetic algorithms. © 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc