Abstract
The European Union's Information Society Technologies Program Advisory Group (ISTAG), in its 1999 vision statement, coined the term “ambient intelligence” (AmI) to portray the image where “people will be surrounded by intelligent and intuitive interfaces embedded in everyday objects and an environment recognizing and responding to the presence of individuals in an invisible way.” For more than a decade since then, the AmI vision has been substantially developed and enriched with research initiatives devoted to the analysis of the technical, social, ethical and legal implications that this upcoming technological setting will bring about. This article contributes to the recent and prolific literature on the topic, focusing in one very important component of the AmI scenario: the massive deployment of a new generation of intelligent agents, embedded in the environment and adaptive to the users' profiles, preferences and needs. The paper provides a short description of the future environment where these agents will operate, the Ambient Intelligence scenario, and proposes one overarching term to denominate the new breed of intelligent agents within the AmI context: the “A.I.vatar”. The article underlines the unique features of these agents, distinguishing them from similar entities, namely the “traditional” intelligent software agents and the avatars. The paper concludes with a series of legal remarks pointing to future research directions on the topic.