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Smart Spaces enhance user capabilities and comfort by providing new services and automated service execution based on sensed user activity. Though, when becoming really "smart", such spaces should not only provide some service automation, but further learn and adapt their behavior during use. This article motivates and investigates learning of situation models in a smart space, covering knowledge acquisition from observation as well as evolving situation models during use. An integral framework for acquiring and evolving different layers of a situation model is detailed. Different learning methods are presented as part of this framework: role detection per entity, unsupervised extraction of situations from multimodal data, supervised learning of situation representations, and the evolution of a predefined situation model with feedback. The situation model serves as frame and support for the different methods, permitting to stay in an intuitive declarative framework. An implementation of the whole framework for a smart home environment is described, and the results of several evaluations are depicted.

Oliver Brdiczka is a Scientific Researcher at PARC’s current Ubiquitous Computing research area. His research focus has been on building models of human behavior for providing novel assistive technology. His extensive experience in machine learning and statistical modeling has served in a number of research and commercial projects, including several European projects (IST CAVIAR, IST CHIL) and national French research projects (ANR CASPER). He has built a number of systems and prototypes in the past: situation and social activity detection system for France Telecom Research, a collaborative note taking and sharing system at TU Darmstadt, Germany, and activity logging and mining applications at PARC. He has chaired the 2nd and 3rd Workshops on Multimedia Technologies for E-Learning (MTEL), and has served as program committee member of the Workshop of Context Modeling and Reasoning (CoMoRea), and the Workshop on Social Computing with Mobile Phones & Sensors: Modeling, Sensing and Sharing.