COGITO: A Platform for Developing Cognitive Environments

A cognitive environment (CE) is a smart environment having self-learning and self-adaptation capabilities. It is obtained by augmenting a physical environment by using IT equipment and artificial intelligence technologies. The goal is to furnish the environment’s dwellers and the environment itself with advanced services devoted to (i) improving the quality of life of the people, (ii) optimizing the use of shared resources and spaces, (iii) increasing security and safety, (iv) assisting people in daily life activities, (v) extending the lifetime of devices and infrastructures, and (vi) enforcing and actuating policies promoting sustainability, green-aware behaviors, and energy-saving management of the whole system. Realizing a CE is a complex and multidisciplinary task. It requires transversal skills among which those related to distributed systems, IoT and artificial intelligence technologies, and networking. In addition, suitable methodological approaches and platforms could be leveraged in order to deal with the complex process of designing and implementing a CE. In this chapter, as enabling technology, the COGITO platform is introduced. COGITO is an agent-based IoT platform tailored to the development of CEs in a heterogeneous continuum computing environment comprising cloud, fog, and edge resources. The practical use of the platform is demonstrated through some use cases developed at the ICAR-CNR headquarter at Rende (Italy).