Experience research

Abstract

Research is meant to explain, create, and evaluate entities to advance knowledge. we ask questions about relationships between entities, cause, and effect. We invent purposeful entities that are valuable, and explore whether entities have desired characteristics. Morrison and George (1995) describe research approaches as formative, descriptive, evaluative, and developmental. Basili et al. (1986) list four types of purposes in the scope of software engineering experimentation: to characterize, evaluate, motivate, and predict. The underlying motivation may be to understand, assess, manage, engineer, learn, improve, validate, and assure. Wynekoop and Conger (1990) describe research purposes, based on the work of Basili et al., as understanding the meaning of entities studied, engineering the original development of a prototype, re-engineering an existing entity, evaluation of an entity, and describing or defining entities. Ambient Intelligence implies that technology is embedded in everyday objects, such as walls, furniture, even nature, and surrounding humans in an intelligent way enabling them to participate in a networked society. The AmI space is open, allows evolution and extendibility. It is dynamic to allow for reconfiguration (ISTAG, 2003). Technologies in AmI space must have qualities such as safety, reliability, security, privacy, usability, and interoperability. People must have trust and confidence that technologies bear these qualities. In Ambient Intelligence the user is in control and not controlled. New technology needs to be developed to reach the goals of AmI space: on one the hand, basic system components, such as smart materials, micro/nanoelectronics systems, I/O technology, embedded systems, and ubiquitous communication, while on the other hand multimedia, natural interaction, context awareness, emotional computing, multi-modality, and computational intelligence will serve the needs of the user. To connect these two sides, i.e., the ambient and user technologies, researchers and developers need an integration research platform. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2006.