Over the past years, the information and communication technology (ICT) industry has focused principally on rolling out evermore sophisticated mobile and wireless technologies that increasingly permeate all aspects of everyday life.We are getting progressively dependent on computers and communications networks. As individual devices have become smaller in size and more powerful, they have increasingly been linked together within complex networks. Before the end of this decade (2005–2015), seamless broadband communication networks will be spanning from the personal area to the regional and global area. This will be made possible by meshing all sorts of different computing and communication networks, whether these are fixed wired and wireless networks; third or higher generation mobile networks; wireless personal area networks (PANs) and local area networks (LANs); satellites; or any other.

The distinct processes of communication and computation will be linked together within miniature artefacts and objects—“smart” devices—with sensing, computational, pervasive, autonomic, and self-organizing capabilities. These artefacts will be embedded or “hidden” in the environment and communicate with each other. Their linked communications will underlie the creation of distributed and self-regulating systems that are adapted to human needs. These semi-intelligent and highly adaptive networks will augment the physical environment with new properties, enhancing its interaction with people, while keeping the underlying system out of sight. The aim will be to hide the overall system complexity, preserve human attention by delivering us only information that is rich with meanings and contexts and provide stable functionality, with functions being revealed only “on-demand, anywhere, and anytime.”We expect—indeed, it seems virtually certain—that these new network resources will, especially in combination, stimulate a new generation of personalized applications and services. Such situated and cooperating smart artefacts, whether in the form of sensors, actuators, robotic devices, tags, or whatsoever will boost the creation of new ambient environments that are tailored to individual needs and will increasingly link the real and the virtual world. These massively distributed systems will all mesh together to form “dynamic ecosystems” that are immersed in computerized ambient environments, and growing and adapting themselves to the evolving needs of individual users and communities.