School Of Computer Science Research Articles

From Conventional Wireless Sensor Networks to Smart Grids

1 Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Western Ontario, London, ONT, Canada N6A 5B9 2 Electrical and Computer Engineering Department, University of Miami, Coral Gables, FL 33146, USA 3 Electrical and Computer Engineering Department, Stevens Institute of Technology, Hoboken, NJ 07307, USA 4China Electric Power Research Institute, No. 15, Xiaoying Road, Qinghe, Haidian, Beijing 100192, China 5 School of Computer Science, University of Windsor, Windsor, ONT, Canada N9B 3P4

Dimensions of Perceived Support for Innovation Scale: A Comparison of Students from Only Child and Multiple Children Families in a Chinese University

Aims: The study aim was to develop the perceived support for innovation scale, and compare the students from only child and multiple children families in a Chinese university on this scale. Study design: This was a cross sectional survey design. Place and Duration of Study: School of Psychology, School of Computer and Information Science and Software, Southwest University, China, from December 2012 to August 2013. Methodology: A total of 813 (males = 279 and females = 534) university students selected randomly at the Southwest University, China participated in the study. The mean age of participants was 20.15 (SD = 1.034).The participants completed a measure of perceived support for innovation. Original Research Article British Journal of Education, Society & Behavioural Science, 4(5): 633-646, 2014 634 Results: The means of perceived support for innovation were from low (3.23+/-0.76) to high (3.81+/-0.67) for students from only child families and from low (3.14+/-0.65) to high (3.71+/-0.62) for students from multiple children families. There were differences in the family support (t =3.962, df =811, p<.001) and team support (t =2.824, df =811, p<.01) between the two groups. Nonparametric tests showed that the median and 1st quartile of students from only child and multiple children families were same. The items of cumulative percentages of score 4 and 5 less than 60% for students from only child families had 11 items, and for students from multiple children families had 14 items (11 items were same as students from only child families). Conclusion: The inclusiveness, family support and teacher encouragement of perceived support for innovation in students from only child and multiple children families were relatively higher, and team support and resource security were lower. The family support and team support perceived by students from only child families were significantly higher than students from multiple children families.

Special Issue on: Model and Data Engineering

We welcome you to this special issue dedicated to the best papers presented at the second International Conference on Model and Data Engineering (MEDI) that was held in Poitiers, France in October 2012. MEDI, initiated by researchers from Euro-Mediterranean countries, aims at promoting the creation of north–south scientific networks, projects and faculty/student exchanges as well as of other parts of the world. The first edition of MEDI was held in Obidos, Portugal, in September 2011. MEDI promotes the interaction and collaboration of research communities issued from modelling and system modelling on the one hand and data and data modelling on the other hand. However, the explosion of the volume of data, models, processes within organizations has brought up new requirements and research issues, in particular to copewith problems related to semantic modelling, deployment, exploitation, performance, personalization or recommendation. Each year, MEDI invites world-known researchers to give talks. In the first edition, Timos Sellis presently at RMIT University in the School of Computer Science and Information Technology, Australia gave a talk about Personalization in Web search and data management, and Mandy

Correction: Limited-Memory Fast Gradient Descent Method for Graph Regularized Nonnegative Matrix Factorization

Affiliation number 1 for the first, second, and third authors is incorrect. The correct affiliation is: National Laboratory for Parallel and Distributed Processing, School of Computer Science, National University of Defense Technology, Changsha, Hunan, China.

Beamforming Techniques for Wireless MIMO Relay Networks

1 Department of Digital Systems, School of ICT, University of Piraeus, 18534 Piraeus, Greece 2 Department of Information and Communication Systems Engineering, University of the Aegean, 83200 Karlovassi, Samos Island, Greece 3 School of Computer Science and Electronic Engineering, University of Essex, Wivenhoe Park, Colchester CO4 3SQ, UK 4 IEMN, UMR CNRS 8520 and IRCICA, USR CNRS 3380 and Telecom Lille, Institut Mines Telecom, Lille, France

A simulation study on the effects of dendritic morphology on layer V PFC pyramidal cell firing behavior

