Designing Interaction for Ambient Intelligence Environments and Smart Cities
Dr. Dr. Norbert Streitz, Scientific Director of Smart Future Initiative from Frankfurt, Germany will give a lecture on designing interaction for smart cities this Thursday, 16.06.2011 at 15.30.
Location: Ausstellungsstrasse 60, third floor, room sq310
Having entered what is being called the Urban Age, economic prosperity and quality of life will
largely depend on the abilities of cities to reach their full potential. One important dimension beyond
the deployment of appropriate infrastructures is providing ambient intelligence-based support for
smart urban living. The notion of Smart Hybrid Cities is introduced as the focus and cross-section of
important developments we are facing. Combining hybrid information and experience spaces with
ubiquitous and pervasive computing in urban contexts constitutes what is being called ‘smart hybrid
city’. The talk addresses a wide range of issues and challenges for designing ambient intelligence
environments, e.g., "system-oriented, importunate smartness" vs. "people-oriented, empowering
smartness" by keeping "the human in the loop", the shift from information design to experience design,
the implications of sensor-based smart environments for privacy, developments from the level of
smart rooms and intelligent buildings to the level of urban environments, digitalization of content and
virtualization of social communication behavior spreading from the realm of virtual worlds back into real
environments. These developments require also reflecting on the ambient intelligence research agenda.
Needing a vision for reconciling humans and technology in the Urban Age, we argue for a human-
centered design approach resulting in a Humane Smart Hybrid City.
About the Speaker
Norbert Streitz (Ph.D. in physics, Ph.D. in psychology). Senior Scientist and Strategic Advisor with more
than 30 years of experience in information and communication technology. Founder and scientific
director of the Smart Future Initiative (SFI) launched in January 2009. 1987 - 2008, Division Manager and
Deputy Director of the Fraunhofer Institute IPSI, Darmstadt, Germany, also teaching at the Department
of Computer Science, Technical University Darmstadt. 1978 – 1986, Assistant Professor at Technical
University Aachen (RWTH), Germany. Post-doc research fellow at University of California, Berkeley, USA,
visiting scholar at Xerox PARC, USA, and at the Intelligent Systems Lab of MITI, Tsukuba Science City,
Japan. Research areas: Cognitive Science, Human-Computer Interaction, Interaction and Experience
Design, Hypertext/Hypermedia, CSCW, Ubiquitous Computing, Ambient Intelligence, Disappearing
Computer, Cooperative Buildings, Smart Home, Urban Environments, Smart/Hybrid Cities. Published/
edited 18 books and authored/co-authored more than 120 papers. Manager of large projects funded
by the EU and industry. Member of editorial and advisory boards, program and steering committees.
Keynote speaker at scientific and commercial events in Europe, USA, South-America, and many countries
in Asia.
More information available at http://www.smart-future.net