Pervasive computing, often synonymously called ubiquitous computing, is an emerging field of research that brings in revolutionary paradigms for computing models in the 21st century. Tremendous developments in such technologies as wireless communications and networking, mobile computing and handheld devices, embedded systems, wearable computers, sensors, RFID tags, smart spaces, middleware, software agents, and the like, have led to the evolution of pervasive computing platforms as natural successor of mobile computing systems. The goal of pervasive computing is to create ambient intelligence where network devices embedded in the environment provide unobtrusive connectivity and services all the time, thus improving human experience and quality of life without explicit awareness of the underlying communications and computing technologies. In this environment, the world around us (e.g., key chains, coffee mugs, computers, appliances, cars, homes, offices, cities, and the human body) is interconnected as pervasive network of intelligent devices that cooperatively and autonomously collect, process and transport information, in order to adapt to the associated context and activity.

The Pervasive and Mobile Computing Journal (PMC) is a professional, peer-reviewed journal that publishes high-quality scientific articles (both theory and practice) covering all aspects of pervasive computing and communications. Topics include, but not limited to:

• Pervasive/Ubiquitous computing and communications architectures and protocols
• Autonomic computing and communications
• Mobile computing systems and services
• Ambient, invisible, implicit, and adaptive computing
• Mobile grid and peer-to-peer computing
• Algorithmic paradigms, models and analysis of pervasive computing systems
• Smart spaces and intelligent environments
• Enabling technologies (e.g., Bluetooth, BANs, PANs, 802.11 wireless LANs)
• Embedded systems and wearable computers
• Wireless sensors networks and RFID technologies
• Virtual immersion communications
• Multiple inter-connected networking technologies (e.g., cellular, ad hoc, hybrid)
• Positioning and tracking technologies
• Auto-configuration and authentication
• Context-aware computing and location-based services and applications
• Service creation, discovery, management, and delivery mechanisms
• Middleware and agent technologies
• Application layer protocols and services
• Programming paradigms for pervasive and ubiquitous computing applications
• User interfaces and interaction models
• Runtime support for intelligent, adaptive agents
• (Innovative) applications requirements, performance, and benchmarking
• Security, privacy, fault-tolerance and resiliency issues.

Special Issue on Mobile and Social Sensing
Submission Date: 2019-10-30

The ubiquity of smart phones together with the popularity of social media heralds an era of mobile and social sensing. Mobile and social sensing is becoming a paradigm for collecting observations of the physical phenomena, either directly from human observers, or by means of crowd-sourcing the data measurement tasks using sensors in the smart phones or various other wearables (e.g., Google Glass, Apple Watch, and Fitbit devices). It thus involves massive amount of sensory data collection and/or dissemination where humans can act as sensor carriers (e.g., carrying GPS sensors that share location data), sensor operators (e.g., taking pictures and videos with smart phones), or as sensors themselves (e.g., sharing their observations on social media). This emerging field faces new challenges in data collection, dissemination, fusion, and mining; cognitive modeling; computational social and behavior science; information and coding theory; information processing and knowledge discovery; data dissemination and forwarding, reliability, privacy, and security; and cyber-physical-systems with human-in/on-the-loop. This special issue invites technical papers on both theoretical contributions and systems describing original ideas, exciting results, and real-world experiences in the context of mobile and social sensing.

This special issue will focus on (but not be limited to) the following topics:

Mobile, ubiquitous, and pervasive sensing
Social sensing and social networks as sensor networks
Crowd/participatory and opportunistic sensing
Rural sensing
Urban sensing and smart city
Reliability, privacy, and security in mobile and social sensing
Sensing unstructured data in mobile/social domain
Modeling, analysis, fusion, and mining of social and mobile sensing data
Theory, algorithms, systems, and experiments pertaining to mobile/social sensing
Ubiquitous, mobile, and pervasive information processing and knowledge discovery
Mobile and Social Sensing Applications (i.e., Internet of Social Things, Internet of Social Vehicles)
Data mining in Mobile and Social Sensing

Special Issue on Location Based Services and Applications in the era of Internet of Things
Submission Date: 2020-01-31

The last decade of ICT has been characterized and driven in many aspects by the massive technological revolution of mobile devices that completely changed the way people communicate and how they interact with available services and the environment. Furthermore, the Internet of Things (IoT) represents the next technological (re)evolution envisioning a world where people and devices are always connected and can seamlessly interact with one another. In fact, people and things can more efficiently communicate on the move exploiting the awareness of their location (indoor and outdoor) while this information can also be used to create new context-aware services and experiences. Smart City and Industrial IoT represent notable use cases where ubiquitous connectivity, mobility, and location awareness of people and devices represent key enablers to provide new services, ranging from dynamic creation of rescue groups in case of emergencies to efficient and autonomous management of warehouses. In particular, the Special  
Issue aims at underlining how the advent of the IoT has pushed the development of innovative and widespread LBS services, by providing mechanisms to enable and foster the interaction (both monitoring and actuation) with the context surrounding people and things.

This Special Issue addresses the innovative developments, technologies, and challenges related to IoT Location Based Service (LBS) design and implementation for ubiquitous and pervasive application scenarios. The Special Issue is seeking the latest findings from research and ongoing projects. Additionally, review articles that provide readers with current research trends and solutions are also welcome. The potential topics include, but are not limited to:

- LBS and Internet of Things
- Geospatial services and resource discovery
- Seamless interaction between people and things in pervasive environment
- Architecture for distributed geospatial applications
- Edge/Fog Computing Architectures to support LBS applications
- Vehicles as Connected Smart Objects in IoT applications
- Drone Applications & IoT
- Heterogeneity and Interoperability management
- 5G Architectures and Applications for the next generation of LBS services
- Indoor and outdoor localization technologies
- IoT Pervasive and Ubiquitous Applications
- Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence for localization and LBS
- Real-world experiences, e.g., in Smart City and Industrial IoT environments