Event Abstract Back to Event A simulation study on the effects of dendritic morphology on layer V PFC pyramidal cell firing behavior Maria Psarrou1, 2, 3, Stefanos Stefanou1, Alexandra Tzilivaki1, 4, Athanasia Papoutsi1, Vassilis Cutsuridis1 and Panayiota Poirazi1* 1 Foundation of Research and Technology, Institute of Molecular Biology and Biotechonogy, Greece 2 Science and Technology Research Institute, United Kingdom 3 University of Hertfordshire, School of Computer Science, United Kingdom 4 University of Crete, Department of Biology, Greece The majority of neuronal cells found in the cerebral cortex are pyramidal neurons. Their function has been associated with higher cognitive and emotional functions. Pyramidal neurons have a characteristic structure, consisting of a triangular shaped soma whereon descend two extended and complex dendritic trees, and a long bifurcated axon. All the morphological components of the pyramidal neurons exhibit significant variability across different brain areas and layers. Pyramidal cells receive numerous synaptic inputs along their structure, integration of which in space and in time generates local dendritic spikes that shape their firing pattern. In addition, synaptic integration is influenced by voltage-gated and ion channels, which are expressed in a large repertoire by pyramidal neurons. Electrophysiological categories of pyramidal cells can be established, based on the action potential frequency, generated from a fixed somatic stimulus: (1) cells that fire repetitive action potentials (Regular Spiking – RS), (2) cells that fire clusters of 2 – 5 action potentials with short ISIs (Intrinsic Bursting – IB), and (3) cells that fire in repetitive clusters of 2 – 5 action potentials with short ISIs (Repetitive Oscillatory Bursts – ROB). In vitro and in silico scientific studies, correlate the firing patterns of the pyramidal neurons to their morphological features. This study provides a quantitatively analysis via compartmental neuronal modelling of the effects of dendritic morphology and distribution and concentration of ionic mechanisms, along the basal and/or apical dendrites on the firing behavior of a 112-set of layer V rat PFC pyramidal cells. We focus on how particular morphological and passive features of the dendritic trees shape the neuronal firing patterns. Our results suggest that specific morphological parameters (such as total length, volume and branch number) can discriminate the cells as RS or IB, regardless of what is the distribution and concentration of ionic mechanisms along the dendritic trees. Moreover, varying combinations of the basal, the apical or both dendritic tree plexus produce different cell type percentages. Consequently, it appears that variations on the dendritic size and dendritic topology of the pyramidal cells influence their firing patterns and subsequently may influence the information coding that these neurons support. Keywords: Dendrites, PFC, morphology, pyramidal cell, Single neuron modeling, firing pattern Conference: 4th NAMASEN Training Workshop - Dendrites 2014, Heraklion, Greece, 1 Jul - 4 Jul, 2014. Presentation Type: Poster presentation Topic: morphological and functional characterizations Citation: Psarrou M, Stefanou S, Tzilivaki A, Papoutsi A, Cutsuridis V and Poirazi P (2014). A simulation study on the effects of dendritic morphology on layer V PFC pyramidal cell firing behavior. Front. Syst. Neurosci. Conference Abstract: 4th NAMASEN Training Workshop - Dendrites 2014. doi: 10.3389/conf.fnsys.2014.05.00023 Copyright: The abstracts in this collection have not been subject to any Frontiers peer review or checks, and are not endorsed by Frontiers. They are made available through the Frontiers publishing platform as a service to conference organizers and presenters. The copyright in the individual abstracts is owned by the author of each abstract or his/her employer unless otherwise stated. Each abstract, as well as the collection of abstracts, are published under a Creative Commons CC-BY 4.0 (attribution) licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) and may thus be reproduced, translated, adapted and be the subject of derivative works provided the authors and Frontiers are attributed. For Frontiers’ terms and conditions please see https://www.frontiersin.org/legal/terms-and-conditions. Received: 11 Apr 2014; Published Online: 12 Jun 2014. * Correspondence: Dr. Panayiota Poirazi, Foundation of Research and Technology, Institute of Molecular Biology and Biotechonogy, Heraklion, Crete, 70013, Greece, poirazi@imbb.forth.gr Login Required This action requires you to be registered with Frontiers and logged in. To register or login click here. Abstract Info Abstract The Authors in Frontiers Maria Psarrou Stefanos Stefanou Alexandra Tzilivaki Athanasia Papoutsi Vassilis Cutsuridis Panayiota Poirazi Google Maria Psarrou Stefanos Stefanou Alexandra Tzilivaki Athanasia Papoutsi Vassilis Cutsuridis Panayiota Poirazi Google Scholar Maria Psarrou Stefanos Stefanou Alexandra Tzilivaki Athanasia Papoutsi Vassilis Cutsuridis Panayiota Poirazi PubMed Maria Psarrou Stefanos Stefanou Alexandra Tzilivaki Athanasia Papoutsi Vassilis Cutsuridis Panayiota Poirazi Related Article in Frontiers Google Scholar PubMed Abstract Close Back to top Javascript is disabled. Please enable Javascript in your browser settings in order to see all the content on this page.

