Evacuating buildings during emergencies like fires or terrorist attacks demands heightened environmental awareness, swift decision-making, and immediate action. In recent years, there has been a surge in research aimed at bolstering this process and assisting individuals involved through dedicated technical means. However, many questions still linger unanswered. This study elaborates on the concept and the initial design of a mobile application, constituting part of an intuitive evacuation assistance system tailored for evacuation leaders to enhance the situation awareness of individual leaders and the evacuation team in emergencies. Through the proposed system, leaders will receive real-time assistance regarding environmental hazards, evacuation procedures, requests for additional assistance, and the count of occupants in the building or specific areas, among other aspects, thereby enhancing overall situational awareness. Achieving this entails implementing a suitable sensory infrastructure, deploying intelligent algorithms to construct an artificial situation awareness, and crafting a user-centric interface design, all detailed in this contribution.The analytical discourse presented in this contribution high-lights the concept’s strength, while the mobile application’s and sensory infrastructure’s initial trials demonstrate its practical viability for real-world implementation.

Evacuating buildings during various emergencies, such as fire or terrorist attacks, requires high awareness of the environment, quick decision-making, and immediate action. In recent years, the research has increased regarding how to support this process and persons involved by dedicated technical means. However, still, a lot of questions remain unanswered. This contribution presents a concept and the first mobile application design as part of an intuitive evacuation assistance system for evacuation leaders to improve emergency situation awareness of individual leaders and the evacuation team. Using the proposed system, the leaders will get real-time support regarding environmental hazards, evacuation procedures, extra assistance requests, the number of people in the building or their area, etc., improving the overall situation awareness. This can be achieved by a proper sensory infrastructure, intelligent algorithms building an artificial situation awareness, and a user-focused interface design, as introduced in this contribution.The analytical discussion presented in this contribution points out the strength of the concept, and the first tests of sensory infrastructure presented show feasibility for real-world applications.

This paper concerns the novel concept of an Interactive Dynamic Intelligent Virtual Sensor (IDIVS), which extends virtual/soft sensors towards making use of user input through interactive learning (IML) and transfer learning. In research, many studies can be found on using machine learning in this domain, but not much on using IML. This paper contributes by highlighting how this can be done and the associated positive potential effects and challenges. An IDIVS provides a sensor-like output and achieves the output through the data fusion of sensor values or from the output values of other IDIVSs. We focus on settings where people are present in different roles: from basic service users in the environment being sensed to interactive service users supporting the learning of the IDIVS, as well as configurators of the IDIVS and explicit IDIVS teachers. The IDIVS aims at managing situations where sensors may disappear and reappear and be of heterogeneous types. We refer to and recap the major findings from related experiments and validation in complementing work. Further, we point at several application areas: smart building, smart mobility, smart learning, and smart health. The information properties and capabilities needed in the IDIVS, with extensions towards information security, are introduced and discussed.

Overallt samlar sensorer data som analyseras for att rakna ut hur man sparar energi, hur mycket insulin som ska injiceras, var den narmaste hyrbilen finns, hur manga manniskor som fortfarande ar kvar inne i en brinnande byggnad... Denna snabba spridning av teknik kallas for Sakernas Internet, eller IoT. Manniskor har makten, eller har vi verkligen det? Hur mycket varderar vi var integritet? Vilka internetanslutna gadgets hjalper oss att leva ett halsosamt och hallbart liv - och vilka prylar kommer bara att oka var stressniva? Nar blir anvandningen missbruk? Utstallningen undersoker hur IoT paverkar manniskor, samhalle och industri. Forskningsprojekt i utstallningen: Emergent Configuration for IoT Systems (ECOS+), Smart energy management and security (SEMS), Fair Data, Walk the ward, Dynamic Intelligent Sensor-Intensive Systems (DISS), PELARS-projektet och Busrunner presenteras i "IOTAP-labbet"

The Evolutionary Dungeon Designer (EDD) [1] is as a mixed-initiative tool for creating dungeons for adventure games. Results from a user study with game developers positively evaluated EDD as a suitable framework for collaboration between human designers and PCG suggestions, highlighting these as time-saving and inspiring for creating dungeons [2]. Previous work on EDD identified the need of assessing aesthetic criteria as a key area for improvement in its PCG Engine. By upgrading the individual encoding system and the fitness evaluation in EDD's evolutionary algorithm, we present three techniques to preserve and account the designer's aesthetic criteria during the dungeon generation process: the capability of locking sections for preserving custom aesthetic structures, as well as the measurement of symmetry and similarity in the provided suggestions.

