Svenja Adolphs: taking Electronic text analysis to a whole new level

What is Ambient Intelligence?

12/6/2026: On a cold December afternoon you enter a small apartment that feels just right, and you feel the urge to take a shower so that you can rid yourself of fatigue. The shower reads your muscle tension and out of the corner of your eye you can see an LED screen that indicates how much water has been used since the first. A short shower, with water filled with soothing aromas, leaves you happy and muscles relaxed. So relaxed that all you can think of is your girlfriend. So you call out her name and mimic picking up a phone. A wall directly in front of you becomes a small screen which indicates that she is currently driving. You are routed to voicemail and given a set of options to categorize the importance of your message. As she slows down to park her car, an opaque message on her front window reads: “Msg: Ezequiel”. A dinner for two?

Ambient intelligence is technologies and artifacts which seek to replicate and coexists with our organic human nature. In attaining this natural essence, ambient intelligence (AmI) can then become opaque in our daily lives and interactions; enhancing us without being noticed. These technologies aim to have a symbiotic relationship humans much like fungi and trees, existing on a singular level (Clark 25).

Does a fungus improve the livelihood of a tree in the same way that technology improves our lives? No. Although ambient intelligence seeks to become a background of our daily lives, its purpose is to enhance our human experience. Its opaque nature intends to mesh with the user so that humans can experience these technologies much like our autonomous nervous system. AmI are artifacts operating without our awareness yet enhancing our experience through anticipating and guiding the spontaneity of human existence.

AmI’s basic application is to alleviate “functions that might otherwise occupy our conscious attention” (Clark, 31). Simply put, AmI would free up ‘laborious’ mental activities such as choosing what to eat for dinner, which clothes to put on, how to plan a productive day and ways in which to contact a friend. One example would be how my futuristic shower, could create an experience which is optimally soothing yet alleviates my need to worry about an enormous water bill. Such technology would anticipate our needs and meet them in a manner which does not limit our spontaneous organic nature. The spontaneous appearance of human decisions gives an open-ended growth pattern to our lives and gives us exciting content to grow from. The developers of AmI technology hope to alleviate some of the problem solving activities we do on a daily basis, to allow us to pursue other things.

cyborg

Our present solution to achieve these goals by using AmI is to research technology which can begin to catalogue and reference habitual human activities. By recording body language, eating habits, social tendencies and natural rhythmic patterns AmI could anticipate the proper ways in which to help us. Andy Clark estimates that this type of technology could prove most proficient when integrated with a person at young age. In the future AmI could have the potential of adapting to a person’s growing interest and random explorations for the purpose of directing them to new ideas, experiences and opportunities (Clark, 31 in Natural Born Cyborgs 2011).

Corpus linguistics, which Svenja Adolphs analyzes in her book Introducing Electronic Text Analysis, is one important method that AmI technology could potentially use. A database which could use corpus linguistics to understand our psychological behavior would essentially solve much tension between humans and computers. In this futuristic context, corpus linguistics would serve as a ‘mirror’ which AmI technology would use to understand our habits and patterns as organic beings.

“Once data has been sorted in an accessible way, such as in concordance output for example, we can carry out further analysis on the data. This analysis helps to identify patterns that we might not be able to describe purely on an intuitive basis. This includes whether a word carries positive or negative connotations, and the semantic concepts that surround individual words.”- Svenja Adolphs 8.

In considering the goals of AmI, modern cell phones can have great potential for developing systems which learn human habits in order to suggest personal activities. The Sensay phone is an impressive example of AmI technology which aims to ‘learn’ the owner. In ‘learning’ the user, the Sensay phone can categorize real time activities and program itself around these environments. The phone would use motion sensors, a microphone, a heat-flux sensor and galvanic skin-response sensors to categorize environments with the type of communication we utilize on a cell phone. There would be no reason to set your phone to silent in a business meeting, if the phone can identify silence, room temperature and physical signs of activities which involve focus. Much like Twitter addicts who find the necessity to constantly post location and mood on the internet the Sensay could be programmed at the user’s discretion to allow others to have access to information such as a person’s location and activity.

Commercially, AmI technology could be most useful in home environments where people experience an abundance of activities which fall under the category of ‘laborious’ mental activities. The  Invoked computing concept aims to make everyday objects into technological interfaces through the recognition of gestures. This technology would simplify any activity which requires the use of artifacts to be reduced to a motion such as the sway of a hand, pointing of a finger or lightly pushing a wall. The physical invoked computing device could easily fade into the background of a user’s daily life, and allow a ubiquitous relationship between user and computer interface. Why look for the bulky laptop or tiny cell phone when a banana or pizza box could perform the same functions? This is a small example of how AmI might help humans place a greater importance on a clearer set of focal things and practices.

Conceptually Ambient Intelligence is fantastic for convenience. Such convenience may seem to conform AmI technology into the multitude of modern day artifacts producing no radical societal change. Yet some believe that AmI will change society through changing the individual’s neural patterns. Although nothing like surgical neural enhancement or pharmaceutical augmentation, AmI will aim to subtly change the way we think and operate as humans.