Journal of Pervasive and Mobile Computing

In order for a new technology to become widespread, novel tools and objects that realize and support it must be developed. On the road to the realization of the Ambient Intelligence (AmI) vision, new technological artifacts have started to appear and change the nature of almost every human activity. As the computer disappears, new Smart Objects appear, augmented with Information and Communication Technology (ICT) components (i.e. sensors, actuators, processor, memory, wireless communication modules) and able to receive, store, process and transmit information. Recently, Smart Objects have become mobile by combining research results from Robotics. In addition to objects, spaces also undergo a change towards becoming Smart Environments, which offer a set of digital services by embedding sensing, actuating, processing and networking infrastructure in a physical space.

An Ambient Ecology consists of smart objects, autonomous artifacts, portable objects, mobile robots, plain objects, services and people. Ambient Ecologies reside in Smart Environments. They can be thought of as distributed application platforms, which support the deployment of ubiquitous computing applications; the latter are developed as orchestrations of available services, features and capabilities in order to support user activity. While smart objects and environments focus on information storage and processing, the main feature of an Ambient Ecology is interaction: Smart Objects interact with each other and with the Smart Environment, people interact with the Ambient Ecology components or the applications these support, etc.

Ambient Ecologies integrate their, possibly heterogeneous, components, into a coherent whole. They exhibit systemic properties such as adaptation and learning; they may also exhibit emergent properties, as a consequence of the interactions among their components.

In this special issue, we are seeking high quality papers reporting original research results on topics that include, but are not limited to:

• Design frameworks, architectures and models of Ambient Ecologies, middleware and ubiquitous computing applications
• Design of smart and adaptive Ambient Ecology components, i.e. artifacts, robots, smart spaces, services, policies and applications
• Realization of system-level properties of Ambient Ecologies, i.e. reflection, self-awareness, self-configuration, and adaptation
• User interaction with Ambient Ecologies, including speech recognition and natural language processing, multimodal interaction, computer vision, gesture recognition, activity recognition, emotion and mood recognition etc
• Data/information processing, machine learning and decision making techniques in Ambient Ecologies
• Knowledge representation and management, management of heterogeneity and design of semantically rich Ambient Ecologies
• Plan and activity recognition, task and workflow modeling and realization
• Tools to engineer and maintain Ambient Ecologies
• Evaluation of Ambient Ecologies, including both formal evaluation, empirical evaluation and user studies
• Case studies of successfully deployed Ambient Ecologies

SUBMISSION PROCESS:

Authors should prepare and submit manuscripts according to the Guide for Authors as published in the Journal website at http://www.ees.elsevier.com/pmc/. Manuscripts must not have been previously published or currently under consideration for publication elsewhere. If a similar version of the paper has been published in a conference, the submitted version should contain significant additions/enhancements (with at least 33% new material). Authors are requested to submit their published conference articles and a summary document explaining the enhancements made in the journal version.

IMPORTANT DATES:

• Paper submission: March 22, 2010
• Notification: September 15, 2010
• Revised manuscripts: October 29, 2010
• Expected publication: May 2011

GUEST EDITORS:

• Achilles Kameas (Hellenic Open University & CTI, Greece)
• Alessandro Saffiotti (Orebro University, Sweden)