Call For Papers: Special Issue on Foundation Models and AI Agents in Pervasive Computing

IEEE Pervasive Computing seeks submissions for this upcoming special issue.
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Submissions Due: 1 September 2025

Important Dates

Call for Papers

The convergence of pervasive computing and foundation models—spanning large language models, multimodal architectures, and AI agents—represents a paradigm shift in intelligent systems design. As foundation models evolve from text processors to sophisticated reasoning engines capable of planning, tool use, and multi-step problem solving, their integration with pervasive computing creates new possibilities for ambient intelligence that can perceive, reason, and act autonomously in everyday environments.     

Recent advances in model optimization and specialized architectures have made it feasible to deploy capable foundation models on edge devices and resource-constrained systems. Simultaneously, the emergence of AI agents introduces new interaction paradigms where systems maintain long-term memory, coordinate across modalities, and adapt behavior based on environmental context. However, this convergence also challenges fundamental assumptions about evaluation, safety, and human oversight, as traditional metrics prove inadequate for assessing emergent behavior and goal alignment in open-world deployments.     

This special issue seeks contributions advancing our understanding of foundation models and AI agents in pervasive computing, with attention to the unique challenges of ambient, always-on deployments where probabilistic behaviors and emergent capabilities reshape human-computer interaction.

We invite original submissions addressing—but not limited to—the following topics:     

  • Edge Deployment and Optimization: Architectures, quantization techniques, and specialized foundation models for resource-constrained pervasive systems; dynamic model selection and energy-efficient inference strategies like test-time compute and scaling.
  • AI Agents in Ambient Environments: Design patterns for embodied agents in smart environments; multi-agent coordination; tool use and API integration; long-term memory and persistent reasoning.
  • Multimodal Foundation Models: Cross-modal reasoning architectures for vision, audio, haptics, and sensor data; real-time multimodal processing pipelines; context-aware model adaptation; methods for scalable data curation and mixing for pre-training.
  • Evaluation Beyond Traditional Metrics: Frameworks for assessing alignment, helpfulness, and emergent behaviors; human-centered evaluation approaches; longitudinal in-the-wild methodologies; benchmarks for pervasive AI.
  • Human-Agent Interaction and Trust: Designing legible autonomous behaviors; user mental models and expectation management; intervention strategies and human oversight mechanisms; trust calibration in ambient systems.
  • Privacy-Preserving Distributed Intelligence: Federated learning for collaborative model improvement; secure multi-party computation for agent coordination; data governance in agent-mediated environments.
  • Adaptation and Continual Learning: Continuous model adaptation based on user feedback; few-shot learning for rapid deployment; catastrophic forgetting mitigation; balancing stability and plasticity.
  • Safety and Responsible Deployment: Value alignment for autonomous pervasive agents; fail-safe mechanisms; bias detection and mitigation; regulatory considerations for ambient AI systems.
  • Applications and Field Studies: Real-world deployments in healthcare, education, smart cities, accessibility, and industrial settings; longitudinal evaluations and lessons learned from in-the-wild studies.

We especially welcome interdisciplinary perspectives combining HCI, systems, ML, and social sciences, as well as critical analyses examining societal implications and forward-looking contributions that anticipate future challenges in pervasive autonomous systems.   

We also welcome papers addressing any aspect of this field, provided that the connection to pervasive computing is central and clear. Review or summary articles offering critical evaluations of the state of the art or in-depth analyses of emerging technologies will also be considered if they demonstrate academic rigor and relevance.

Submission Guidelines

For author information and guidelines on submission criteria, please visit the Author Information Page. Please submit papers through the IEEE Author Portal, and be sure to select the special-issue name. Manuscripts should not be published or currently submitted for publication elsewhere. Please submit only full papers intended for review, not abstracts, to the ScholarOne portal. Abstracts should be sent by email to the guest editors directly.

Articles submitted to IEEE Pervasive Computing should not exceed 6,000 words, including all text, the abstract, keywords, bibliography, biographies, and table text. The word count must include 250 words for each table and figure. References should be limited to at most 20 citations (40 for survey papers). Authors are encouraged, but not required, to use a template for submission (accepted articles will ultimately be typeset by magazine staff for publication).

In addition to submitting your paper to IEEE Pervasive Computing, you are also encouraged to upload the data related to your paper to IEEE DataPort. IEEE DataPort is IEEE’s data platform that supports the storage and publishing of datasets while also providing access to thousands of research datasets. Uploading your dataset to IEEE DataPort will strengthen your paper and will support research reproducibility. Your paper and the dataset can be linked, providing a good opportunity for you to increase the number of citations you receive. Data can be uploaded to IEEE DataPort prior to submitting your paper or concurrent with the paper submission. Thank you!

Questions?

Contact the guest editors at pvc2-2026@computer.org

  • Dimitris Spathis, (Google, USA)
  • Ting (Sally) Dang, (University of Melbourne, Australia)
  • Chulhong Min, (Nokia Bell Labs, USA)
  • Ehsan Hoque, (University of Rochester, USA)

IEEE Pervasive Computing always welcomes submissions into its regular queue that cover the role of computing in the physical world – as characterized by visions such as the Internet of Things and ubiquitous computing. Topics of interest include hardware design, sensor networks, mobile systems, human-computer interaction, industrial design, machine learning, and data science, as well as societal issues including privacy and ethics. Please read the Author Information page before submitting. Simply select the “Regular” option when submitting at the submission site (submissions are possible at any time; no need for prior abstract by email).