CFP: Special Issue on "Ambient Ecologies" of Journal of Pervasive and Mobile Computing

A recent trend in robotics generalizes the notion of a "robotic system" to include distributed networked systems consisting of robots, sensors, small devices, and software agents.  Witness of this trend is the emergence of new areas like Networked Robots and Ubiquitous Robotics.  A complementary trend in pervasive computing extends the notion of "pervasive computer system" to include devices that interact with the physical world through sensors and actuators.  Witnesses of this trend are the areas of Cyber-Physical Systems and Cooperating Objects.  Unfortunately, work along these two trends is often confined within its specific community, and potential for cross-fertilization is wasted because of lack of common venues.  The ambition of this special issue is to provide a bridge between the Robotics and the Pervasive Computing communities.

An "Ambient Ecology" consists of mobile robots, smart objects, autonomous artifacts, portable objects, plain objects, services and people.  Ambient Ecologies reside in Smart Environments.  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.

The aim of this special issue is to collect in a single place a collection of high-quality papers reporting original research results on topics that are central to the study and development of Ambient Ecologies.
Full Call for Papers:

• http://aass.oru.se/Agora/JPMC10/

Paper submission deadline:

• April 26, 2010

Guest Editors:

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