On September 21, 2010, the author successfully defended her Ph.D. thesis entitled Multi-Camera Vision for Smart Environments at Stanford University.

developed mobile information robot and smart meeting room.

Smart environments integrate Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) into devices, vehicles, buildings and cities to offer an increased quality of life, energy efficiency and economical sustainability. In this perspective, the individual has a core role and so has networking, which enables such entities to cooperate. However, the huge amount of sensitive data, social aspects and the mi...

Smart environments integrate a multitude of different device ensembles and aim to facilitate proactive assistance in multi-display scenarios. However, the integration of existing software, especially visualization systems, to take advantage of these novel capabilities is still a challenging task. In this paper we present a smart view management concept for an integration that combines and displ...

In a given smart meeting room, several users are supposed to cooperate together while employing static and dynamic heterogeneous devices. The goal of such environments is to deliver proper assistance to the users while performing their tasks. Thus, task models are an appropriate starting point for those environments. Those models give the developers the opportunity to focus on the users and the...

earthquakes in urban areas leave behind a considerable amount of debris, which delays the relief services and the reconstruction activities. the relief work would be impossible without the removal of debris from the main access roads to the devastated areas. the proper implementation of this endeavor requires a long-term management of debris. this article discusses development of strategic mana...

—Context-aware guidance systems need to observe and react to the user even if she does not always follow the instructions exactly. A human guide can easily adapt to such situations while a computer guide needs a model how to guide the user, has to work with unreliable sensor data to observe the user, and, in the case of multiple active processes, needs to assign the right sensor information to ...

This paper was written by Edward Thompson, Jr., Senior Vice President, American Farmland Trust* in collaboration with the Funders’ Network for Smart Growth and Livable Communities. It is the fifth in a series of translation papers sponsored by the Funders’ Network to translate the impact of sprawl upon issues of importance to America’s communities and to suggest opportunities for progress that ...

Smart environments are increasingly available and support users in their daily activities in different ways. This paper presents a service-based approach for users active in a smart environment such as a building, campus or public place. The concept is illustrated through the SSP project which provides environment-specific and contextual services on mobile devices running the Android platform.