In February 2008, Quebec will host a brand new conference called “Ambi-sys 2008: First International Conference on Ambient Media and Systems”.

Major areas to be covered are:

- Media and Content Provision, which is defined to cover Integration of Multimedia within ambient systems, Multi-media processing, distribution and integration, Provision and acquisition of ambient information, Privacy, trust, accountability and dependability, Cognition, intelligence, ambience, adaptivity, self-organization and evolution, Multimedia and intelligent agents.

- Communications and Networking, which will be covering Wireless communication, Ambient sensors, actuators and networking, Quality of service and system performance, Digital home and smart living, Evolve-able and adaptive pervasive systems, Scalability, integration, and ubiquity.

- Human Interface and Interaction, which covers topics including Haptic immersive environments, Vision and recognition, Visualization and display, Sensor perception technologies, Context awareness, System personalization, System and human collaboration.

- Intelligence and Automation, which focuses on such topics as Ambient Intelligence, Services, delivery, applications and smart solutions, Multi-media knowledge management, acquisition and data fusion, Detection and knowledge elicitation, Prediction and self-learning, Middleware, Human-computer interaction in technology-rich environments.

The conference website is available here.

Arch Rock Corporation, the first company to offer IEEE 802.15.4 low- power wireless sensor network (WSN) systems incorporating IPv6—the latest and most scalable version of the ubiquitous Internet Protocol—has joined the IPv6 Forum. The IPv6 Forum was formed in 1999 to help create a high- quality and secure next-generation Internet with equitable worldwide access.

Arch Rock uses IPv6 in its Primer Pack/IP, a WSN solution introduced in March 2007. Primer Pack/IP was the first commercial implementation of the IETF 6LoWPAN standard, created to enable wireless IPv6 communication over IEEE 802.15.4 low-power radio for sensor nodes and other devices with limited power, memory and bandwidth. By running native IPv6 beyond the WSN gateway to the sensor nodes themselves, Primer Pack/IP enables the sensor nodes to communicate directly with other IP devices across the network and permits direct node access and management. Arch Rock contributed to the 6LoWPAN standard by helping to devise a means of compressing IPv6’s powerful addressing and header information to fit into small packets whose transmission consumes minimum energy.

More info here.