We invite submissions for the special issue on Smart Environments in the KI journal!
Published by Springer, the scientific journal KI (Kuenstliche Intelligenz) is the German Journal on Artificial Intelligence. The journal offers current information and substantiated background knowledge to all relevant aspects of artificial intelligence.


SMART ENVIRONMENTS -- ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE -- HUMAN-MACHINE INTERACTION
Call for research papers, project and lab presentations
KI Special Issue -- Submissions by June, 30

Smart Environments aim to provide installations that support and enhance the abilities of humans in their regular life and possibly improve the environments themselves too, e.g., in terms of energy efficiency. Smart Environments are based on complex and distributed technical systems but they bear more challenges than the seamless composition of its components addressed in current research in technical disciplines. Setting technical challenges aside, providing intuitive interfaces to a system hidden in the environment and identifying means that allow the system automatically to provide suitable assistance for a wide range of every-day tasks involves several research questions.

Smart Environments are best described as an active field of research spanning several disciplines, but particularly related to Artificial Intelligence and Human-Machine Interaction. Since all applications penetrate our daily life with sensors, privacy becomes a central issue, too. This special issue aims at presenting a survey of the manifold AI-related research currently being performed, along with presentations of the projects and labs in which new ideas are conceived. Among the various disciplines involved, this issue addresses AI-related aspects and the interplay of AI and human-machine interaction, in particular AI techniques fostering new kinds of interaction, shedding some light onto questions such as:

* How can a ubiquitous system communicate its state of believe to a human?
* How can Smart Environments quickly comprehend a situation and user needs?
* How can a system adapt to users and how adaptive should it be?
* Which forms of knowledge representation help to form a shared mental model of system and user?
* How can user acceptance be measured efficiently and reliably?
* What are social and ethical implications of Smart Environments?
* Which are the most pressing use cases? What are their specific requirements?


Submission
----------
We welcome submissions for all kinds of articles published by KI, but especially
- genuine research articles (max. 7 pages in print incl. authors' vita)
- project presentations to highlight an important research question (4-6 pages)
- lab presentations to showcasing smart environment research installations and associated research (4-6 pages)

Please send your submissions via email directly to one of the guest editors listed below, please do not use the online submission system of the journal as otherwise submissions will not be associated with this special issue. Formatting guidelines (Latex and Word) can be found on the journal homepage, see "author instructions" on
http://www.kuenstliche-intelligenz.de

Please signal your interest in submitting a paper by sending a working title of your manuscript to the guest editors in advance.


Important dates
---------------
June 30, 2016 submission deadline
May 2017 journal publication


Editors
-------
Diedrich Wolter, University of Bamberg (DE), diedrich.wolter@uni-bamberg.de, guest editor
Alexandra Kirsch, University of Tuebingen (DE), alexandra.kirsch@uni-tuebingen.de, guest editor