"The Helpful Environment" vision is of a future in which ubiquitous computing, sensor grids and networked systems combine to help the individuals, families, businesses, organizations, the public at large, regions and countries to be self supportive and mutually helpful with specialised resources for their daily lives, for help and assistance in emergencies. The vision, some international programmes which contribute to it, some of the organisations that are pursuing this vision and some of the Edinburgh projects and research that will we hope will help make it a reality are described in this paper:

• Tate, A. (2006) The Helpful Environment: Geographically Dispersed Intelligent Agents That Collaborate, Special Issue on "The Future of AI", IEEE Intelligent Systems, May-June 2006, Vol. 27, No. 3, pp 57-61. IEEE Computer Society.
• http://www.aiai.ed.ac.uk/project/ix/documents/2006/2006-ieee-is-tate-helpful-env-as-published.pdf

More details of the research that is contributing to this vision is at:

• http://www.aiai.ed.ac.uk/project/plan/

For related work see these links:

• IBM Smarter Planet Programme
• Introduction - http://www.ibm.com/smarterplanet/us/en/overview/ideas/index.html?re=sp2
• Blog - http://asmarterplanet.com/
• IBM's vision is to bring a new level of intelligence to how the world works