Overallt samlar sensorer data som analyseras for att rakna ut hur man sparar energi, hur mycket insulin som ska injiceras, var den narmaste hyrbilen finns, hur manga manniskor som fortfarande ar kvar inne i en brinnande byggnad... Denna snabba spridning av teknik kallas for Sakernas Internet, eller IoT. Manniskor har makten, eller har vi verkligen det? Hur mycket varderar vi var integritet? Vilka internetanslutna gadgets hjalper oss att leva ett halsosamt och hallbart liv - och vilka prylar kommer bara att oka var stressniva? Nar blir anvandningen missbruk? Utstallningen undersoker hur IoT paverkar manniskor, samhalle och industri. Forskningsprojekt i utstallningen: Emergent Configuration for IoT Systems (ECOS+), Smart energy management and security (SEMS), Fair Data, Walk the ward, Dynamic Intelligent Sensor-Intensive Systems (DISS), PELARS-projektet och Busrunner presenteras i IOTAP-labbet

Mixed-initiative systems highlight the collaboration between humans and computers in fostering the generation of more interesting content in game design. In light of the ever-increasing cost of game development, providing mixed-initiative tools can not only significantly reduce the cost but also encourage more creativity amongst game designers. The Evolutionary Dungeon Designer (EDD) [3] is a mixed-initiative tool with a focus on using evolutionary computation to procedurally generate content that adhere to game design patterns. As part of an ongoing project, feedback from a user study on EDD's capabilities as a mixed-initiative design tool pointed out the need for improvement on the tool's functionalities [4]. In this paper we present a review of the principles of the mixed-initiative model, as well as the existing approaches that implement it. The outcome of this analysis allows us to address the appointed needs for improvement by shaping a new version of EDD that we describe here. Finally, we also present the results from a user study carried out with professional game developers, in order to assess EDD's new functionalities. Results show an overall positive evaluation of the tool's intuitiveness and capabilities for empowering game developers' creative skills during the design process of dungeons for adventure games. They also allow us to identify upcoming challenges pattern-based mixed-initiative tools could benefit from.

Mixed-initiative Procedural Content Generation uses algorithms to assist human designers in the collaborative creation of game content. Different mixed-initiative approaches use different methods to engage with the design material while supporting the designer's intentions. However, the designer runs the risk of misunderstanding the system's abilities and how to control them. In order to limit miscommunication during the design process, heuristics could be applied. In this paper we present a mixed-initiative tool for evolving dungeons with the aid of game design patterns as heuristics. The tool, the Evolutionary Dungeon Designer, uses a genetic algorithm that searches for levels containing game design patterns on two hierarchical levels of abstraction to express more complex gameplay in the game level. We evaluate the tool through a series of lab experiments and a user study conducted with professional game developers. Our results demonstrate that we are able to control the generation of the different patterns with the aid of design pattern-related input parameters, as well as identifying a number of features a design pattern-based mixed-initiative tool could benefit from.

Procedural Content Generation (PCG) can be a useful tool for aiding creativity in the process of designing game levels. Mixed-initiative level generation tools where a designer and an algorithm collaborate to iteratively generate game levels have been used for this purpose. However, it can be difficult for designers to work with tools that do not respond to the common language of games: game design patterns. We present the Evolutionary Dungeon Designer, the first step towards a mixed-initiative dungeon design tool which evolves dungeon rooms using game design patterns, as well as several metrics regarding the placement of treasures and enemies, in the fitness function of a genetic algorithm. Our results show that we are able to control the frequency, shape and type of design patterns, as well as properly place enemies and treasures in the generated rooms, using design pattern-related input parameters.