INTELLIGENT SYSTEMS GROUP (ISG) - Infotech Oulu

1 Infotech OULU Annual Report 2008 29 INTELLIGENT SYSTEMS GROUP (ISG)Professor Juha R ning, Professor Jukka Riekki and Professor Tapio Sepp nen,Computer Engineering Laboratory, Department of Electrical and Information Engineering,University of and MissionThe INTELLIGENT SYSTEMS GROUP s (ISG) mission is to carryout long-term research on novel technologies and applica-tions of INTELLIGENT SYSTEMS . The main objective is to de-velop enhanced adaptivity and context-awareness for smartenvironments. The research specifically focuses on the crea-tion of dynamic models that enable monitoring, diagnos-tics, prediction and control of target SYSTEMS (living andartificial) or operating environments.

2 It is our aim to makethe environment adapt to the users, instead of making theusers adapt to an inflexible environment. We believe thatby creating these novel components for smart environments,important enabling functionality will emerge that will mul-tiply the versatility and applicability of such living see behaviour modelling as a major challenge in devel-oping truly INTELLIGENT and proactive environments. Humanusers of smart environments often behave in such a com-plex manner that it is hard to predefine and pre-program allof their behavioural patterns in the software. Models of userbehaviour are required that are able to grasp the user s con-text at any moment, and to enable adaptation of the func-tionality of the INTELLIGENT environment to the situation athand.

3 Further, it is essential to model the behaviour of thedevices controlled by the INTELLIGENT environment, as thisenables adaptation to environmental changes without re-programming. SYSTEMS should eventually learn and adaptautomatically through these models to perform their research GROUP combines a variety of key skills andtechnologies to aim at this goal. We have experience in thefollowing key technologies: system architectures and im-plementation of context-aware SYSTEMS ; modelling and rec-ognition of contexts from sensor signals; data miningalgorithms; learning nomadic robots; embedded systemstechnologies; software security; and smart environmentimplementations.

4 The key application areas are: smart liv-ing environments in homes and institutes; industrial auto-mation; mobile robots; context-aware mobile devices; andwellness and medical applications. Each of these domainspossesses special characteristics, but, from the point of viewof developing algorithms for an INTELLIGENT system , they alsopossess remarkable similarities. They all produce a multi-tude of signals that represent the status of the system . Thetarget system behaviour should be modelled and recognizedfrom the signals. The application service should then actaccordingly. The availability of several application domainsyields many advantages: a solution to a special problem inone domain may offer added-value functionality in someother domain; our solutions are deployed by many of ourclient industries; solutions to a wide range of real-worldproblems define a credible and versatile tool-box that has amajor impact on our development-oriented GROUP co-operates with many international and domes-tic partners.

5 In applied research, the GROUP is active in Eu-ropean projects. The GROUP hosted three large Europeanproject meetings (ROBOSWARM, XPRESS, eConfidential)in 2008. In addition, several joint projects are funded bythe Finnish Funding Agency for Technology and Innova-tion (Tekes) and GROUP and its members are active in the scientific com-munity. For example, Prof. Juha R ning co-chaired numer-ous international workshops in the software security area:The 9th Winter School of the European Intensive Pro-gramme on Information Security Management and Tech-nology (IPICS) was arranged in Rovaniemi, and the 4thCrisis Management Workshop (CRM 2008) in Oulu, Fin-land.

6 In information security, the GROUP acted as a memberof the SAFECode International Board of Advisors, GROUP also coorganized a Vulnerability Prevention andSoftware Security seminar with a keynote speech by Schmidt in April, Tapio Sepp nen is a leading figure in both the WellTechOulu Institute, and the Oulu School of Biomedical Engi-neering, an umbrella organization of wellness and medicaltechnology education at the University of Oulu and the OuluUniversity of Applied members of the GROUP were also on the committeesof international conferences. The GROUP s expertise is rec-ognized, testified by the many invited talks and lecturesthat have been given. The INTELLIGENT SYSTEMS GROUP hascommunicated its research to the public and its researchareas have attracted interest in the ProgressIn 2008, the research at ISG concentrated on prototypingsmart environments, mobile and context-aware SYSTEMS , datamining methods, signal analysis and secure were applied in context-aware mobile SYSTEMS , in-telligent service robots, quality control of steel plant andspot welding processes, and analysis of biomedical ECGand EEG Infotech OULU Annual Report 2008 Two-dimensional magnetic map in a corridor of the Com-puter Engineering Laboratory.

7 And the measurement sys-tem used in global self-localization on Prototyping: from a Smart En-vironment towards Remote Distributed Intel-ligenceVerification of the developed methods and models in pro-totypes will be an important part of the research. To sup-port this activity, we will develop software and hardwarearchitectures for smart environments. In addition to verifi-cation, prototypes speed up the commercialization of theresearch results. In prototyping, we have set and tackledthe following objectives:Developing hardware architecture for a smart aim is to develop a basis for devices operating in asmart environment. Modular technologies have been thesubject of our research for some years now.

8 Modularity hasbeen achieved using a modular electronic concept, theEmbedded Object Concept (EOC) Atomi and a modularsoftware architecture - Property Service -, which providesan interface for these resources, and an opportunity to con-trol different robots and other devices of a smart is a concept that utilizes common object-orientedmethods used in software by applying them to combinedLego-like software-hardware entities. These modular enti-ties represent objects in object-oriented design methods,and they function as the building blocks of embedded concept enables one to build new embedded systemsfrom electronic Lego-like building blocks. The goal of theEOC is to make designing of embedded SYSTEMS faster andeasier while preserving the commercial applicability of theresulting device.

9 The EOC enables people without com-prehensive knowledge in electronics design to create newembedded SYSTEMS . For experts, it shortens the design timeof new embedded SYSTEMS . Implementing the conceptualidea of embedded objects has been successfully imple-mented with the Atomi II EOC research has proceeded by developing new ob-jects. The focus of the research has been on improving theirrobustness, and testing the concept in practice by support-ing other research projects. The research will continue to-wards user friendly development tools in order to furtherimprove the on Mobile RoboticsLocalization is one of the fundamental problems in mobilerobotics, as in many applications a robot needs to know itslocation in order to perform its tasks.

10 A global self-locali-zation technique was proposed that utilizes observations ofthe ambient magnetic field. This study was inspired by evi-dence that animals use the magnetic field of the Earth fortrue navigation. The experiments reported in this articlesuggest that (especially) modern buildings with reinforcedconcrete and steel structures have unique spatially varyingambient magnetic fields that can be used for navigation, invery much the same way as the Earth s magnetic field, buton a smaller scale. In principle, a non-uniform ambientmagnetic field produces different observations, dependingon the path taken through it. The approach provides a prom-ising and simple technique for solving the global indoorself-localization current technique is applicable for a one-dimensionallocalization problem, , for localizing a robot or a personwithin corridors.