Smart spaces refer to built environments such as apartments, offices, museums, hospitals, schools, malls, university campuses, and outdoor areas that are enabled for co-operation of smart objects and systems, and for ubiquitous interaction with frequent and sporadic visitors. People come to these places for their everyday activities and to meet each other. They come with different physical, social, and cultural backgrounds and capabilities, with varying roles and objectives. The aim of Smart Spaces is to produce intelligent environments that facilitate everyday practices, are more efficient with respect to resource and costs, create richer user experiences and enhance users’ awareness of the local opportunities.

The core ideas of smart spaces are openness and diversity. Smart spaces will be heterogeneous environments welcoming different people to assume a range of roles. People and smart objects in Smart Spaces collaborate within their networks, and apply various information sources, devices, services and objects that together make up the Smart Space.  The space facilitates the users’ and the system’s smart behaviours, and produces rewarding experiences.

Smart spaces consist of various interconnected embedded systems, services, devices, and mobile terminals. These integrate the information of the local surroundings and people with information from the Internet to form a digital virtual space. Smart Spaces have means for perceiving, measuring and storing the context information of entities in the environment.

The challenges of the Smart Space Thematic Area are to allow the exploitation of information and services across different use and business domains, and to create smooth user experiences. A key challenge is the creation of platforms for new applications and services. Thus, the objectives include developing the platforms in the spirit of open innovation, creating an ecosystem of smart spaces services, and supporting the exploitation. This can be achieved by providing living labs for testing, exploration, experimentation, and validation.

The research directions related to smart spaces include user research, interaction methods, user modelling, context-awareness, intelligent information access, machine learning, augmented reality, techniques for opening and sharing of the embedded information, semantic interoperability, interaction with semantic web, interoperability of devices and services, and event based and ubiquitous computing. The work also includes enabling technologies for smart spaces, such as signal processing techniques for sensors, indoor navigation, distributed computing platforms, and intelligent networking techniques connecting foreground spaces and background knowledge sources.

Lead: Petri Liuha