Artificial Intelligence and Its Applications

1 School of Computer Science and Technology, Nanjing Normal University, Nanjing, Jiangsu 210023, China 2Department of Electrical Engineering, Gonabad Branch, Islamic Azad University, Gonabad, Khorasan-e-Razavi 96916-29, Iran 3Department of Mathematics, Anand International College of Engineering, Agra Road, Near Bassi, Jaipur, Rajasthan 303012, India 4Ambedkar Institute of Advanced Communication Technologies and Research, Government of NCT of Delhi, Geeta Colony, Delhi 110031, India 5 Department of Chemistry, Arab American University, 19356 Jenin, Palestine

Evaluation of a new methodology for paediatric dosimetry: optimization of SPECT protocols, based on Monte Carlo simulations with high-resolution anthropomorphic phantoms

Evaluation of a new methodology for paediatric dosimetry: optimization of SPECT protocols, based on Monte Carlo simulations with high-resolution anthropomorphic phantoms

Nonlinear Analysis: Algorithm, Convergence, and Applications 2014

1School of Mathematics and Information Science, Henan Normal University, Henan, China 2Department of Applied Mathematics, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong 3Department of Mathematics, Tianjin Polytechnic University, Tianjin, China 4Department of Applied Mathematics, University of New South Wales, Sydney, NSW 2052, Australia 5Jiangxi Key Laboratory of Numerical Simulation Technology, School of Mathematics and Computer Sciences, Gannan Normal University, Ganzhou, China

Report of meeting Researches in Didactics of Mathematics and Computer Sciences

The meeting Researches in Didactics of Mathematics and Computer Sciences was held in Eger, Hungary from the 24th to the 26th of January, 2014 at the Eszterházy Károly College. It was organized by the PhD School of Mathematics and Computer Sciences of the University of Debrecen and the Eszterházy Károly College in Eger. The 58 participants – including 43 lecturers and 18 PhD students – came from 7 countries, 15 cities and represented 22 institutions of higher education.

The Analysis and Application Research on the Performance of Describing Based on an Abstract Grid Workflow Language

Grid Workflow Language Yu wan jun1,2, Liu Yunxiang1,2, Fang Hua1,21 Shanghai institute of technology, School of computer science and information engineering, Shanghai, 201418, China 2Shanghai institute of technology, research center of machine olfaction, Shanghai, 201418, China Key words:Intelligant System; Grid Workflow; Activity; Parallel Structure; Abstract:Grids specification is one of the imporant contents in grid workflow fields, it can shield details of underling grid, so users can concentrate on the description of Grid applications. AGWL(Abstract Grid Workflow Language) is an abstract language based on XML, it was always used to describe grid workflow. The basic activities are connected by the control flow and data link. AGWL uses advanced control flow to support the parallel execution of conditions and loops. As an example, we finally introduced a sales process to show the capacity of the grid workflow language AGWL.

Data Disseminations in Vehicular Environments

1 School of Computer Science & Engineering, Kyungpook National University, Daegu 702-701, Republic of Korea 2Universidad Politecnica de Valencia, Camino de Vera, S/N, 46022 Valencia, Spain 3 Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, South Dakota State University, Brookings, SD 57007, USA 4Department of Informatics, Electronic and Sistemistic, University of Calabria, 87036 Cosenza, Italy 5 Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Lawrence Technological University, Southfield, MI 48075, USA

