Call for papers: "Emergence of Large-scale Ubiquitous Contexts Analysis"

For a special issue of the International Journal of Ad Hoc and Ubiquitous Computing.

Advances in smart object (i.e. sensor) development have prompted a dramatic change in our daily lives. We are currently surrounded by these objects, and it is never difficult to find that a considerable number of contexts (or ubiquitous contexts), which are considered efficient and effective in providing insights into specific realms, may be derived during the process. This phenomenon, meanwhile, also raises emerging issues in regard to well management of ubiquitous contexts. Management is not merely a technology that prompts ubiquitous search but also the basis of a wide variety of applications and services, such as recommendation, advertising and personalisation.

We have witnessed the explosive growth of ubiquitous data. Such scale brings significant challenges and profound impacts to both the management and processing of ubiquitous contexts. One significant instance is context indexing. It is very challenging for many annotation and semantic hashing algorithm to effectively and efficiently handle large-scale ubiquitous contexts, especially when the scale moves up from tens of thousands to tens of millions or even billions.

Fortunately, along with the growth of ubiquitous-related technologies, more and more resources have also become available, such as associated metadata, social information, etc. In addition, collaborative tagging, a representative behavior of the Web, enables the availability of tags for a large amount of ubiquitous contexts on the Internet. These aids have provided opportunities to tackle the difficulties of large-scale ubiquitous contexts management.

This special issue offers an open forum discussing emerging trends in large-scale ubiquitous contexts analysis, management and value recreation. The issue is also interested in looking at service architectures, protocols and standards for ubiquitous computing along with the related fundamental issues. Finally, the issue expects to explore works on novel applications and real-world services (and practices as well).

This issue will carry revised and substantially extended versions of selected papers (the top 5% or less) presented at

• the IEEE International Conference on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics (SMC’14); and
• the IEEE International Symposium on Independent Computing (ISIC’14).

However, submissions from researchers unable to participate in the above-mentioned conferences are also welcome and encouraged to submit their papers for this issue.

Suitable topics include, but are not limited to, the following:

• Models, algorithms and frameworks that build up ubiquitous context networks
• Representation (ontology, semantics, etc.) of context in ubiquitous environments
• Intelligence, awareness and optimisation of ubiquitous context
• Architectures, protocols, middleware and technologies for ubiquitous communications
• Software evolution and maintenance in ubiquitous systems
• Adaptive, autonomic and context-aware computing
• Opportunistic networking and sensing in ubiquitous-empowered systems
• Mobile cloud computing and wearable evaluation
• Ubiquitous sensing (e.g. participatory and social sensing)
• Internet of things - systems, data analytics and applications
• Multimodal sensing and context awareness
• Trust, security and privacy issues
• Context-awareness in human-centered computing (e.g. user interface, interaction and persuasion)
• Cognitive engineering and science (e.g. action theory, reasoning, modelling) in ubiquitous context processing
• Social computing and economic models
• Innovative ubiquitous computing applications, services and products
• Real-world practices, surveys and case studies

Important Dates
Paper submission: 31 May, 2015
Decision notification: 30 August, 2015
Revised paper submission: 15 November, 2015
Final paper submission: 15 January, 2016