Project News

SmartProducts was represented at the INTERACT 2011 Workshop on Promoting and Supporting Healthy Living by Design. The following paper was presented:

Toet, E., Meerbeek, B., Hoonhout, J. (2011). Supporting mindful eating: InBalance chopping board. In proc. INTERACT 2011 Workshop on Promoting and Supporting Healthy Living by Design, p49-52 (2011)

The paper can be found in our section Publications.

Conference:

http://www.interact2011.org/

Workshop:

https://sites.google.com/site/healthylivinginteract/

Our goal is to leverage the discussion between researches from several disciplines and thus to advance the research of interacting with smart objects. To stimulate discussion between the workshop participants we plan a poster and demo session. We want to spark further discussions during in-depth discussions on selected topics. We accept submissions in the following categories (Submission Deadline: January 6, 2012):

- position paper (2 pages)

- short papers / demo papers (4 pages)

- full papers (6 pages)

The workshop will be held on February 14, 2012.

Link: http://www.smart-objects.org

The SmartProducts consortium has presented videos and demonstrators at the International Joint Conference on Ambient Intelligence (AmI) 2011. For more details on the conference, please visit: http://www.ami-11.org

Visitors were introduced into the new version of our SmartProducts platform with its guidance system, lightweight reasoning and the integration framework for developer tools.

SmartProducts had a fruitful participation at the 10th International Semantic Web Conference which took place in Bonn on 23-28 October. A demo "Building SPARQL-Enabled Applications with Android Devices" by Mathieu d'Aquin, Andriy Nikolov, and Enrico Motta, which showed the elements of the semantic data management infrastructure for mobile devices, has been shortlisted for the best demo award.

Goal of the OMM-XG is to define what an Object Memory is and which it's characteristic features are. SmartProducts members have contributed to the model that has now been released:

• http://www.w3.org/2005/Incubator/omm/XGR-omm-20111026/

SmartProducts will be present at the Sensing Technology 2011 - to be held at the UK National Exhibition Centre in Birmingham from the 27th to the 28th of September

The event allows showcasing cutting-edge innovation, research and development in sensor and sensing technology. Sensing Technology targets leading manufacturers and resellers of sensor hardware.

The SmartProducts consortium aims at demonstrating practical research that has resulted in a platform that supports standalone or integrated, context-aware products for a range of application scenarios.
The exhibit will showcase SmartProducts research and potential applications using the project's industrial use cases:

• the Cooking Guide Demonstrator, led by Philips Research
• the Smart Car, led by Centro Ricerche FIAT and
• Smart Manufacturing in Aerospace, led by EADS Innovation Works.

Dedicated posters and videos will be used to illustrate the SmartProducts platform architecture and its application in selected project prototypes. Members of the consortium will be on hand to guide visitors through mock-ups, and explain the potential of the research being carried out to design and develop the future smart, proactive, ubiquitous product.

Sensing Technology is now in its second year, after a successful first event in 2010.
Website: http://www.sensingtechnology.co.uk

The create-it convention is organized by the state of Hessia to foster cooperation between partners from industry and research. This years create-it convention is held in the conference center "Darmstadtium" in Darmstadt, co-organized by the Technische Universität Darmstadt.

Prof. Max Mühlhäuser, PI of the SmartProducts project, has been invited to give a keynote talk, entitled "Smart Spaces: Future of Space in the Future Internet". Furthermore, several exhibits from the SmartProducts project will be demonstrated to disseminate project results. For example, the Cocktail Companion, based on the latest version of the SmartProducts platform will be shown. (see our video for a previous version of the exhibit).

"Ambient Intelligence (AmI) represents a vision of the future in which products and services will be responsive to the user context, offering a rich variety of applications in the professional and consumer domains. AmI combines concepts of ubiquitous technology, intelligent systems and advanced user interface design putting the humans in the centre of technological developments."

