María José Santofimia Romero - Grupo ARCO - Universidad de ...

tions. The non-determinism implicit in communicative activities requires a flexible system to supportthe human-robot collaboration. In order to achieve such flexibility, this project proposes an approachbased on the characterization of the users behavior, from which models of use [23] can be derived thatsomehow minimize the unpredicted situations. So, therefore, they are not really tackling the problemof how to react to unpredicted situations, although they are providing a solution that minimizes thesituations not previously considered.Despite the fact that the characterization of user behavior proposed in [51] is specifically aimedat modeling the human-robot collaboration, it could be easily extrapolated to the Ambient Intelligencefield, because the only difference lies in the fact that the COGNIRON robot adopts the rolethat the environment would perform in an Ambient Intelligence context. Those responses expectedfrom the robot are also expected from an Ambient Intelligence context to come from the intelligentenvironment.The third of the surveyed systems is the Context Aware Vision using Image-based ActiveRecognition (CAVIAR) project 3 . This project is mainly devoted to extracting semantically enrichedinformation from the analysis of image sequences. The abstract context model proposed for describingintelligent environments is especially interesting, initially in a rough way, that can later on evolveinto more accurate descriptions of the environment, based on the interaction feedback. The humanactivity recognition task is grounded in a situation network, in which each situation is the result of aprocess federation, in which each process matches a human action.This project is especially interesting for the approach it implements so as to recognize humanactivities, based on symbolic representation of video contents. Despite being limited to the informationcaptured from the video analysis activities, the CAVIAR project shares some motivations withthis thesis, as it is the fact that they are both intended to semantically enrich data extracted from thecontext in order to recognize the long-term activities that are taking place. The essential role thatevents play in understanding activities and human behaviors is also reflected in the approach that hasbeen adopted in order to model the context knowledge, the Event Calculus logic [73]. This approachis mainly intended to model and reason about events and their effects. The work in [7] proposes theset of formal predicates that compose the Event Calculus dialect used for the CAVIAR project. However,from a common-sense point of view, these predicates are correct although incomplete. Someformal predicates are also required so as to model aspects such as the common-sense law of inertia,that states that things tend to remain the same unless externally affected. In this sense, the EventCalculus dialect designed for CAVIAR could not model the knowledge involved in the fact that thewater level contained in a recipient is constantly increasing until it reaches the top of the recipient. Inthat moment, the water level stops increasing and the water spills over onto the floor. The predicateset proposed by the CAVIAR project has not been concerned about these and some additional issuesof common sense.Overall, despite being positively evaluated this project needs to broaden its application scopein order to consider not only the information extracted from video analysis activities but also fromadditional sources of information like sensors, domain knowledge, and common-sense knowledge.Overlooking any of these sources, as common-sense knowledge is ignored in the CAVIAR project,leads the system to a limited success whenever unexpected situations or events come into play.The Ambient Intelligence for the Networked Home Environment (AMIGO) project 4 is anadditional European effort, this time addressed to overcome the obstacles that are preventing home3 http://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/rbf/CAVIAR/caviar.htm4 http://www.hitech-projects.com/euprojects/amigo/19