Introduction to the thematic issue
Juan Antonio Botía, Simon J. Egerton, Hedda Rahel Schmidtke · Journal of Ambient Intelligence and Smart Environments · 2013
This special issue is focussed on context awareness aspects within Smart Environments. Context awareness is one of the key features of Smart Environments, touching all layers of Ambient Intelligence from sensors and networks to Artificial Intelligence and interaction modalities. One of the questions related to Artificial Intelligence is, for example, how to appropriately represent context, or how to enable a smartphone to know a user’s context and to adapt its behavior so as to optimally support them. Appropriate handling of context information is central to enabling intelligence in the services and applications offered in smart environments. Intelligence is the key for adaptive systems and adaptiveness is the key for Smart Environments that support their inhabitants in a non-obtrusive manner that facilitates everyday activities. We believe that this long term usefulness will pave the way towards commercially successful Smart Environments. Research about context regards several key parameters: among the most important, and best established is location. Location based services are among the first economically successful context aware systems, and location is still an active research topic within the Smart Environments field. However, context information also includes time, user interests and preferences, social context, current activity, plans and schedules. As systems shift from the labs of researchers into the homes of customers, cognitive aspects of the human user have to be considered, and concepts of personalization and long term user monitoring need to be ad-