The Challenges in Engineering Intelligent Environments

Dear Colleagues,

The creation of intelligent environments and ubiquitous computing systems is a blend of technology, people, applications, communication systems, and computational intelligence. Intelligent environments have demonstrated advantages in building a sustainable world, both at the personal and societal scales. Building and evaluating the social, environmental, and economic impacts of intelligent technologies is an ongoing effort. The vision of having always available, adaptive, calming, and capable intelligent systems around us to help and support our lives has been a significant engineering challenge. Balancing, evaluating, and improving on each of these areas has been a continued effort to improve the capabilities and utility of intelligent environments since the field was founded decades ago. This Special Issue is designed to gather updates and investigations into the challenges of engineering these intelligent environments with a focus on how they can help create a sustainable world.

Recent advances in low power processing, low power communications, natural language processing, new computational intelligence algorithms, thermal controls, and embedded processing have opened significant opportunities and risks for intelligent systems, often under the umbrella of the Internet of Things. The new features of intelligent systems also present challenges of personal data collection, information security, and personal safety. Integrating and rigorously evaluating these tools should help us understand how effective they are at improving the sustainable intelligent environments our communities may deploy.

This Special Issue on challenges in engineering intelligent environments seeks research papers updating the state of the art in all aspects of the engineering effort. This includes, but is not limited to:

• Social, Environmental, and Economic impacts on sustainability
• Novel sensors
• Human factors
• User interfaces and natural interface systems
• Low energy devices
• Computational intelligence
• Evaluation of existing systems
• Personal data security, privacy, and protection
• Wireless and protocol communications
• Embedded systems
• Processing pipelines
• HVAC and environmental controls

Intelligent systems have made strides in the areas of general life comfort, home security, energy efficiency, healthcare, social engagement, healthy living, and transportation. Updates and formal evaluation of technologies in all of these areas are welcome, though the editors are especially interested in novel applications of intelligent environments in the area of sustainability. The overall goal is to update and report on the state of the art in the field.

Please consider submitting your research to this Special Issue.

Sincerely,

Dr. Aaron S. Crandall
Dr. Brian L. Thomas
Dr. Bryan Minor
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Sustainability is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• intelligent environments
• energy efficiency
• social technologies
• sustainable systems
• engineering
• human factors
• ubiquitous computing
• sensors
• user interfaces
• embedded systems
• artificial intelligence
• adaptive systems
• wearable computing