Dear Colleagues,

As technology permeates into every aspect of our lives and becomes embedded in the environments that we encounter on a daily basis, the dreams for a world of ubiquitous computing are being realised. Augmented by the deployment of artificial intelligence, the technology rich spaces that surround us are given an ambient intelligence where software samples the real world, reasons with available information and pro-actively takes action. Much work has been done in this area as reflected by the literature, but as we delve further, the scale of the environments we envision increases. This special issue is intended to focus specifically on the challenges related to scaling-up intelligent environments research “beyond four walls”.

Within the context of this special issue, we consider an Intelligent Environment (IE) to be a ubiquitous computing deployment, preferably (but not necessarily) with some form of ambient intelligence. And so, a “large-scale” IE (LSIE) goes beyond the size of “normal” experimental labs and can be defined as adhering to one or more of the following characteristics:

• Monolithic: Large ubiquitous computing environments that exist as a whole and typically contain several physical sub-spaces (e.g. multi-room apartment, entire building, campus, town, city, etc.).
• Composite: Environments composed of multiple geographically or organisationally separated IEs that are electronically joined to form a larger compound. For example, a building that is not a monolithic IE, but composed of several independent IEs, or a “virtual University” that is composed of several classrooms from different countries and electronically linked to transcend their physical separation.
• Virtual-reality: Software simulations that are entirely virtual and model an IE on the scale of at least a multi-room/multi-floor building.
• Mixed-reality: Physical Environments that are extended/reflected by some component of virtual reality to enlarge their scale.

We are interested in papers that present new and novel approaches to the core problem area and are especially interested in real-world deployments (i.e. “living-labs”), experimental results and technology or software that facilitates the transition of users and their digital assets/profiles as they roam between IEs.

Dr. Mohamed Rashid Al-Mulla
Dr. James Peter Dooley
Guest Editors

• pervasive computing
• ambient intelligence
• infrastructure and middleware
• scalability
• mobile/portable computing
• mixed reality
• intelligent interactive systems
• internet of things