This paper highlights selected grand challenges that concern especially the social and the design dimensions of research and development in Ambient Intelligence (AmI) and Smart Environments (SmE). Due to the increasing deployment and usage of 'smart' technologies determining a wide range of everyday life activities, there is an urgent need to reconsider their societal implications and how to address these implications with appropriate design methods. The paper presents four perspectives on the subject grounded in different approaches. First, introducing and reflecting on the implications of the 'smart-everything' paradigm, the resulting design trade-offs and their application to smart cities. Second, discussing the potential of non-verbal communication for informing the design of spatial interfaces for AmI design practices. Third, reflecting on the role of new data categories such as 'future data' and the role of uncertainty and their implications for the next generation of AmI environments. Finally, debating the merits and shortfalls of the world's largest professional engineering community effort to craft a global standards body on ethically aligned design for autonomous and intelligent systems. The paper benefits from taking different perspectives on common issues, provides commonalities and relationships between them and provides anchor points for important challenges in the field of ambient intelligence.
Typically, the animal world has been used conceptually by roboticists as a source of inspiration for finding new approaches to efficient locomotion, perception and intelligent control [Brooks9 I], [Hallam, Walker931,[Aloimonos97]. This paper explores the question of designing a robot to share a space with a simple animal. A series of experiments between a mobile robot and three chickens in a cage are described. Techniques are described to mechanically reduce chickens' anxiety towards moving machinery. A model of interaction between animals and machines is proposed. These insights are then placed into a wider context of robot design.
In October 2012 a group of non-governmental organizations formed a Campaign to Stop Killer Robots. The aim of this campaign was to preemptively ban fully autonomous weapons capable of selecting and engaging targets without human intervention. The campaign gained momentum swiftly, leading to different legal and political discussions and decision-makings. In this article, we use the framework of cultural techniques to analyze the different operational processes, tactics, and ethics underlying the debates surrounding developments of autonomous weapon systems. From reading the materials of the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots and focusing on current robotic research in the military context we argue that, instead of demonizing Killer Robots as such, we need to understand the tools, processes and operating procedures that create, support and validate these objects. The framework of cultural techniques help us to analyze how autonomous technologies draw distinctions between life and death, human and machine, culture and technology, and what it means to be in control of these systems in the 21st century.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.