The brave new world of ambient intelligence

This chapter provides an overview of ambient intelligence in order to set the stage for the subsequent identification and discussion of threats, vulnerabilities and safeguards In this chapter, we provide a somewhat high-level description of the key technologies that are crucial to the development and deployment of ambient intelligence. The development and deployment of AmI are being propelled by certain visions of the future, which we reference in this chapter. For the most part, the development and deployment are taking place in a rather structured context composed of visions, scenarios, roadmaps, strategic research agendas, platforms and projects. We highlight the most important of these.