or Ambient Assisted Living

Professor Dieter Rombach

5.00pm Tuesday 11 September
Free event, no bookings required

How can you live and better inyour own home with state-of–the art Information technology?

Fraunhofer Institute for Experimental Software Engineering (IESE) “Assisted Living Lab“ was officially opened in 2006: At first glance, it looks like a regular apartment, with living room, bedroom, kitchen, and bathroom. But smart sensor technology is hidden everywhere: “In combination with Assisted Living solutions, Ambient Intelligence technology can provide persons in need of care with some degree of autonomy in their own home“, explains project manager Thomas Kleinberger: “In the Assisted Living Lab, we can now show what is already possible today.“

Thus, a cup, for instance, “feels” whether it has been emptied, the intelligent refrigerator monitors the expiration dates of its contents, and the intelligent walking stick actively reports when it drops to the ground – because the person using it might have also fallen down. These are just a few examples of an intelligent environment.

Dieter Rombach, the Institute director, sees the need for Assisted Living research in the demographic development: “People are living longer, the age pyramid is changing “. The goal of the project is to allow elderly people to live in their familiar environment for as long as possible. Information technology shall get to know the resident in his own home and support him in his daily life.

Research in Ambient Intelligence is also shared by the University of Kaiserslautern: “The project presents a grand scientific challenge“, stated Jürgen Nehmer from the University of Kaiserslautern. Christian Madler, Chief Physician at the Westpfalz-Klinikum Kaiserslautern, called Assisted Living research “an important interface for medicine”. Important collaborations have already been established. Harald Orlamünder from Alcatel SEL AG confirmed the importance of Assisted Living for industry: “Assisted Living is absolutely in line with current trends, and I am looking forward to a fruitful future“. Looking at the future, project manager Thomas Kleinberger states that “After tests in the lab and trial phases in senior citizen homes, first prototypes might already be brought to market in collaboration with industry in three to five years“.

The Fraunhofer Institute for Experimental Software Engineering(Fraunhofer IESE) in Kaiserslautern currently has 180 employees who perform research in the areas of software development, software quality management, and software competence management. Together with its sister institute in the USA, Fraunhofer IESE offers processes, methods, and techniques for developing software-based systems according to engineering-style principles. In doing so, it follows an empirical approach: Through proven, innovative solutions, products based on software can be brought to the market with a measurably higher degree of efficiency.

The customers of Fraunhofer IESE come from domains where products are dominated by software: automotive and transportation systems, telecommunications, telematics and service providers, medical systems, as well as information systems and applications in the public sector. The institute provides support to companies of any size – from international corporations to small and medium-sized enterprises. The public sector also plays an important role as a project partner.
Fraunhofer IESE, which was founded in 1996, is directed by Prof. Dieter Rombach and Prof. Peter Liggesmeyer. It is one of 58 institutes of the Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft, which, as the largest applied research organization in Europe, contributes to national and international competitiveness.

Dr. H. Dieter Rombach is a Full Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Kaiserslautern, Germany. He holds a chair in software engineering, is executive and founding director of the Fraunhofer Institute for Experimental Software Engineering (IESE), and chairs the Fraunhofer ICT group, which aims at shortening the time needed for transferring research technologies into industrial practice. His research interests are in software methodologies, modeling and measurement of the software process and resulting products, software reuse, and distributed systems. Results are documented in more than 180 publications in international journals and conference proceedings. He is co-author of the book A Handbook of Software and Systems Engineering: Empirical Observations, Laws and Theories (2003)

He received his B.S. degree in mathematics from the University of Karlsruhe, Germany, in 1975, his M.S. degrees in mathematics and computer science from the University of Karlsruhe, Germany in 1978, and his Ph.D. degree in computer science from the University of Kaiserslautern, Germany, in 1984. In 1990, he received the prestigious Presidential Young Investigator Award (US$ 500,000.00) from the National Science Foundation, USA, in recognition of his research accomplishments in software engineering. In 2000, he was awarded the Service Medal of the State of Rhineland-Palatinate, Germany, for his accomplishments in software engineering research and his contributions to the economic development of the state through the establishment of a Fraunhofer institute. Since 2003, he has been serving as a member of the Software Process Achievement (SPA) Awards Committee of Carnegie Mellon University’s Software Engineering Institute.

Dr. Rombach heads several research projects funded by the German government, the European Union, and industry. He currently is the lead principal of a federally funded project (ViSEK) aimed at building up a German repository of knowledge about innovative software engineering technologies. He provides consulting to numerous companies on issues including quality improvement, software measurement, software reuse, process modeling, and software technology in general, and he is an advisor to the federal and state governments on ICT issues. He frequently gives industrial executive seminars on software quality improvement, software measurement, software reuse, and process modeling. He was Co-Guest-Editor of two Special Issues in IEEE Software, on Software Quality Assurance in September 1987 and Measurement-Based Process Improvement in July 1994, respectively, and organized the International Workshop on Experimental Software Engineering Issues in Dagstuhl, Germany, in September 1992. He served as General Chair of the 18th International Conference on Software Engineering in Berlin in 1996, and as program co-chair for ICSE 2006 in Shanghai, China. He is an associate editor for both the Kluwer Journal "Empirical Software Engineering" and “ACM TOSEM” and serves on the editorial boards of numerous other journals and magazines (e.g., IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, ACM Transactions on Software Engineering Methods, and IEE International Journal on Software Process). He serves on several international advisory boards for international research centers, e.g., Lero in Ireland, Simula Research Lab in Norway, CESE in USA.

Dieter Rombach was appointed to the International Scientific Advisory Group (ISAG) of the Australian research consortium ”National Information and Communications Technologies Australia“ NICTA in April 2006.

The consortium was founded in 2002 by the Australian government to provide application-oriented research in the area of information and communications technology for the benefit of industry and society. Its objectives are thus similar to those of the German Fraunhofer model.

NICTA’s scientific advisory group consists of six leading individuals from the international business (e.g., IBM) and research community (e.g., MIT, Stanford, Berkeley). The group’s tasks include advising the board of directors on strategic planning issues, providing an overview of international research trends, and recruiting international top researchers.
Further information on the membership and leadership structure of NICTA can be found at:
http://www.nicta.com.au/director/aboutnicta/our_organisation/structure_and_governance.cfm

The lecture will be introduced Judy Kay, Associate Professor at the School of Information Technologies at the University of Sydney. She is a principal in the CHAI: Computer Human Adapted Interaction Research Group which conducts both fundamental and applied research in personalisation and pervasive human computer interaction.

This Sydney Ideas lecture is part of the two day GerMANY Innovations Program hosted by the University of Sydney at the University of Sydney. See website for more program information.

All are welcome to attend this free Sydney Ideas event.