Self integrating systems for better living evironments

Information and communication technology is a major factor that will shape the way how we will be living in the future. This translates in particular to our living environments, the private spaces, dwelling places, living quarters we will inhabit. Here, information and communication technology has not only the potential to make our lives more comfortable – it can address vital aspects. One example, which is of utmost importance in an aging society, is the support of elderly people in their homes. Ambient assisted living is a term coined to describe a goal many research efforts strive to reach. One promising approach to enhance private living environments is to equip them with systems that possess a distinctive feature: self-integration. Self-integration is together with other system properties such as self-organization, self-configuration, self-healing, self-adaption, self-stabilization, self-protection a central principle for managing highly complex, autonomous systems. Future living environments will benefit greatly from the development of algorithms and systems that offer secure and transparent communication relying on adaptive, self-integrating IT-systems. With communication, we denote the communication between technical systems as well as the communication between information and communication technology and residents in private living quarters. For meeting the challenges inherent in this research area, competencies in various disciplines of computer science are required ranging from embedded systems, telecommunication, computational theory, cryptography, computer graphics and computer vision to artificial intelligence. The need for interdisciplinary collaboration lead to the formation of the SENSYBLE (Self-Integrating Systems for Better Living Environments) doctoral college, a common research initiative by the Computer Science and Mathematics department of the Goethe-University, Frankfurt am Main and the department of Design, Computer Science, Media of the RheinMain University of Applied Sciences. The SENSYBLE doctoral college is funded by the Hessisches Ministerium für Wissenschaft und Kunst (Ministry of Higher Education, Research and the Arts of the German state of Hesse), Goethe-University and RheinMain University of Applied Sciences. All members of the doctoral college have been key in realizing the 2010 Workshop on Self-Integrating Systems for Better Living Environments – SENSYBLE 2010. SENSYBLE 2010, which was held in Wiesbaden, Germany on November 12th and 13th, 2010, brought together researchers from various disciplines of computer science who work in the area of enhancing private living environments with information and communication technologies. Focus points were self-organization, informational self-determination and human computer interaction. These proceedings of the workshop contain all peer-reviewed contributions that were accepted for publication by the programming committee. The organizers would like to thank the Information Technology Society of the Association for Electrical, Electronic & Information Technologies VDE and the Gesellschaft für Informatik GI for their support of this workshop. We also thank all people involved in making this workshop a success, particularly our internationally renowned keynote speakers Jee-In Kim from the Konkuk University, Seoul and Kai Rannenberg from the Goethe-University, Frankfurt am Main.