IJSC Special Issue on ASC

• Iryna Gurevych (Ubiquitous Knowledge Processing Lab, Technische Universität Darmstadt, Germany)
• Max Mühlhäuser (Telecooperation Division, Technische Universität Darmstadt, Germany)

This special issue of the International Journal of Semantic Computing (IJCS www.worldscinet.com/ijsc) is concerned with novel methods, algorithms, and concepts which fruitfully combine ambient intelligence and semantic technologies, called ambient semantic computing.

By ‘ambient intelligence’, we refer to distributed, mobile, and ubiquitous computing approaches that emphasize the dawning era of networked ‘anytime anywhere’ computers, which users wear and encounter in everyday life – without perceiving them as computers. Context-aware computing, multimodal and tangible interaction, and smart environments are examples for relevant research fields in ambient intelligence.

By ‘semantic technologies’, we refer to natural language processing (NLP), knowledge related research, and computer perception approaches (e.g. handwriting and speech recognition, computer vision, multimedia analysis, situation detection, etc.) that target ‘human understanding’ of the ‘perceived media’. Examples of relevant NLP technologies are spoken dialogue interfaces, natural language information search, question answering and NLP-based methods in service or software search, discovery, composition or maintenance.

We are convinced that the vision of ambient intelligence, i.e. a world of omnipresent ‘hidden’ computers that truly aid human beings can only be achieved if these computers can deal with concepts that reflect human understanding and common sense. Therefore, the ‘smartness’ of ambient intelligence must be combined with the ‘naturalism’ of semantic technologies.

Topics to be addressed include, but are not limited to:

• language-based and multimodal human-computer interfaces for ambient intelligence
• combinations of distributed systems and natural language processing technologies to support knowledge work
• unstructured information management methods for semantically enabled software
• next generation public security based on ambient intelligence and semantic technologies
• situational context used to improve information management and NLP context used for context-sensitive ubiquitous computing
•  ‘natural’ concepts for combining human and computer-based trust, privacy, reliability etc.
• concepts and methods, resources and tools for the development of ambient semantic computing systems

• Deadline for paper submission: 28.02.2008
• Notification of acceptance: 30.04.2008
• Camera-ready version of accepted paper: 31.05.2008
• Target publication date: 30.06.2008 

Papers should be submitted to the guest editors {gurevych|max} @tk.informatik.tu-darmstadt.de

Latex-2e instructions can found at
http://www.worldscinet.com/style_files/ijsc/214-ijsc_2e.zip

MS-Word instructions can be found at
http://www.worldscinet.com/style_files/ijsc/214-ijsc_doc.zip