Recent years have seen an explosion in the use of data science and AI as a central tenant in numerous computing applications, products, research, and innovation. Examples of the success of data science abound—applying new machine-learning techniques to problems such as vision and speech recognition and translation has achieved commonplace levels of performance that would have seemed impossible a few years ago.
In parallel, developments in pervasive computing increasingly enable us to instrument our physical environment with complex sensors and actuators and create an interconnected world that generates huge volumes of data. The importance of these trends can be seen in the growing momentum of exemplars such as the Internet of Things (IoT), smart environments, and smart cities. These applications demand a new focus on how we capture, process, and use data in pervasive environments.
Beyond the hype, it is clear that our world is becoming increasingly datacentric, in which both physical and electronic services depend on the collection, analysis, and application of large volumes of heterogeneous data.
This special issue focuses on work at the intersection of data science/AI and pervasive computing. In particular, we solicit contributions that focus on the following aspects of pervasive data science:
- New hardware and software to support data collection in pervasive environments.
- Ownership, trust, and provenance of pervasive data.
- Privacy and consent in highly instrumented pervasive environments.
- New techniques for data processing and inference in pervasive and IoT environments.
- Adaptation and optimization of data processing algorithms for use on pervasive and IoT devices.
- The use of data science and AI to support ubiquitous computing in challenges such as localization and activity recognition.
- Decision making and actuation based on data from pervasive and IoT environments.
- Application areas for data science and AI in pervasive computing and the IoT—for example, autonomous vehicles, augmented cognition, smart cities, and digital health.
- Using pervasive data science and AI in robotics.