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Call for chapters

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Personal Assistants: Emerging Technologies

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Intelligent Systems Reference Library

Springer

http://www.springer.com/series/8578

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INTRODUCTION

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It has been shown that the quality of life for people remaining in their own homes is generally better than for those who are institutionalized. Moreover, the cost for institutional care can be much higher than the cost of care for a patient at home. To balance this situation, efforts must be made to move the services and care available in institutions to the home environment. Thus, society poses new challenges, demanding systems that overcome this issue.

Personal Assistants (PA) are a relatively new concept, advancing the Cognitive Orthotics concept that is only focused on direct assistance, to people with cognitive or physical disabilities, and expanding the area to include complex platforms that include sensors, actuators, monitoring abilities and decision processes.

PA is an area containing technologies such as cognitive assistants, multi-agent systems, robotics and applications (such as e-health and e-learning), among others. Essentially, PA is focused on people and their disabilities, providing tools that best fit them using personalization methods. They have been typically developed:

- to perceive the intrinsic mechanisms of human cognition such as reasoning, learning, memorizing, acting and adapting;

- to discover the thought process leading to each decision;

- to build systems that can emulate those thought processes and make decisions or suggestions.

The Ambient Assisted Living has been prolific in providing solutions to assist the user. However, the personalization has not been widely addressed and it is necessary to have customized systems to properly respond to users' expectations. Thus, the unification of the human computer interaction is essential to offer a more natural way of engaging with its users and translate desires to actions.

PA can range from a medication reminder to a messaging system that connects its users with their relatives. New developments like the IOT (Internet of Things) and the increasing amount of computing power that handheld devices have allowed the development of environments that were until now unavailable through embedded systems. Therefore, there are a lot of implementation options open for development on this area.

This book is intended to provide an overview of the research being carried out in the interdisciplinary area of personal assistants and cognitively inspired systems. Chapters presenting theoretical and applied research contribution in the field are welcome.

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AREAS OF INTEREST

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Key topics of interest include (but are not limited to):

- Agent & Multiagent Systems for AmI

- Ambient Assisted Living

- Ambient Intelligence

- Applications

- Artificial Intelligence for AmI

- Cognitive Assistants

- Context Aware Computing

- Data protection and privacy

- Domotics (Home Automation)

- Evaluation of Personal Assistants

- Evolutionary Computation

- Ethics and Legal Issues

- Intelligent Systems

- Knowledge Discovery and Acquisition

- Memory Assistants

- Mobile Computing

- Robotics

- Spatial Cognition and Computation

- Ubiquitous Computing

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SUBMISSION GUIDELINES

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The chapters submitted to the Personal Assistants: Emerging Technologies will be published on the Springer Intelligent Systems Reference Library edition http://www.springer.com/series/8578 (SJR Q3).

Submissions to the special issue must include original research. Papers must be new and have not been published or submitted to other sources.

Authors should prepare their manuscript according to the "Guide for Authors" available at the Springer homepage: Latex - http://resource-cms.springer.com/springer-cms/rest/v1/content/20566/data/v3/monographs

Word - http://resource-cms.springer.com/springer-cms/rest/v1/content/3318/data/v2/T1-book.zip

The number of pages should be between 15 to 20.

All submissions should be done via Email to one of the editors:

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IMPORTANT DATES

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Deadline for chapter submission: December 15th, 2016

Notification of acceptance: March 1st, 2017

Tentative publication date: July, 2017