The ERCIM Working Group SESAMI on "Smarts Environments and Systems for Ambient Intelligence" (http://www.ics.forth.gr/sesami/) has been officially formed in mid 2006 and is co-chaired by Anthony Savidis (FORTH) and Norbert Streitz (Fraunhofer). It succeeded in bringing together a selected group of internationally renowned experts in the field, displaying a very good balance of ERCIM and non-ERCIM institutions.
There are two key scientific activities that have been scheduled for 2007:
1) Two special thematic sessions as part of the 4th International Conference for Universal Access in Human Computer Interaction (UAHCI), jointly with the 12th International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction to be held on 22-27 July 2007 in Beijing, China (http://www.hcii2007.org/):
- SESAMI-I: Interaction Design and Evaluation chaired by Norbert Streitz
- SESAMI-II: Tools, Architectures and Infrastructures, chaired by Anthony Savidis.
For both sessions an open call for papers has been made, resulting in a selection of total 14 accepted papers, 7 per session. All papers will be published as part of the Springer LNCS proceedings of the UAHCI - 2007 conference.
2) A Special Theme issue will be published by Elsevier in their international refereed, interdisciplinary Journal "Interacting with Computers" (IwC). It is entitled "Interaction in Ambient Intelligence: Methods, Tools and Applications" with the guest editors Anthony Savidis, Norbert Streitz, Carsten Magerkurth and Constantine Stephanidis. The selection process for the papers has started.