Context-Driven Human-Environment Interaction (CdH-E Interaction)

The Ambient Intelligence (AmI) paradigm brings about one important challenge, i.e. to make environments adaptive, responsive or reactive to users' current contextual situation. To meet this goal, it is important to enable interaction mechanisms among all those entities so that they can address users' needs. Following this premise, a key aspect of user interaction with Smart Environments (i.e. ICT instrumented environments designed to offer services to end‐users) is to acquire, model and reason upon users' and environments' contextual information in an implicit and transparent manner. Only then it will be possible for the environments to intelligently react and personalize their behaviour to facilitate users' daily activities. Therefore, it is paramount to identify the entities in the environment, discover their capabilities, model them and analyse new interaction schemas and styles among them and end‐users. Traditional human‐computer interaction requires frequent explicit user intervention to indicate every action to the computer. However, this vision contradicts the Invisible Computing vision brought forward by Weiser with his seminal paper on Ubiquitous Computing, discipline on which AmI is grounded. Consequently, it is important to progress towards more natural enriched interaction, making it much more implicit versus the traditional explicit dialogue with the computer. In this way, we will realize Human–Environment interaction where dynamically gathered user's and environment's context, automatic activity recognition or more natural, subtle explicit interaction (e.g. gesture recognition), among us and the surrounding objects and devices in an environment will become the norm. This special issue examines these topics focusing on, but not limited to: ‐ Modelling techniques and emergent technologies for CdH­E interaction: models of users and device ecosystems encompassing users interaction both within controlled (offices, homes) and more uncontrolled environments (countryside, cities) ‐ Interaction schemas and styles for CdH­E: the emergence of new novel interaction techniques based on the increasing capabilities of end‐user devices such tablets or smartphones equipped with cameras, NFC or GPS chips, where implicit (system‐driven) and explicit (user‐driven) interaction may be enabled. ‐ Ubiquitous Communications on CdH­E interactive systems: The need to enable interactions not only among humans and objects, but also among the objects themselves so that they coordinate their actions and reactions to please user needs