PhD finished! A thesis on Ambient Intelligence

Note: this entry is not new. It has been imported from my old blog and included here in order to have it as reference.
At last! Almost a month ago, on June 12^th, I received my PhD degree after succesfully passing the PhD exam. The title of my dissertation was "A Reactive Behavioural Model for Context-Aware Semantic Devices".

For those of you interested, this is an excerpt from the abstract:

In this thesis, we propose a model for knowledge sharing between devices and for representing their behaviour in a way that promotes autonomous context-aware reactivity. In our approach, we bring Semantic Web technologies to the Ubiquitous Computing world in order to provide the means for collaboratively transforming data into knowledge and enabling intelligent reasoning mechanisms.

The model leads to a decentralised architecture where devices spontaneously discover each other, share context information, perform reasoning and adapt their behaviour dynamically in order to create a feel for Ambient Intelligence in the environment. In order to validate our approach we have identified some evaluation criteria and developed a number of prototypes that were deployed in experimental scenarios.

The results of our research may contribute to pave the way for a new wave of social digital objects that we denominate semantic devices.

The full version can be downloaded here:

• My PhD Thesis (normal quality)
• My PhD Thesis (high quality)