Guest editorial

Citation

Syukur, E. and Garcia-Villalba, J. (2009), "Guest editorial", International Journal of Pervasive Computing and Communications, Vol. 5 No. 2. https://doi.org/10.1108/ijpcc.2009.36105baa.001

Guest editorial

Article Type: Guest editorial From: International Journal of Pervasive Computing and Communications, Volume 5, Issue 2.

With computing technology maturing, a multitude of computer-based services (ranging from controlling the lighting in the environment to booking a flight) can be made available for users anytime anywhere. Efficient and effective ubiquitous services and networking, lead to ubiquitous and smart intelligent computing environments. As for this special issue on ubiquitous intelligence and smart objects, systems and environments, we concern on providing mobile users with ubiquitous intelligence, depending on their contexts and in an automatic, responsive and attentive (to the user) manner.

The efficiency and effectiveness of ubiquitous intelligence and smart worlds lie on the foundation of integrating and connecting computer technology seamlessly and invisibly in our daily life. Basically, the term “ubiquitous intelligence and smart worlds” embraces people setting tasks, devices and environments working together, in order to enable them accessing services (information) seamlessly, while moving around in natural fashion. At the same time, the awareness and intelligence of software computing, involves computing devices being aware of their physical, as well as computational environment, enabling them to respond and interact intelligently to people.

This special issue on ubiquitous intelligence and smart objects, systems and environments is organized from the papers of the First International Workshop on Ubiquitous Smart Worlds and Intelligence (UISW 2005) in conjunction with the 19th IEEE International Conference on Advanced Information Networking and Applications (AINA-2005), which was published in Lecture Notes Computer Science. The UISW 2005 workshop was held at the Tamkang University, Taipei, Taiwan, from March 28-30, 2005. The workshop received 44 submissions from 12 countries. Each submitted paper was peer-reviewed by three referees from the technical committees based on its quality and significance. Only half of the submitted papers were selected and included in the proceedings and presentations of UISW 2005.

All the selected authors were encouraged to submit their revised manuscripts to this special issue and ten submissions, we received in total. We carefully reviewed all the journal submissions, and four papers were finally selected, based on their quality and suitability to the journal special issue. The selected papers address various aspects of ubiquitous networking, intelligence, smart objects, environments and systems.

The first paper in this special issue, entitled “Application development environment for event-driven ubiquitous devices” is presented by Sagara et al. The authors describe the requirements of an application development environment for ubiquitous devices. Moreover, they describe the design and implementation environment for ubiquitous chips. The proposed development environment provides various functions for users to intuitively develop/customize applications. Finally, the authors present an example of an application development to show the effectiveness of their approach.

The second paper “Baton: a service manager for better sustaining agent coordination in smart spaces” by Suo et al. focuses on a service management system to enhance the coordination mechanism of multi-agent systems in smart spaces. The authors present Baton, a service management system to explicitly resolve the particular issue stemming from smart spaces when coordinating agents. Services in Baton are described by well-defined structures, getting the processes of service discovery and composition more accurate and efficient. Solutions for request collisions are modeled as binary integer linear programming problems, which makes it easy to solve the collisions and in the mean while, keep changes of service dependencies to the minimum. Thus, Baton has been designed as a complement to coordination approaches in multi-agent systems with a focus on mechanisms for service discovery, composition, request arbitration and dependency maintenance. The effectiveness and efficiency of Baton has been validated by some evaluation experiments.

The third paper “ENME: an ENriched MEdia application utilizing context for session mobility in a telecom system” by Østhus et al. describes the opportunity to combine IP-based multimedia telephony applications with context-aware information that can be used in smart and ubiquitous computing environments. This results an Enriched Media application (known as ENME). To show the feasibility of the proposed concepts, a prototype of an ENME was implemented and demonstrated based on a model railroad system. The proposed application has been evaluated thoroughly, in particular on the health-care environments. The experimental results concluded that human and organizational aspects play important roles in order to handle better session transfers for an ongoing communication.

The last paper by Zamudio and Callaghan is entitled “Understanding and avoiding interaction-based instability in pervasive computing environments”. The authors focus on the fundamental issue related to the interaction of rule-based autonomous agents in pervasive computing and intelligent environments. The framework called interaction networks (IN) was implemented, in order to describe, analyze and eliminate the situations in multi-agent systems that can lead to unwanted periodic behaviors. The experimental results show that using IN, Multidimensional Model (MDM), Instability Prevention System (INPRESS), and Interaction Benchmark and intelligent locking techniques help to identify and prevent such unwanted cyclic behaviors related to the interaction of rule-based autonomous agents.

Last but not least, we would like to take this opportunity to thank all authors, who have submitted their papers to the IJPCC special issue. Authors have also been very punctual in the submission process, as well as, patient in all stages of publication process. We also thank the referees from the UISW 2005 for their valuable comments, which help authors to revise, and improve the quality of their papers. A very special thanks to the Editors in Chief of the International Journal of Pervasive Computing and Communications (IJPCC), Prof Laurence T. Yang, St Francis Xavier University and Prof. Jianhua Ma, Hosei University. They kindly supported, and guided us at all stages of the publication process, as well as, helped us in publishing this special issue.

Evi SyukurSchool of Computer Science and Engineering, The University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia

Javier García-VillalbaDepartamento de Ingenieria del Software e Inteligencia Artificial, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Madrid, Spain