[aaloa supporters] Thoughts related to the recent comments on the Lecce Declaration

[Mohammad-Reza Tazari]

For those who are following the comments on 
http://www.aalforum.eu/group/leccedeclaration

Dear Dirk,

some of my personal thoughts with regard to your comments are:

  * I guess, you would confirm that the same problem can be analyzed
    from different perspectives resulting in different sets of
    priorities. This does not necessarily mean that they contradict with
    each other; they might be even complementary!
  * The background of the line of work in this group has been the
    conclusions of an open workshop announced on May 2nd and taken place
    on June 7th (with 55 registrations within one month, of which 42
    have been present in the workshop). It is important to have a
    thorough look at the protocol of that meeting here
    <http://aaloa.org/workshops/amb11> (with recorded video, all
    presentations, and notes) in order to make sure that what has
    happened has not been "just the will of three people". 13 of the 17
    presentations at the workshop were added to the workshop program
    voluntarily (people who registered could apply to be a presenter and
    we had to ignore only two of them because of the lack of time but
    made slides for mentioning them in the workshop). The protocol
    itself was the result of three weeks of intensive discussions in a
    closed mailing list of workshop participants. => there is a good
    support in the AAL community also for the idea that creating
    ecosystems around open platforms has a certain priority.
  * It is naturally not possible to have a full discussion about the
    level of this priority here and now but I think it could be helpful
    to refer to the Track F of the AAL Forum 2010 in Odense
    <http://www.aaloa.org/Documents/AALForum2010/TrackF_proceedings>,
    especially to the summary of the panel discussion in session F.5 in
    its last paragraphs, which contains some analysis why this priority
    is not at an ignorable level.
  * My personal experience so far has been that indeed the real
    platform-level needs for developing AAL applications and providing
    AAL services are not very much specific to AAL. However, in my
    opinion, no other application domain has had a similar driving power
    for moving towards application-level interoperability in open
    distributed systems. I repeat here my comment on v3: "AAL is a
    multidisciplinary technological approach that involves (too) many
    different standards at diverse levels of hardware, software
    (architectures and interfaces), processes and services, data and
    content, etc. Considering that even simple sensors and actuators
    from a single domain are not interoperable by themselves, it should
    be obvious that the complexity increases dramatically when several
    different domains, such as health, well-being, comfort,
    entertainment, home automation, energy efficiency, and on top of
    that the innumerable possibilities for remote assistance are
    considered in a combined way for creating AAL applications and
    services. => It is impossible that all this complexity is under the
    control of one single entity!" For me, this means that targeting the
    creation of ecosystems around common open platforms is legitimate
    while it does not negate other perspectives at all.
  * AAL has forced us to think in terms of an "operating system" for
    open distributed systems; this is not a solved issue! It is one of
    the biggest technological challenges of the near future. We are
    already observing  the move of big enterprises to start to think in
    term of ensembles of devices (e.g., Google-Android way of
    interoperability between smart phones, tablets & TVs or the Apple
    way of interoperability between iPhones, iPads & iTVs -- However,
    likely, this is not sufficient and won't solve the AAL problem
    automatically as long as they do not consider the diversity problem
    mentioned in the previous bullet). Once few such "space-level
    operating systems" prove to have solved the problem, the real
    AAL-related competition on the market (the AAL market breakthrough)
    will start. This is what we call the ecosystem around common open
    platforms. The LD defines some measures for facilitating the process
    to get to there. This does not mean that nothing else should be
    targeted.

I hope, you find some interesting stuff in the above.

Kind regards,

-- Saied


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