Ambient Intelligence

Ambient intelligence is the vision of a technology that will become invisibly embedded in our natural surroundings, present whenever we need it, enabled by simple and effortless interactions, attuned to all our senses, adaptive to users and context-sensitive, and autonomous. High-quality information access and personalized content must be available to everybody, anywhere, and at any time. This book addresses ambient intelligence used to support human contacts and accompany an individual's path through the complicated modern world. From the technical standpoint, distributed electronic intelligence is addressed as hardware vanishing into the background. Devices used for ambient intelligence are small, low-power, low weight, and (very importantly) low-cost; they collaborate or interact with each other; and they are redundant and error-tolerant. This means that the failure of one device will not cause failure of the whole system. Since wired connections often do not exist, radio methods will play an important role for data transfer. This book addresses various aspects of ambient intelligence, from applications that are imminent since they use essentially existing technologies, to ambitious ideas whose realization is still far away, due to major unsolved technical challenges. "This book addresses ambient intelligence used to support human contacts and accompany an individual's path through the complicated modern world. From the technical standpoint, distributed electronic intelligence is addressed as hardware vanishing into the background. Devices used for ambient intelligence are small, low-power, low weight and (very importantly) low-cost; they collaborate or interact with each other; and they are redundant and error-tolerant. This means that the failure of one device will not cause failure of the whole system. Since wired connections often do not exist, radio methods will play an important role for data transfer. This book addresses various aspects of ambient intelligence, from applications that wait around the corner using essentially existing technologies to ambitious ideas whose realization is still far away due to major unsolved technical challenges."--Jacket "This volume is devoted to the exciting topic of dissipative solitons, i.e. pulses or spatially localised waves in systems exhibiting gain and loss. Examples are laser systems, nonlinear resonators and optical transmission lines. The physical principles and mathematical concepts are explained in a clear and concise way, suitable for students and young researchers. The similarities and differences in the notion of a soliton between dissipative systems and Hamiltonian and integrable systems are discussed, and many examples are given. The contributions are written by the world's leading experts in the field, making the book a unique exposition of this important topic."--Résumé de l'éditeur "This volume is devoted to the exciting topic of dissipative solitons, i.e. pulses or spatially localised waves in systems exhibiting gain and loss. Examples are laser systems, nonlinear resonators and optical transmission lines. The physical principles and mathematical concepts are explained in a clear and concise way, suitable for students and young researchers. The similarities and differences in the notion of a soliton between dissipative systems and Hamiltonian and integrable systems are discussed, and many examples are given. The contributions are written by the world's leading experts in the field, making the book a unique exposition of this important topic."--Jacket Why does mankind always want to predict the future?