Special issue on the frontiers of natural computing

Natural computing is the study of computational processes that occur in biological and other naturally-occurring systems, whether these processes occur in silico, in vivo, or in vitro. Many of the ideas underlying natural computing can be traced back to the early days of modern computer science, and the work by visionaries such as Turing and Von Neumann. Since these early days, the field has continued to grow and generate new ideas, leading to the development of distinct research communities in areas such as neural computing, evolutionary algorithms, synthetic biology, and artificial life, to name but a few. The aim of the Frontiers of Natural Computing workshop, held at the University of York, UK from 10th to 12th September 2012, was to bring people together from the different strands of natural computing, and provide a venue to collectively talk about the future development of the field. With this in mind, we invited speakers and solicited contributions from across the field of natural computing. The resulting programme of talks and poster presentations covered many diverse but related areas of research, including: synthetic biology, systems biology, artificial life, discrete dynamical systems, evolutionary algorithms, neural computing, artificial development, membrane computing, artificial immune systems, information theoretic approaches, hardware architectures and methods for complex systems modeling and analysis. This special issue contains six articles contributed by delegates who presented at the event. All articles were fully peer reviewed, and we would like to thank the people involved in this process. We would also like to take this opportunity to thank all those who attended and helped to organise the event, and we would especially like to acknowledge the generous financial support of the EPSRC (under the grant ‘‘Artificial Biochemical Networks: Computational Models and Architectures,’’ ref. EP/F060041/1), which enabled us to offer free attendance to delegates, and provide bursaries to student attendees. A prominent issue addressed by the workshop was the question of how much we still have to learn from biological and natural systems. The first article, ‘‘Consideration of Mobile DNA: New Forms of Artificial Genetic Regulatory Networks,’’ by Larry Bull, is very much within this vein of investigation. Recently it has become apparent that transposable elements (or ‘‘jumping genes’’) in DNA have had a profound influence upon the evolution of modern-day species. In this paper, the author extends the classic random M. Lones (&) School of Mathematical and Computer Sciences, Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh, UK e-mail: michael.lones@york.ac.uk

Developing a NFC-equipped smart classroom: Effects on attitudes toward computer science

This study describes a smart classroom system that integrates near field communication (NFC) technology to automate attendance management, locate students, and provide real-time student feedback. The proposed system’s attendance management feature can conserve time and reduce paper-work because students use their NFC-enabled smartphones or NFC smart cards to register their attendance automatically. Also, the system’s student-positioning feature is particularly useful for teaching large classes because teachers typically experience difficulties in both recognizing students and familiarizing themselves with their students’ learning progress. In addition, the real-time feedback function could be beneficial especially for Asian students because they are usually reluctant to express their opinions during class. This study also evaluates the proposed system’s effect on students’ attitude toward science education by applying relevant theories. Our case study of a computer science course shows that the attitudes of students toward computer science generally improved following the implementation of the proposed system. Because more than half of the measures from the aspects of learning computer science at school and importance of computer science are positive and significant, this indicates that students find computer science more interesting, expecting, exciting, beneficial, helpful, and appealing after the using the proposed system.

Sharing computer science education ideas

This article describes a unique Israeli-Russian project, in which Israeli high school computer science (CS) teachers promote curricular reform in the Russian region of Penza, based on the Israeli high school CS curriculum. The reform involves local schools, universities, the hi-tech industry and local government officials. It includes changes in courses, textbooks and other teaching materials. The Israeli teachers provided workshops to assist the Russian teachers in the assimilation of the reform. This collaboration may encourage other countries to collaborate and not necessarily re-invent the wheel; for some countries it can serve as a catalyst to assist in bringing computer science education into schools.

Exploration on the teaching reform of computer science in medical school

Current curriculum provision and teaching patterns of computer science in medical school has been far behind the requirements of clinical and research works, which restricted the develop- ment of medical talents to a large extent. According to the experiences of teaching practice, Department of Computer Science in Chongqing Medical University launched reform on medical computer science from aspects of teaching practice, curriculum provision, teaching methods and evaluation methods. Computer courses were opened according to students＇ computer knowledge and the profession. Task-based teaching and comprehensive evaluation methods were employed in order to improve the teaching quality. Key words: Computer science ; Teaching reform ; Curriculum provision ; Task- based teaching ; Online examination; Medical school

