Preface - Challenges of engineering intelligent environments

This issue of JAISE is focused on the theme of Challenges of Engineering Intelligent Environments. The last decade has produced very interesting advances in the development of Intelligent Environments (IEs). These advances have benefitted different aspects of such systems with different intensity. The main problem is that as IEs are composed of several components: hardware, software, networks, and interfaces, we need all of these components to perform at a certain level of quality so that the overall system is satisfactory to the users. Although good progress was made across all the mentioned areas, the inherent complexity of IEs means that there is still some significant work to be done and several challenges remain open for our community to tackle. This Thematic Issue presents a snapshot of those challenges and the state of the art. We hope that this Thematic Issue is found inspiring by researchers who are active in the area as well as motivate new research in this domain. We are grateful to the Guest Editors who organized this Thematic Issue: Asier Aztiria (University of Mondragón, Spain), Aaron S. Crandall (Washington State University, USA), and Gordon Hunter (Kingston University, London, UK). The last pages of this issue provide information on successful vivas by Ph.D. students working in the area.