Ambient Intelligence: The Hidden Natural Intelligence.

first journal on Ambient Intelligence! There is no surer way to become a fool in our industry than to make predictions about the long term future of IT so we will avoid that here but we do have a firm belief that this international journal will be sounding board for much of the cutting edge research in Ambient Intelligence and ubiquitous computing in the near future. We are delighted to have serving on our editorial board, the most influential figure in the Ambient Intelligence space – Prof. Emile Aarts who is currently Vice President and Scientific Program Director at Philips Research Laboratories. Prof. Aarts has been leading the way for over 12 years now and all who have had experience of his HomeLab project will testify to its groundbreaking nature. We are also thrilled to have other internationally recognised experts onboard such as Yang Cai of Technology) among others. This journal is indebted to those who have volunteered for editorial review duties. The success of the journal depends entirely on the selfless contributions from the editorial board and we thank all those who are serving. There are of course many definitions of Ambient Intelligence (AmI). To add another, we could say that Ambient Intelligence has the awareness of specific characteristics of human presence and personality dealing in turn with user needs, responding intelligently and all the while – remaining invisible to the user (unless necessary) and striving to ensure that any interactions should be of minimal effort, easy to understand and ultimately enjoyable. Now, if you really think about that statement and the checklist of aspects which need to be satisfied – then you could be forgiven for thinking that it is a fantasy. That however it can be argued, is why a journal such as IJACI exists. Of course, the vision of Ambient Intelligence is difficult but here in these pages is where we expect to see the vision become a reality. Ambient Intelligence refers to the environment of computing which is aware and responsive to the presence of human interaction. The aim is to use the space surrounding us in the form of movement, shape and sound recognition and create a system that will be able to recognise all the different scents that are in the environment. Ambient Intelligence has been influenced by user centred design which is an approach to design which regards the user's needs as …