The SmartProducts consortium has followed this call and will participate with an demonstrator at the International Joint Conference on Ambient Intelligence (AmI) 2011. For more details on the conference, please visit: http://www.ami-11.org

When developing complex systems, it sometimes happens that supporting tools are written inside a project, which do not directly belong to the scope of the project. However, also these tools can be of interest for people outside the project sometimes.

Thus, we released now a small tool called jFilesearch. This tool helps developers to locate certain files within a bunch of folders and/or JAR-files. The results can be filtered (e.g. show duplicated files only) and exported.

Have a look at the tool, if you are...

• searching for source or class files (optionally also all others) within a given library (folders/jars) because you do not know which library to include or which bundle should be exporting it, or
• searching for duplicate entries either inside one single JAR-file or in a library of several folders/jars, or
• searching for the latest version of a file.

You can download the tool from our forum (for registered users only) or start it as a webstart application from there.

Today the SmartProducts project in PRE held a demonstration for the Program Manager of the Consumer Lifestyle Fred Boekhorst. He is a Senior Vice President with a lot of experience inside Philips and inside Philips Research.  He was joined by one of the members of his team. The theme of coaching towards healthful meal choices appealed to him. We also showed the coffee machine. He gave positive feedback on the technology and the opportunities with questions around the benefits for a consumer.

The activities in Philips Research are centered around  the businesses in healthcare, Lighting and Lifestyle.  The SmartProducts project contributes the work related to the Consumer Lifestyle sector of Philips and  is embedded in the related activities in Philips Research Eindhoven (PRE). On June 21 the Lifestyle Research Day 2011 was organized. In this meeting exchange of  information is taking place. New developments and needs from the lifestyle business and technology enabled innovations in research are discussed. One of the speakers was Antonio Hidalgo the CTO of Consumer Lifestyle. In this event we showed the SmartProduct technology by demonstrating the coffee machine application. In the demo the machine was managed by a smart phone running Mundocore to enable coffee making and also guide the decalcification process. The demo and all related equipment was prepared and made available by TU-Darmstadt (I hope they did not miss the coffee too much!). The day was visited by roughly 120 people. Some 30 payed attention to the coffee machine.

A workshop on distributed systems in smart spaces, organized by Telecooperation Lab (TU Darmstadt), took place on the 1st of July. The workshop was organized in the series "Fachgespräche", which is a format hosted by the "Gesellschaft fur Informatik", the biggest professional association for computer science in Germany. There were interesting presentations and lively discussions on topics such as middleware for smart spaces, privacy, sociological and economical aspects, e-health, smart factories, and indoor-navigation. 

Goal of the OMM-XG is to define what an Object Memory is and which it's characteristic features are. SmartProducts members have contributed a scenario for this analysis and gave talks on the workshop that has been organized from 23.05. to 24.05.2011. Speakers were:

• Daniel Schreiber: Smart X – From Reference OM to Smart Products
• Markus Miche: Classification of Storage Frameworks for Digital Objects Memories

The following paper has recently been accepted:

Miche, M., Ständer, M. Brogle, M. (2011) Leveraging Process Models to Optimize Content Placement - An Active Replication Strategy for Smart Products, 5th ERCIM Workshop on eMobility

The fourth newsletter of the SmartProducts research project is available now under Publications

© SieMatic Möbelwerke, http://www.siematic.com

With this quesionnaire, we try to clarify how (graphical) user interfaces should be distributed in so called "smart environments" to provide information to the user in the best way. We have chosen the example scenario of a kitchen which can be augmented with various products to support the user.

This questionaire will take approximately 5-10 minutes.

The questionnaire is available either in english or in german:

• English version
• German version

The SmartProducts project will be exhibiting in the Innovation Theatre of the Sensing Technology show at the NEC in Birmingham, UK 28-29 September 2011 (link). Why not come along to see what we have been doing and how this could benefit your business?

SmartProducts is involved in the W3C Semantic Sensor Network Incubator Group (http://www.w3.org/2005/Incubator/ssn/wiki/), where the goal is to propose a generic ontology for describing different kinds of sensor data.

SmartProducts provided one of the test scenarios for the ontology based on the smart kitchen scenario. The group activities are now officially finished, and the report is being finalized and will be available soon.

