IN PRESS Paulo Ferreira CURRICULUM

This special issue of Computers & Graphics is devoted to Pervasive Computing and Ambient Intelligence and its relation to mobility, ubiquity and wearable computing. This is a rather exciting area because it entails an ambitious vision of the future in which computers adapt to people, instead of being the other way round, as it happens today. We will be surrounded by intelligent devices embedded in everyday objects. The environment will recognize and respond to the presence of individuals in an invisible way. This vision requires high quality research in a large number of computer science topics that range from hardware specific devices and operating systems to advanced multimodal user interfaces. The papers in this special issue provide very interesting answers to some of the problems raised by such vision of the future. They cover a large spectrum of topics ranging from middleware to applications. The first paper, authored by Teresa Romão et al. describes a system called ANTS. It supports a mechanism of augmented reality to explore physical and natural structures. The system is based on a client-server approach and is flexible enough so that some of its modules can be moved from the client to the server or vice versa. The second paper is authored by Enrique Leon et al. It is about the use of emotional information in computer systems and, for that purpose, it presents a solution for detecting emotional changes in real time based on physiological measures and a combination of neural networks with statistical mechanisms.