Preface to JAISE 13(2)

Vincent Tam, Hamid Aghajan, Juan Carlos Augusto, Andrés Muñoz
2021 Journal of Ambient Intelligence and Smart Environments  
whom we thank for their service. Recent advancement in computing, communication and sensing technologies have empowered many Cyber-Physical System (CPS) and Internet of Things (IoT) platforms for assisted living, Industry 4.0, intelligent buildings, smart healthcare, and robotics. Most of the real-world CPS and IoT platforms typically involve a vast amount of sensory data stored in a diversity of formats with different data annotation or models. Therefore, to build a reliable computational
more » ... for recognising human activities accurately, the continuous, detailed and high-quality annotation of sensory data is a very important yet challenging task. The article "Shared learning activity labels across heterogeneous datasets" by Ye explores the solution space of sharing annotated activities across different datasets in order to enhance the accuracies of human activity recognition methods. A major difficulty in performing such tasks lies in resolving heterogeneity in the feature and activity spaces between these diverse datasets. For example, each dataset may have a different number of sensors with heterogeneous sensing technologies which may be deployed in a diversity of environments with various activities to be recorded for different users. To address the challenge, data sharing as well as classification algorithm sharing approaches have been developed that feature the knowledge model to enable computationally-efficient feature space remapping and uncertainty reasoning for effective classifier fusion. Besides recording and recognising human activities with accuracy and timeliness, smart environments such as intelligent buildings are tasked to provide comfort to end users while saving energy through intelligent control systems. Intelligent systems have been reported to offer comfort to a single user or averaging the comfort of multiple users without considering their individual needs. The article "A novel model for optimization of intelligent multi-user visual comfort system based on soft-computing algorithms" by Romero-Rodríguez et al. proposes a versatile model for a multi-user intelligent system that coordinates the resources of the environment to offer visual comfort to multiple users with different user profiles, activities and priorities utilizing soft-computing algorithms. In addition, this model makes use of external lighting to provide the recommended level of illumination for each individual user without having to solely rely on artificial lighting in order to also save energy. In addition to various intelligent control systems, ubiquitous monitoring devices such as video cameras have been redesigned into smaller and smarter forms for integration into numerous smart environments to enable the provision of innovative applications and services which support the well-being of end-users in healthcare or other sectors. To fully realise the potential benefits associated with ubiquitous monitoring, it is important to understand the role of user perception. The article "Factors that influence user perception of ubiquitous monitoring environments: An empirical study in a developing country" by Wiafe et al. investigates the factors that influence user perceptions of ubiquitous monitoring devices by carefully extracting and examining samples from a groups of participants.
doi:10.3233/ais-210595 fatcat:yzlk2aaq3belde2z45iv75pmq4