Ambient Systems (ISSN: 2032-927X)

Description

The design of Ambient Systems is a cross disciplinary endeavour aimed at supporting and augmenting people’s activities in everyday life, by embedding computational intelligence in the distributed network of devices available in their living environment. While technology needs to become more and more invisible to provide smart support, novel forms of user experience and multimodal interaction need to be devised to enable fluid, intuitive and appealing transitions between the physical and digital world.
This journal seeks contributions from leading experts and visionary thinkers in industry and research, about the principles, interaction paradigms, methods and applications that best can drive the future design of Ambient Systems and their human-centred, situated interfaces.
Relevant topics covered by this journal concern:
Methods and tools for the development of Pervasive Environmental infrastructure
Design of highly immersive contents for Ambient Media
Trustful mechanisms for context awareness, social sensing and inference
AIterative design and evaluation studies of multimodal interfaces
Adaptive and personalized solutions for ambient intelligence
Embodied agents and affective interfaces
Personal, social, safety and ethical issues raised by Ambient system applications, such as Domotics, Ambient Assisted Living, Pervasive Edutainment Environments
Keywords

Pervasive/Ubiquitous Computing and Applications; Multimodal Interaction Design; Context awareness, social sensing and inference; Automatic Behavioural Analysis; Embedded Smart Agents; Advanced Networking Architectures; User Experience studies of Ambient Media content; Security, Privacy and Trust; User Preferences and decision-making processes in Ambient Systems; User adoption and appropriation of Ambient Systems; Mixed Reality applications; Smart Homes; Ambient Assisted Living.
Editors-in-Chief
Silvia Gabrielli is a senior researcher in the Ubiquitous Interaction group at the CREATE-NET Research Consortium, Trento (Italy), which she joined in 2010. Since 2008 she is also adjunct Professor of Human-Computer Interaction at the University of Trento (Faculty of Cognitive Sciences) within the Interfaces and Communication Technologies BSc Program. Over the last ten years she has been research scientist at FBK-IRST (Trento), HCI-Lab University of Udine, DIS University of Rome La Sapienza, Interaction Design Institute Ivrea (Torino) and Interact Lab (University of Sussex, Brighton, UK). She received her Ph.D. in Cognitive Sciences and a Master degree in Psychology from the University of Padova (I) in 2001 and 1994 respectively. Her research interests include the human-centred design of Smart Environments and Interfaces for Personal Healthcare, Assisted Living and Edutainment.
Tiziana Catarci got her Ph.D. in Computer Engineering in 1992 from the University of Roma “La Sapienza”, Italy. From 1987 to 1990, from 1990 to 1998, and from 1998 to 2000 she was research assistant, assistant professor and associate professor respectively at the University of Roma “La Sapienza”, where she is now a full professor. Her main research interests are in theoretical and application oriented aspects of visual formalisms for databases, information visualization, database design, cooperative information systems, user interfaces, usability, digital libraries, data quality and Web access. On these topics she has published over 150 papers in leading journals and conferences and 20 books. Her contribution can be regarded as one of the first and most significant examples of deep analysis and formalization of the interaction between the user and the database, which takes in consideration both usability issues and language related aspects.
With respect to applications, she has led or participated in various projects on visual query systems, usability studies and developed methodologies for database design. Particularly relevant are some European projects, including KIM, VENUS, FADIVA, LAURIN, SEWASIE,DELOS, Interop, WORKPAD, SM4All, aiming at investigating different aspects of interface design and human-computer interaction. Outside of academia, she has been a consultant to large (private and government) organisations. Since January 2009, she is delegate provost for ICT at “La Sapienza”. Dr. Catarci is regularly in the programming committees of the main database and human-computer interaction conferences and is associate editor of ACM SIGMOD Digital Symposium Collection (DiSC), VLDB Journal, World Wide Web Journal, and Journal of data Semantics. She has been associate editor of IEEE MULTIMEDIA for several years. She has been the PC Co-chair of WISE 2003 and of ODBASE 2004, the Workshop co-chair of Interact 2005, and the tutorial co-chair of VLDB 2006. In 2008, she has been the Note Co-chair of the 2008 edition of the largest and most important conference on human-computer interaction, ACM CHI. In 2009 she is one of the Track Chairs of ICDE 2009. She has been the organizing chair of the 27th International Conference on Very Large Databases (VLDB2001), has been the program co-chair of the Fifth IFIP Working Conference on Visual Database Systems (VDB5) and has been the program co-chair of the International Workshop on Advanced Visual Interfaces (AVI) in 1996 and is in the AVI steering committee. AVI is bringing together researchers in Human Computer Interaction and Databases since 1992. She has been guest co-editor of two special issues of the Journal of Visual Languages and Computing (on “Visual Query Languages”), of ACM SIGMOD Record (on “Information Visualization”), of Information Systems (on “Data quality” and on “Data and Service Integration”), of the WWWJ (on “Multi-channel Adaptive Information Systems on the World Wide Web”) and of the VLDB Journal (on “Metadata Management”).
Editorial Board
Context Aware Systems, Architectures and Services Embedded Systems
Schahram Dustdar
Technical University of Wien, Austria
Ambient Media, Context Awareness
Artur Lugmayr
Tampere University of Technology (TUT), Finland
Usability of Intelligent Systems, User-Adaptive Systems and Intelligent User Interfaces, User-Centred Design of Systems Based on Semantic
Anthony Jameson
DFKI, Germany
Multimedia Content Analysis, Social Signal Processing
Alessandro Vinciarelli
IDIAP, Switzerland
Glasgow University, UK
Context Aware Middleware, Mobile Mixed Reality Interaction, 3D Modelling in AR/VR, Multimodal Interaction
Pedro Santos
Fraunhofer IGD, Germany
Ubiquitous Computing, Smart Environments, Adaptive User Interfaces, Usability and Interaction
Oscar Mayora
CREATE-NET, Trento, Italy