Last thursday October, 24th, Dr. Luke Chen gave a seminar entitled: "Towards a Knowledge–driven Framework and Infrastructure for Assistive Living within Smart Environments". In his talk, Dr. Chen covered the landscape of Ambient Assisted living.

"Technology-driven assistive living has emerged as a promising approach to addressing the rising ageing population. This is mainly due to the technology push, i.e. the maturity, prevalence and financial affordability of technologies such as miniaturized sensors, smart devices and wireless communication, and application pull, i.e. the growing needs of social and healthcare, in particular for the elderly. The notion of smart environments, especially Smart Homes, has recently attracted increasing attention in the realization of the approach, dubbed as ambient assisted living. In this talk the speaker will first introduce the semantic smart home concept describing its rationale and underpinning technologies and framework. Then the speaker will focus on two main research areas upon which he and his team has been actively undertaking research for the past several years. The first area is ontology based activity modelling and recognition, and the second is personalization and adaptation. While special emphases will be placed on underlying methods and mechanisms, technical details will be explained and highlighted. The talk will conclude by discussing research problems and challenges in related areas, and speculating future research directions."