MuSAMA is based on the hypothesis that ubiquitous machine intelligence, envisioned for our future everyday environments, will be provided by dynamic ensembles: Local agglomerations of smart appliances, whose composition is prone to frequent, unforeseeable, and substantial changes. Members of such ensembles need to be able to cooperate spontaneously and without human guidance in order to achieve their joint goal of assisting the user. The resultant concept of autonomous cooperative assistance poses new challenges for the research on ubiquitous and ambient information technology.
Work in MuSAMA therefore concentrates on the investigation of models and algorithms that allow dynamic, ad-hoc ensembles to deliver the assistive power of Smart Environments independently of external or global knowledge. Globally coherent ensemble behavior with respect to a user's need emerges from local interaction of individual appliances. The application scenario for MuSAMA are instrumented rooms that support teams in knowledge exploration and knowledge integration based on distributed display facilities.
