Ambient Intelligence - the link between the sciences - paving the way where no recommender system has gone before

i It was Christmas Eve and I was 13 years old. My brother Timothy was 16. I do not recall who started it but we had the mother of all fights. A sweeping broom was broken along the way and our sudden rage ended in us both declaring that we were keeping and indeed opening the presents we had bought for each other earlier in the week there and then I ran to mine (bought for BLOCKINhim) BLOCKINfirst. BLOCKINI BLOCKINrapidly BLOCKINtore BLOCKINthe BLOCKINpaper BLOCKINoff. BLOCKINThere revealing itself under our Christmas tree was a chess set. Meanwhile Timothy had ripped his paper (…of what should have been my present) and he was holding a tape cassette cleaning kit. You BLOCKINsee, BLOCKINthe BLOCKINsad BLOCKINthing BLOCKINhere BLOCKINis BLOCKINthat BLOCKINI BLOCKINdid BLOCKINnot BLOCKINown a tape player (he did) and he had absolutely no interest in chess (I was the chess player). It turns out that we had both actually bought gifts for ourselves in the guise of trying to give them to the BLOCKINother….. BLOCKINMy BLOCKINwife BLOCKINactually BLOCKINfinds BLOCKINthat BLOCKINstory incredibly BLOCKINsad! My point is this. In the modern era, we both would have probably shopped on Amazon. We both would have been tracked by recommender systems/agents but no intelligent algorithm could have known that even though we had 'gift wrapped' the items and thus 'told the recom-mender system not to associate these items with our 'history' – that these items were indeed objects that we desired and thus should be included in our 'history'. I guess what I am trying to say here is that humans are wonderfully made and incredibly complex. Computerized Systems are sometimes wonderfully made but more often than not they are the weakest link. This should not stop us from our pursuit of nirvana in the exiting area of ambient intelligence but rather to encourage us to seek insights through collaboration with our colleagues in psychology, biomedical sciences, humanities BLOCKINand BLOCKINeven BLOCKINperhaps BLOCKINeven BLOCKINtheology! BLOCKINWho really knows? Some of the exciting breakthroughs have come at the edges where different world views collide and lead to insight. Perhaps such a collaboration that drilled down deep into the science behind recommender systems and human nature – could have developed some fuzzy techniques which offset the weird nature of my brother and I. So, to issue 4 and the development of in-frastructures enabling dynamic and automated composition of IT systems is a …