Weiser's vision has been used to justify and define new research within an extremely diverse collection of fields. It is increasingly evident that such research cannot be carried out in isolation. Research in this area is fundamentally multi-disciplinary, requiring the assimilation of problems and concepts from a variety of specializations. From our perspective, in its current state, ambient intelligence is only the latest stage in the evolution of informatics as a scientific discipline. In this chapter, we will provide an overview of the field in its current state.