Page - 193 - in Intelligent Environments 2019 - Workshop Proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Intelligent Environments

Preface to the 3rd International Workshop on Legal Issues in Intelligent Environments (LIIE’19) Pedro Miguel FREITAS a , Ugo PAGALLO b and Massimo DURANTE b a Universidade Católica Portuguesa, Portugal b University of Torino, Italy Intelligent environments are without a doubt a great feat of technology, one of many that characterize the society of information and technology we now experience. Despite bringing recognizable advantages to the fulfillment of human needs by adapting the ecosystem around human intentionalities and activities, intelligent environments do bring about difficult challenges to the creation of normative frameworks that regulate their usage. Drafting and applying legal norms that are suitable to ever-evolving technologies means that, on one hand, not only legal practitioners, legislators and scholars must be prepared to closely monitor technological advances to adequately prepare and apply suitable legal norms, and, on the other hand, do so in a pace that is traditionally not common in law. This workshop is intended to create a forum of discussion between those who share a common interest in this area of intersection between technology (intelligent environments) and law. The creation of intelligent environments is without a doubt a great feat of technology, one of many that characterize the society of information and technology we now live in. They bring recognizable advantages to the fulfillment of human needs by adapting the ecosystem around human intentionalities and activities. They create a seamless convergence between technology and the physical world. Their presence is increasingly ubiquitous and has changed how we perceive and interact with the environment around us. Interestingly enough, the better the intelligent environments are thought out and implemented the more invisible and omnipresent they are. One of the main selling points of intelligent environments is the enhancement of everyday environments through awareness and interaction capabilities that are user-friendly and purposely unobtrusive and invisible. In our view, the potential of an intelligent environment is only grasped when it molds itself to fit the need of the user. It is therefore an instrument and not an end in itself. The pace with which intelligence is brought to the environment is intertwined with the development of technical breakthroughs in an interdisciplinary field where knowledge is drawn from areas such as microelectronics or communication technologies. Law, and its well-recognized lassitude, has struggled with hastiness of technological developments. Intelligent environments do bring about difficult challenges to the formulation of normative frameworks that regulate their usage. Drafting and applying legal norms that are suitable to ever-evolving technologies means that, on one hand, not Intelligent Environments 2019 A. Muñoz et al. (Eds.) © 2019 The authors and IOS Press. This article is published online with Open Access by IOS Press and distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License 4.0 (CC BY-NC 4.0). doi:10.3233/AISE190042 193