Introduction

The overall mission of the Smart Surroundings project is to investigate, define, develop, and demonstrate the core architectures and frameworks for future ambient systems.

The project started in April 2004, will run for four and a half years, and has a budget of 13 Million Euro. The Smart Surroundings research program is investigating a new paradigm for bringing the flexibility of information technology to bear in every aspect of daily life. It foresees that people will be surrounded by deeply embedded and flexibly networked systems that provide easily accessible yet unobtrusive support for an open-ended range of activities, to enrich daily life and to increase productivity at work. This presents a paradigm shift from personal computing to ubiquitous computing , challenging the research community to investigate new building blocks and integrated infrastructures, as well as emerging applications and interaction styles. These systems will create a Smart Surrounding for people to facilitate and enrich daily life and increase productivity at work. These systems will be quite different from current computer systems, as they will be based on an unbounded set of hardware artefacts and software entities, embedded in everyday objects or realized as new types of device.

Relevant knowledge areas include embedded systems, computer architecture, wireless communication, distributed computing, data and knowledge modeling, application platforms, human-computer interaction, industrial design, as well as application research in different settings and sectors.

Our ambition is to move beyond prototypes toward sustainable systems for implementation of the ubiquitous computing vision. The research effort will span the entire spectrum ranging from scenarios of use, requirements elucidation and through to architectural design.

This project brings together a critical mass of world-class research teams in distributed, embedded and interactive systems to aim at a significant advance in ubiquitous computing. The partnership will build integrated infrastructure, provide tools and conceptual frameworks, develop a wide range of new applications and investigate the overall architecture of ambient systems.
It is envisaged that in the longer term, work performed within this project will lay the foundations for the development of a new range of components, architectures, guidelines and standards that underpins the future development of ambient systems.