Embodied Ambient Intelligent Systems

The information and communication technology (ICT) we interact with in daily life is more and more distributed in the environment (the so called intelligent space). Most of these devices have increasing calculation capacity and therefore the potential to contribute to an overall distributed calculation power and therefor a processing intelligence. These so called intelligent nodes can for example provide context information (sensors) or act as an interface through which we interact with the whole system. At the same time interaction with such ambient intelligent systems gets more and more complex. The interaction with the system is not any more human to single machine, like we were used in the interaction with the personal computer (PC) or personal device, it’s an interaction with a system which is around us and ubiquitously distributed in our surroundings.Research projects are currently investigating the possibility of users interacting with avatars. The advantage of avatars is, that the systems gets an embodiment and a personality. The complexity of the underlying distributed system is hidden from the user. The user is interacting in a natural dialogue with a system which has a personality, cognitive and effective capabilities, human like memory structures as well as perception and awareness. The paper presents the concept of ambient intelligent systems and the challenges regarding user interaction. It shows how the interaction of such systems can be improved by the embodiment of an ambient distributed system. Based on three current research projects working with avatars this concept is explained and first results are presented.