Final report on the inter-agency workshop on research issues for smart environments

Presents the final report summarizing some of the major outcomes of the July 25-26 DARPA/NIST/NSF inter-agency workshop on smart environments, which took place on the campus of Georgia Tech. in the College of Computing. We are beginning to see a proliferation of small, portable information appliances for individuals and powerful sensors that can be embedded and networked in environments. As we attempt to compose these devices into sophisticated, an hoc and cooperative computational and communications structures, significant research issues arise, from both technological and human-centered perspectives. The purpose of this workshop was to identify those issues from two distinct perspectives: human-centered: what can and should we expect for human interaction within a smart environment? Technology-centered: what new requirements do smart environments place on technology infrastructure, specifically networking infrastructure? What new advances in programming or system construction must accompany this paradigm shift? We summarize findings from breakout discussions representing these two perspectives. We then summarize discussions of inter-disciplinary research issues and the need for effective testbeds for researching smart environments.