December 1st, 2007
Smarter homes with an Amigo
I’m sure that some of you remember Jini, an initiative launched in 1998 by Bill Joy of Sun Microsystems. This software was supposed to turn all the devices we use into ‘network
citizens,’ as Joy said. It never really worked. And even if the electronic devices we own are increasingly network compatible, they still are unable to work together intelligently. This is why the European Union has funded a project to allow your fridge or your TV to communicate with your phone or your PC. This project, named Amigo, will end in February 2008 and was granted €13 millions by the EU. This project enrolled powerful partners such as France Telecom, Microsoft or Philips which pay the rest of the bill, expected to reach €23 millions. The researchers think their approach will be successful because it’s an entirely open source project and everyone can participate. But read more…
You can see above an example of home network in which consumer electronics (CE), personal computing (PC), mobile communications and home automation domains are interconnected. (Credit: Amigo project)
For more information about the Amigo project — which will end in February 2008 — you can check this fact sheet. You also can read an ICT Results article titled “An open approach to smarter homes.” The article also includes a link to a video describing how the system woill work.
But is such a project really necessary? “‘People are finding themselves with all these networkable devices and are wondering where the applications are that can use these devices to make life easier and how they could be of more value together than individually,’ says Maddy Janse, a researcher for Dutch consumer electronics group Philips’ [and Amigo project manager
.]
ICT Results adds that “there are two fundamental obstacles to realising the vision of the intelligent networked home: lack of interoperability between individual devices and the need for context-aware artificial intelligence to manage them. And, to make smart homes a reality, the two issues must be addressed together.” This is what the Amigo project is doing, “creating a middleware software platform that will get all networkable devices in the home talking to each other and providing an artificial intelligence layer to control them.”
Even if the figure above shows how should work an Amigo home network, here are some more details about the architecture. “The Amigo architecture consists of a base middleware layer, an intelligent user services layer, and a programming and deployment framework that developers can use to create individual applications and services. These individual software modules form the building blocks of the networked home environment, which has the flexibility to grow as and when new devices and applications are added. Interoperability is ensured through support for and abstraction of common interaction and home automation standards and protocols, such as UPnP and DNLA as well as web services.”
For more information, you also can read some selected documents about this project.
- A general project description
- Engineering Software Systems for Ubiquitous Computing (Presentation, 9 pages, September 2006)
- User Requirements for Context-Aware Entertainment and Communication Systems (Presentation, 30 pages, September 2006)
- Ambient Intelligence for the networked home environment (Project flyer, 2 pages, November 2004)
Sources: ICT Results, November 29, 2007; and various websites
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