Advances in ambient intelligence technologies

This special issue contains selected papers from the 3rd International Conference on Ambient Systems, Networks and Technologies (ANT 2012), which was held at Niagara Falls, Ontario, Canada, August 27–29, 2012. The conference attracted a large number of scientific papers that contributed to the state-of-the-art in the areas of pervasive and ambient information systems. All the papers selected for this special issue have undergone two rounds of rigorous review process. Based on the reviewers’ feedback, seven papers were selected for publication from eight best papers invited from ANT 2012. The accepted papers cover interesting works on new developments in ambient intelligence such as adaptable intelligence systems, smart environments, body area networks, and network security. The first paper by Zhang, Khedri, and Jaskolka, ‘‘An Aspect-Oriented Language for Feature Modeling’’, proposes a new language called AO-PFA for developing ambient systems. Built on top of Product Family Algebra (PFA) and by using the aspect-oriented technology, AOPFA offers capabilities in dealing with unpredictable changes in ambient applications. The paper by Hoelzl, Kurz, and Ferscha, ‘‘Goal Oriented Recognition of Composed Activities for Reliable and Adaptable Intelligence Systems’’, focuses on activity and context recognition, an important research topic for adaptable ambient intelligence systems. The paper proposes a goal oriented approach to dynamically create and instantiate models to recognize high level composed activities in an opportunistic way. The paper by Li, He, and Arora, ‘‘ThermoNet: FineGrain Assessment of Building Comfort and Efficiency’’, describes ThermoNet, a hybrid wireless sensor network solution for monitoring and optimizing energy consumption of the Heating, Ventilation, and Air Conditioning systems in large buildings. The paper reports some interesting findings based on the data collected from a realworld environment. The paper by Menon, Jayaraman, and Govindaraju, ‘‘Probabilistic Spatio-Temporal Retrieval in Smart Spaces’’, deals with uncertainties of object tracking in smart spaces. The paper proposes a data model that supports computation of probabilities of spatio-temporal queries giving the uncertainty of the location of an occupant. The paper by Knapen et al., ‘‘Exploiting GraphTheoretic Tools for Matching in Carpooling Applications’’, studies carpooling for commuting and proposes a Global CarPooling Matching Service (GCPMS) that provides advice on how to combine commuting trips by carpooling. In order to evaluate the matching performance of the GCPMS, a multi-agent system is also developed and some initial experimental results are reported. The paper by Khan et al. ‘‘A New Patient Monitoring Framework and Energy-Aware Peering Routing Protocol (EPR) for Body Area Network Communication’’, proposes a new architecture of Body Area Networks for indoor hospital environments. The paper presents an EPR for reducing the traffic load and energy consumption while increasing the number of packets successfully delivered to the destinations. The final paper by Beitollahi and Deconinck, ‘‘ConnectionScore: A Statistical Technique to Resist Application-Layer DDoS Attacks’’, describes a Q. Z. Sheng J. Ma School of Computer Science, The University of Adelaide, Adelaide, SA 5005, Australia e-mail: qsheng@cs.adelaide.edu.au

Getting an Intuition for Big Data

IEEE Software Editor-in-Chief Forrest Shull discusses the importance of building reliable systems to interpret big data. In addition, he discusses the IBM Impact 2013 Unconference; the Software Engineering Institute's SATURN 2013 conference in which the IEEE Software Architecture in Practice Award went to Simon Brown of Coding the Architecture, for his presentation titled "The Conflict between Agile and Architecture: Myth or Reality" and the IEEE Software New Directions Award went to Darryl Nelson of Raytheon for his presentation titled, "Next-Gen Web Architecture for the Cloud Era." He also welcomes Professor Rafael Prikladnicki of the Computer Science School at PUCRS, Brazil, and Chief Software Economist Walker Royce of IBM's Software Group to the IEEE Software Advisory Board. The first Web extra at http://youtu.be/JrQorWS5m6w is a video interview in which IEEE Software editor in chief Forrest Shull speaks with Paul Zikopoulos, Director--IBM Information Management Technical Professionals, Competitive Database, and Big Data at IBM, about the potentials of mining big data. Zikopoulos will deliver a keynote at Software Experts Summit 2013 on 17 July in Redmond, Washington. The second Web extra at http://youtu.be/NHHThAeONv8 is a video interview in which IEEE Software editor in chief Forrest Shull speaks with Catherine Plaisant and Megan Monroe of the University of Maryland Human-Computer Interaction Laboratory about big data information visualization and its applications to software development. The third Web extra at http://youtu.be/NqXE0ewoTKA is a video overview of the IBM Impact 2013 Unconference, sponsored by IEEE Software magazine, an event specifically designed for developers that featured Grady Booch and Tim O'Reilly as keynote speakers.

