Theme issue on “Sensor-driven computing and applications for Ambient Intelligence”

Ambient Intelligence (AmI) is essentially a sensor-driven, user-centric computing and application paradigm. It represents a vision of a world of digitally augmented physical environment where sensors are embedded ubiquitously and transparently into everyday objects and living spaces, to enable fine-grain capture of user and ambient context information that provides the basis of intelligence for higher-order cognitive systems, i.e., systems that can perceive, reason, learn, and react intelligently to their environments. Sensors provide the important bridge between the physical world and the computing systems for AmI applications. Through a myriad of sensing modalities, information about the state of the users, objects they interacted with, activities they engaged in, and their surroundings, can be acquired and translated to contextual knowledge for ‘‘cognitizing’’ computing systems, making them ever sensitive and responsive to the needs and situation of the humans under their support or care. This theme issue is organized to showcase recent research results in the field of sensor-driven computing and innovative sensor-driven applications for ambient intelligence. Through a rigorous two-stage review process involving experts from both academia and industry, 10 papers from 31 submissions worldwide are selected for publication in this issue. In the following, we briefly discuss these 10 accepted papers, which have been organized into four categories. The first category comprises of four papers focusing on different aspects of context management.