aire is dedicated to examining how to design pervasive computing systems and applications for people. To study this, aire designs and constructs Intelligent Environments (IEs), which are spaces augmented with basic perceptual sensing, speech recognition, and distributed agent logic.

aire's IEs have encompassed a large range of form factors and sizes, from a pocket-sized computer up to networks of conference rooms. Each of these serve as individual platforms, or airespaces on which pervasive computing applications can be layered. Examples of aire applications currently under development include a meeting manager and capture application, contextual and natural language information retrieval, and a sketch interpretation system (developed by the Design Rationale Group).

aire forms a core component of MIT's pervasive computing project, Project Oxygen