The paper entitled “Programming Smart Object Federations for Simulating and Implementing Ambient Intelligence Scenarios”, presented by Ioannis Georgalis, PhD Candidate at the University of Crete and member of the HCI Laboratory of ICS-FORTH, received the Best Student Paper Award at the 3rd International Conference on Pervasive and Embedded Computing and Communications Systems (PECCS 2013, Barcelona, Spain 19-21 February 2013).

The research results presented in the paper have been produced in the context of a collaborative effort between the Human Computer Interaction Laboratory of the Institute of Computer Science of FORTH and the Meme Media Laboratory of Hokkaido University, Japan in the area of Ambient Intelligence and Pervasive Computing. This work proposes a new programming model for implementing the functionality of ambient intelligence environments. In this context, the contributions of the paper are two-fold: (a) the introduction of a new event-based, dynamic, weekly-typed programming language whose runtime semantics allows for a simple and effective description of smart objects, and (b) the description of meaningful interaction strategies, that are implemented in the proposed language, through which executable smart object federations can be used for simulating and implementing ambient intelligence scenarios.

The paper's authors are: Ioannis Georgalis (Human-Computer Interaction Laboratory of ICS-FORTH), Professor Yuzuru Tanaka (Hokkaido Univeristy, Japan), Professor Emeritus Nikolaos Spyratos (University of Paris-South) and Professor Constantine Stephanidis (ICS-FORTH and University of Crete).