SmartRoom

The mission of Smart Room is to form a localized digital environment for holding conferences, meetings, lectures, trainings, and some other activities important for research, education, and business processes. Participants are located in a room and use the environment in their ongoing activity. The environment provides a set of services that simplifies activity organization and participation as well as automates technical functions of information acquisition, sharing, and transformation. The automated and intelligent support simplifies the human activity, allowing participants to concentrate on the problems the event is devoted to, not on technical details of information acquisition, sharing and transformation.

Smart-M3 based system architecture: Smart Room is a multi-agent intelligent system that provides a smart space for its agents. The smart room space (SR space) is implemented using the Smart-M3 platform. Agents communicate sharing their knowledge (data, semantics and any digitally encoded information) in the SR space. Information interoperability is achieved due to ontological representation models (RDF, OWL) and the smart space access protocol (SSAP, a part of Smart-M3). SSAP is XML-based and implements communication (on top of TCP) between an agent and the SR space (operations join/leave, insert/update/remove, subscribe/unsubscribe). SR space is maintained by Smart-M3 semantic information broker (SIB), which runs on a dedicated SR server. Agents run on smart room devices and operate as Smart-M3 knowledge processors (KP), i.e., they have own local knowledge, access shared knowledge in the SR space, apply reasoning over that knowledge, and make consequent decisions in accordance to the application logic (with possible publication of derivative knowledge in the SR space). Basic reasoning is performed on the space side and based on Semantic Web technologies (e.g., SPARQL queries attached to SSAP operations). 

IoT-aware environment: Smart Room is equipped by various devices (surrounding physical/digital objects), which are localized within the room or located nearby (e.g., in the server room of the organization). Each device can host one or more smart objects: autonomous everyday objects, being augmented with sensing, processing, and network capabilities, are transformed into smart objects that understand and react to their environment.

Service set: Agents (smart objects) running on SR devices are involved into service provision chains. Any service has a dedicated agent that performs functions on client demand and/or provides information related to specific component of the room. Some services (which can dynamically change their state between active and inactive) are available at the moment and are offered to participants in the room. Some services are public, i.e., intended for all participants and shown on large screens in the room. Services can also be accessed from a client agent installed on personal mobile devices. Although the services are available for all participants, a specific service subset is offered for each person based on his preferences and current context. It allows implementing personalization and enabling proactive delivery of the services.

Smart Room can operate in several modes, depending on the type of event holding in the room. 

1. Conference

2. Meeting

3. Lecture

Each mode has own core service set (partially overlapped with other modes). For instance, the conference set includes agenda and presentation. In any mode, Agenda describes the activity plan held in the room. For instance, a conference agenda is a list of talks (conference program). Presentation visualizes slides and other information of the current speaker. Agenda and Presentation have own screens in the room.

Each core service set can be augmented with advanced services.

1. World information services are accessed from the web. They provide information and processing facilities that can be used in the smart room. For instance, information trackers find appropriate knowledge collected in the web, e.g., presenter’s citation index from Google Scholar.

2. Discussion services allow online discussions between the participants. It uses public blog services available in the Internet. For instance, participants can discuss each other’s presentations during the conference or publish their opinion during the meeting.

3. Activity tracking services are deployed locally in the smart room. They accumulate knowledge appeared in the room and derive new knowledge. For instance, personalized reports sent to each participant after the conference.

4. Sensors are deployed in the room. They monitor parameters of internal physical environment and publish the measurements into the smart room space.