The SmartProducts project consortium is one of the founding members of the W3C incubator group for defining a standard for the Object Memory Model [1]. SAP [2] is a member of the incubator group, and Daniel Schreiber [3] from TUD [2] contributes as an invited expert. We provide use cases from the project to the incubator group and in particular address how procedural knowledge associated with products should be represented in the Object Memory.

[1] http://www.w3.org/2005/Incubator/omm/

[2] http://www.smartproducts-project.eu/mainpage/partner

[3] http://www.smartproducts-project.eu/mainpage/people

After a little more than 2 years of the project, the second SmartProducts project review was successfully held at SAP Switzerland in Regensdorf, canton of Zurich. Our EU project officer Werner Janusch and three external experts had a chance to review the latest project achievements. Highlights were the demonstrations of the many technical SmartProducts components developed in the past year and very concrete plans and preparations for the applications trials due in the final year. In its last year, the project will focus on technical integration and the implementation and execution of the application trials.

The following papers have recently been accepted:

• Cano, A.E., Dadzie, A.-S., Hartmann, M. (2011). Who's Who-- A Linked Data Visualisation Tool for Mobile Environments, (To appear in) Proceedings (Demo Track), the Extended Semantic Web Conference (ESWC 2011).
• Dadzie, A.-S., Rowe, M., Petrelli, D. (2011). Hide the Stack: Toward Usable Linked Data, (To appear) in Proceedings, the Extended Semantic Web Conference (ESWC 2011).

All public M24 deliverables are available in the publication section.

The SmartProduct consortium co-edits a special issue of the prestigous ACM TIIS journal. The complete call for papers with all the details can be found on the TIIS website http://tiis.acm.org/special-issues.html.

SmartProducts co-organized the workshop on "Interacting with Smart Objects" at the International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces (IUI2011). The workshop was a great success, 15 participants from Europe, the US and Asia discussed current research issues on how the interaction with smart objects should be like. Nine papers were accepted, mostly focussing on technical issues, but one paper even discussed the artistic aspect of smart objects.

The following papers have recently been accepted:

• Vildjiounaite, E., Kantorovitch, J., Kyllönen, V., Niskanen, I., Hillukkala, M., Virtanen, K., Vuorinen, O., Mäkelä, S.-M., Keränen, T., Peltola, J., Mäntyjärvi, J., Tokmakoff, A., Designing Socially Acceptable Multimodal Interaction in Cooking Assistants, 2011 International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces, Palo Alto, Feb. 2011
• I.Niskanen, J.Kantorovitch, and E. Vildjiounaite, Towards the user confidence in sensor-rich interactive application scenarios, accepted to workshop on Semantic Models for Adaptive Interactive Systems (SEMAIS 2011) at IUI 2011, 13-15 February, Palo Alto, USA
• I.Niskanen and J.Kantorovitch, Towards the future smart products systems design, accepted to IEEE Pervasive Computing and Communication (PerCom 2011), short paper and demonstration, March 21 - 25, Seattle, USA

We are happy to announce the relaunch of the project website and the community platform. We changed to a Joomla!-based platform to better arrange articles around the project. The new category "SmartProducts Platform" will contain links, details and tutorials concerning the different components of the platform. These details will be kept up-to-date to allow visitors insights about the current state of the development.

For further interested visitors, we provide the opportunity to join our community and start discussions with us in the new forum. Questions that arise in a frequent manner will then be added to the FAQ to help people, which are new to the platform, avoinding common starter problems.

SmartProducts demonstrator named CocktailCompanion was presented at iTEC 2010 in Hanau. The Cocktail Companion developed by TU-Darmstadt demonstrates the usage of the SmartProducts platform for guiding users in making cocktails. See the video in our video section.

Two demonstrators of SmartProducts were presented at ICT 2010 (information and communication technologies) in Brussels. The Cocktail Companion developed by TU-Darmstadt guides users making Cocktails and the Smart Wrench Demonstrator developed by SAP helps engineers to tie up screws in the right order and with the correct axial force. Furthermore a video of the Cocktail Companion is available in our video section.