User-centric ambient information systems and applications

This theme issue looks at new developments in pervasive and ambient systems such as localization, interaction interfaces, context-aware services, smart environments, and personal task scheduling. It is based on selected and rereviewed papers from the 3rd International Conference on Ambient Systems, Networks and Technologies (ANT 2012), which was held at Niagara Falls, Ontario, Canada, August 27–29, 2012. The conference attracted a large number of scientific papers that contributed to the state-ofthe-art in the areas of pervasive and ambient information systems. All the papers selected for this special issue have undergone two rounds of rigorous review process. Based on the reviewers’ feedback, seven papers were selected for publication from ten best papers invited from ANT 2012. The first paper by Adnan, Datta, and MacLean, ‘‘Efficient and Accurate Sensor Network Localization’’, focuses on localization, a key research challenge in wireless sensor networks, and proposes a generic, distributed algorithm that outperforms a typical range-free algorithm Weighted Monte Carlo Localization (WMCL). The paper by Zhou et al. ‘‘Innovative Wearable Interfaces: An Exploratory Analysis of Paper-based Interfaces with Camera-Glasses Device Unit’’ considers ubiquitous interaction approaches and conducts some interesting research by developing a MobilePaperAccess system. This system enables mobile interactions by exploiting a wearable camera-glasses device with a paper-based interface. Context awareness is a critical feature in user-centric ambient environments in the sense that more personalized services can be offered to users. The following three papers focus on context-awareness and offer some recent developments and advancement. The paper by Ouksel and Lundquist, ‘‘A Context-Aware Cross-Layer (CACL) Broadcast Model for Ad Hoc Networks’’, concerns poor performance of 802.11 medium access control (MAC) and proposes a CACL broadcast model, which offers superior single-hop transmission rates than MAC. Some further extension to CACL is also discussed in the paper. The paper by Yuan and Herbert, ‘‘Context-Aware Hybrid Reasoning Framework for Pervasive Healthcare’’, presents a personalized, flexible, and extensible hybrid reasoning framework for developing context-aware healthcare applications to assist activity of daily living of the elderly. The framework particularly supports context-aware sensor data fusion and anomaly detection by exploiting the hierarchical fuzzy rule-based reasoning (FRBR). The paper by Gronli, Ghinea, and Younas, ‘‘Context-Aware and Automatic Configuration of Mobile Devices in Cloud-Enabled Ubiquitous Computing’’, reports a prototype system on crosssource integration of cloud-based, context aware information in ubiquitous computing. The paper by Mathew et al., ‘‘Building Sustainable Parking Lots with the Web of Things (WoT)’’, describes a scalable parking-lot infrastructure based on the emerging WoT. With this infrastructure, it is possible to perform mashups of physical things for creating a smart parking spot (SPS) that can be interacted by drivers from the Web. The initial evaluation reveals some promising results such as 40 % of saving in both time and air pollution. The final Q. Z. Sheng J. Ma School of Computer Science, The University of Adelaide, Adelaide, SA 5005, Australia e-mail: qsheng@cs.adelaide.edu.au

Web and Wireless Geographic Information Systems

W2GIS is a series of events continuously developing and expanding, with the aim to provide a forum for discussing advances in theoretical, technical, and practical issues in the field of wireless and Internet technologies suited for the spreading, using, and processing of geo-referenced data. Following a tradition of alternation between Europe and Asia, the 11th edition took place in the wonderful city of Naples, Italy, in April 2012, offering participants a unique setting for scientific discussion. The international program committee was composed of 38 representatives from 15 countries, and made a valuable effort to select 13 full papers and 4 short papers from a total of 32 submissions, coming from 12 countries in 4 continents. These papers have been published in a Volume of LNCS [1]. As a result, the technical program of the symposium provided many stimulating contributions, ranging from spatial humancomputer interaction to positioning, including sensor networks and geo semantics. Two invited speakers further enriched the event. Prof. Christopher Jones, from the School of Computer Science at Cardiff University (UK), presented an overview of a natural language photo captioning system able to describe the geographical context of the photo with regard to its possible subject, in association with proximal and regional place names. Dr. Andreas Sasse, from the Volkswagen Group Research, Department of Driver Information Systems, in Wolfsburg (DE), provided a stimulating talk on the future requirements, in terms of accuracy and updates, for maps and location-based services to be included in tomorrow’s vehicles. For this special feature, revised and extended versions were solicited from the highest quality papers at the 11th W2GIS symposium. The usual rigorous JOSIS review process was applied, leading to the acceptance of two papers in the field of sensor networks. Nowadays we live in an environment which is more and more embedded of sensors, able to capture and distribute observations of the phenomena surroundings our lives. Consequently, much research effort worldwide is expended on addressing the challenges posed by this new technological evolution. The first paper of this special feature, is by Annalisa Appice, Anna Ciampi, Donato Malerba, and Pietro Guccione. This article describes a new approach to deal with the problem of missing observations in networks of sensors. In particular, authors propose a novel spatiotemporal interpolation process, overcoming the tendency to treat space and time separately. The proposed technique is empirically evaluated using two large, real climate sensor networks. The results show that, in spite of a notable reduction in the volume of data, the technique guarantees accurate estimation of missing data. The second paper is by Mohamed Bakillah, Steve H.L. Liang, Alexander Zipf, and Mir