A “smart” environment incorporates intelligent systems (e.g., smart home, smart factory, smart city, smart car etc.) employing heterogeneous devices, such as: sensors, actuators, cameras, networks, and screens. Within such a smart environment, autonomous agents can take on an important mediating role between human users and the environment. This is particularly true if high-level cognitive functions and computational intelligence are employed to handle the uncertainty of the complex environment so as to allow agents to act appropriately within different contexts of interaction.

Using robotic systems in smart environments opens the door to several socio-cognitive applications, such as: reducing cognitive load for individuals interacting with a smart environment, assisting the elderly and people with cognitive disabilities in mobility and daily tasks (which requires robots to learn the multimodal characteristics of human behavior and to spatially perceive the environment containing other smart objects to decide the best way to employ/manipulate them in order to successfully perform tasks), and developing a cloud-connected robot system to incrementally share knowledge between robots in different smart environments about the behavioral characteristics of human users in order to interact with them adaptively. To meet the requirements of these target applications, robots need to be able to learn how to use the capabilities of their smart environments to better address the needs of the human users. Industrial applications of such technologies include factories of the future and the digital eco-system within an autonomous car.

This special issue aims to shed light on cutting edge lines of interdisciplinary research in cognitive science, artificial intelligence, and robotics covering basic research and applications. Recent advances and possible future research avenues on smart robots and environments would be discussed in detail in this journal special issue.

II. Potential Topics

Topics relevant to this special issue include, but are not limited to:

• Cyber-physical systems in smart environments
• Multimodal human robot interaction
• Cognitive modeling of human behavior
• Cognitive architectures and strategies for intelligent interaction with the environment
• AI and machine learning approaches applied to human-robot-environment interaction
• Internet of things
• Ambient assisted living
• Infotainment in smart vehicles
• Natural user interface design
• Cloud robotics
• Ubiquitous computing

III. Submission

Submissions to the special issue must include original research that has not been published nor submitted to other journals. Authors should prepare their manuscript according to the "Guide for Authors" available at the journal homepage: http://www.journals.elsevier.com/cognitive-systems-research/. Papers should be submitted through the EVISE system: https://www.evise.com/evise/jrnl/cogsys. Authors should select "VSI:Smart Environments" as the article type during the submission process.

IV. Timline (Submission portal will be open on March 1, 2018)

• Deadline for paper submission: April 30, 2018
• First notification for authors: July 31, 2018
• Deadline for revised papers submission: September 30, 2018
• Final notification for authors: November 30, 2018
• Deadline for submission of camera-ready manuscripts: January 15, 2019