The third newsletter of the SmartProducts research project is available now under Publications

The workshop proposal "Interacting with Smart Objects" by Max Mühlhäuser, Melanie Hartmann, Daniel Schreiber, Kris Luyten (University of Hasselt) and Oliver Brdiczka (PARC) was accepted at the conference on intelligent user interfaces (IUI 2011) in Palo Alto, USA

Ziqi Zhang, Victoria Uren, Fabio Ciravegna. A comprehensive solution to procedural knowledge acquisition using information extraction. In the International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Information Retrieval (KDIR 2010).

Mathieu d'Aquin, Andriy Nikolov, Enrico Motta. How much semantic data on small devices? 17th International Conference on Knowledge Engineering and Knowledge Management (EKAW 2010).

Matthias Beckerle, Leonardo A. Martucci, Sebastian Ries. Interactive Access Rule Learning: Generating Adapted Access Rule Sets. The Second International Conference on Adaptive and Self-adaptive Systems and Applications (ADAPTIVE 2010).

The Distributed Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (DAI-Labor) and SmartProducts discussed cooperations regarding human-product interaction. The DAI-Labor researches on smart services and systems and integrates its reserach in a Living Lab for evaluations in an open enviroment.

The proposal Smart Products: proactive knowledge management is now online available as an exhibit at the ICT2010. Find all information at the ICT 2010 homepage!

We are glad to announce that a proposal about SmartProducts was accepted at the International Conference on Telecommunications (ITC). The Conference is about sharing visions of current and future research trends and exploring key policy options.

The semantic extension of XPDL was introduced in the workshop paper Shaken not Stirred: Mixing Semantics into XPDL on the 5th Int. Workshop on Semantic Business Process Management on ESWC 2010
Authors: Philip Webster, Victoria Uren, Marcus Ständer

SmartProducts was presented to Robert Woitsch of the plugIT project to discuss possible collaborations. The plugIT projects is about Buisiness and IT alignment using a model-based plug-in framework.

SmartProducts was presented to a UReason delegation to discuss possible collaborations. UReason is a business company that is spcialised in real-time operational advisories for process operators and production management.

All the public deliverables of the first year are now available in our Publications section for download.

Join the SmartProduct community online to participate in the further development of the SmartProducts platform.

The second newsletter of the SmartProducts research project is available now under Publications

On the 15.December SmartProducts was introduced to the "Innovationsallianz Digitales Produktgedächtnis".

SemProm researches smart labels that allow products to to keep a diary about there lifecylcle.

On the 18.November five position papers from people of the SmartProducts team were presented at the "Smart Products: Building Blocks of Ambient Intelligence" workshop (AmI-Blocks'09).

See the publication section for the list of papers.

The SmartProducts project was presented to a delegation from the Korean ETRI. Daniel Schreiber and Marcus Ständer demonstrated the newest version of the smart coffee machine (see SmartProductsVideos for a video of an older version) and explained the project goals and approach.

First newsletter of the SmartProducts research project, 29th September 2009 To receive the SmartProducts Newsletters, just fill out the subscription form here!

On the 22.September SmartProducts presented a poster at the Lernen Wissen Adaptivität Workshop.(LWA 2009) in Darmstadt, Germany. Get the poster here!

Max Mühlhäuser will give the invited keynote at The Third International Workshop on Design and Integration Principles for Smart Objects (DIPSO 2009) about SmartProducts. The DIPSO Workshop will take place on 30th of September in conjunction with Ubicomp 2009 at Orlando, Florida.

The SmartProducts project will be presented at the Workshop on Semantics and Future Internet at the Future Internet Symposium on 1st of September. Update: Slides now available here.

SmartProducts is an integrated project (IP) funded by the European Union in the 7th Research Framework Programme (FP7). The project started only in early 2009, but was already chosen to present its innovative approach to a large audience at the European ICT Infoday in Luxemburg.