New developments in pervasive and ambient information systems

Abstract

This special issue contains selected papers from the 2nd International Conference on Ambient Systems, Networks and Technologies (ANT 2011), which was held at Niagara Falls, Ontario, Canada, September 19–21, 2011. The conference attracted a large number of scientific papers that contributed to the state-of-the-art in the areas to the theme of the conference. All the papers selected for this special issue were subjected to a two rounds of rigorous review process. Based on the reviewers’ feedback, a total of seven papers were selected for publication from ten invited papers. The accepted papers cover interesting works on new developments in pervasive and ambient systems such as smart environments, environmental monitoring, information search and processing, and the practical use of smart devices in industrial applications. A brief summary is as follows. Identifying and recognizing objects in (indoor) smart environment is one of the challenging research areas in pervasive and ambient systems. The paper by Menon et al. proposes a novel model for identifying and tracking objects in smart environments. This work integrates recognition and spatio-temporal reasoning in order to achieve improved precision in smart environments. The proposed approach is evaluated through experimentation in terms of face recognition, which shows improved performance, precision, and recall. Wireless sensor network (WSN) augmented with ambient intelligence has interesting applications in home living. Rawi et al. in their paper develop WSN-based Human Comfort Ambient Intelligence system, which exploits fuzzy rules in order to measure human comfort index in a living space. It explores complex relationship among multiple comfort factors such as thermal, visual, and indoor air comfort factors. Further, the system is developed in a way such that it provides flexibility in terms of adding or removing comfort factors as well as sensor nodes. Trust is another important issue in providing truly smart environments in living spaces. El Husseini et al. propose a trust model that takes into account user’s past and present behavior. The proposed model utilizes a lightweight authentication key agreement protocol in order to ensure trust and to provide mutual authentication between communicating entities. The model is developed such that it optimizes the communication and processing of resource scare devices in smart environments. Al-Turjman et al. explore the utilization of WSN in environmental monitoring applications such as forestry. The large number of failures complicates the process of environmental monitoring as WSNs often suffer from physical damages and network partition. This paper proposes 3D grid-based deployment for relay nodes and is based on a minimum spanning tree construction. It is used in re-connecting the disjointed WSN sectors and has the potential to optimize various factors including: average relay node count and distribution, the scalability of the federated WSNs in large-scale applications, and the robustness of the topologies. Effective processing of queries in mobile ad hoc network is crucial in order to optimize performance, reduce energy consumption, and avoid failures. Nghiem et al. E. Shakshuki (&) Jodrey School of Computer Science, Acadia University, Wolfville, NS, Canada e-mail: elhadi.shakshuki@acadiau.ca