Developing reactive geo-intelligent personal and public environments

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Up until recently, personal, public and geographic spaces could be viewed as distinct features of a spectrum of spaces at different scales. Geographic space was the space of municipalities and cities, regions and nations, public spaces were subspaces of cities and municipalities where access and control were regulated by some common authority, and personal space concerned your body and your home environment. Recent trends in wearable computing and intelligent environments are blurring these distinctions, however. Built public spaces may change dynamically and in real time due to the presence of a person and reflect aspects of their personal identity. We carry smartphones with us that pass on personal information to environmental sensors, or which provide us with up-to-date information about the environment through which we are passing. Geographic information may be used to update displays in both public and private spaces. Our investigation concerns the development and use of smart environments, both for personal spaces such as the home and the body, and for public spaces such as schools, theatres, hospitals or open city spaces such as parks or city squares. We are particularly interested in reactive or responsive environments that enhance, extend, challenge or transform aspects of personal identity. This focus on identity derives from work with issues of disability, but identity is a universal characteristic and hence this limitation or focus is enabling for all applications under investigation. The issue of developing reactive environments is complex. These environments may be defined as formally incorporating (i) a distributed sensor network ; (ii) a computer/network architecture ; and a (iii) a set of behaviours. The incorporation of some level of geo-intelligence is a natural extension, since the distributed sensor network will acquire data at different locations, often in different ways and output behaviors may also need to be spatially aware. Hence the development of these environments draws on current research trends in cognitive architectures, intelligent environments, sensor networks within computer science, geomatics and the geosciences, architecture and other contributing disciplines.