project description people publications project factsheet The project (started November 1, 2004) shall investigate a novel type of technology that we call Ambient Awareness. This concept integrates aspects of Ambient Intelligence into Awareness Systems, with the aim to support informal and lightweight social communication. Awareness Systems are computer mediated communication systems that help people maintain a peripheral awareness of others. We focus on connecting households with mobile individuals to help people stay in touch with close friends and family. The project shall investigate Ambient Awareness, which comprises of two elements: * Automatic Capture of Awareness Information. A sensing environment can semi-automatically construct a model and an AV record of residents’ activities. * Pervasive Awareness. Mobile devices entering an aware environment may “negotiate” awareness information exchange with this environment. The environment may compile a model of context from information it takes from multiple devices; conversely each device may obtain awareness information from the environment. The project will create, in a human-centered design approach, a prototype of a system for automatic awareness profiling at home and of the middleware required to update the awareness information of people entering the aware home. User studies will aim to explore the affective human needs that Awareness Systems can serve and the degree to which an Ambient Awareness System will help rather than hinder people to be perceived as socially intelligent in their technology-mediated social interactions. The project aims to: * Explore the concept of Ambient Awareness and its acceptance by end-users * Explore the concept of Social Intelligence. In psychology, Social Intelligence has been defined as the ability to get along with people in general, social technique or ease in society, knowledge of social matters, susceptibility to stimuli from other members of a group, etc. Social Intelligence is a critical element of human intelligence and one that has been neglected in current conceptions and demonstrators of Ambient Intelligence.