Foreword

This special issue, with five papers extended from selected contributions to The 2nd International Conference on Context-Aware Systems and Applications (ICCASA 2013) held in Phu Quoc Island of Vietnam, will serve as a reference material for researchers, scientists, professionals and students in computer science and computer engineering as well as developers and practitioners in computing and networking systems design by providing them with state-of-the-art research findings and future opportunities and trends. These papers include some recent advances in context-awareness reflected in this special issue. In particular, the special issue covers various aspects of context-awareness as follows:

  • Paper 1 by Abdur Rakib and Hafiz Mahfooz Ul Haque proposes a logical framework for modeling and verifying context-aware multi-agent systems. The paper provides an axiomatization of the logic and proves that it is sound and complete. The paper also shows how Maude rewriting system can be used to encode and verify interesting properties of models using existing model checking techniques.

  • Paper 2 by Phan Cong Vinh considers autonomics as self-*. An autonomic network is defined when nodes have minimal dependencies on human administrators or centralized management systems. The paper formalizes autonomic networking.

  • Paper 3 by Gabrielle Peko, Ching-Shen Dong and David Sundaram proposes that enterprises need to integrate sustainability objectives with adaptive approaches to manage complexity and uncertainty. The overarching objective is to explore how an enterprise can become both adaptive and sustainable by interweaving the deliberate and emergent in the context of strategy, organization, process, and information. The paper develops several artefacts that assist with responses to complexity and uncertainty while also supporting goals of sustainability. In particular, the paper proposes context aware adaptive and sustainable concepts, framework, lifecycle, architecture, and a prototypical implementation.

  • Paper 4 by Prashant Srivastava, Nguyen Thanh Binh and Ashish Khare proposes a combination of Local Ternary Pattern (LTP) and moments for Content-Based Image Retrieval. Performance of the proposed method is compared with other state-of-the-art methods on the basis of results obtained on Corel-1,000 database. The comparison shows that the proposed method gives better results in terms of precision and recall as compared to other state-of-the-art image retrieval methods.

  • Paper 5 by Phan Cong Vinh presents collective adaptive systems (CASs), which are inspired by the socio-technical systems. CASs are characterized by a high degree of adaptation, giving them resilience in the face of perturbations. In CASs, highest degree of adaptation is self-adaptation that is tightly entangled with humans and social structures. Taking advantage of the categorical approach, the paper establishes a firm formal basis for modeling self-adaptation in CASs.

We owe our deepest gratitude to Dr. Nguyen Manh Hung—Chairman and Rector of Nguyen Tat Thanh University in Vietnam for his useful support, especially to all the authors for their valuable contribution to this special issue and their great efforts, and also to the referees for ensuring the high quality of the material presented here. All of them are extremely professional and cooperative. We wish to express our thanks to the Editor-in-Chief, Prof. Imrich Chlamtac, for his important assistance with the process of assembling the special issue.