Call For Papers: IEEE Pervasive Computing

IEEE Pervasive Computing explores the intersection of the digital and physical worlds—where computation, communication, and sensing technologies merge seamlessly into our everyday environments. The magazine provides a forum for the global community of researchers, practitioners, and educators who design, build, and deploy technologies that bring intelligence and interactivity into the physical world.

Our mission is to advance understanding of how computing pervades physical spaces, objects, and experiences, and how data and machine intelligence derived from these environments can enhance human life, social systems, and industrial processes. The magazine publishes rigorously peer-reviewed articles that translate fundamental research into real-world impact—bridging theory, engineering, and application.

Scope and Topics

We invite original research articles and comprehensive survey papers that advance the state of the art in pervasive and ubiquitous computing, data-driven intelligence, and human-centred systems. Contributions must clearly demonstrate a core connection to computing in the physical world and may span (but are not limited to) the following five pillars of focus:

Hardware

• Embedded and wearable sensing platforms
• Energy-efficient and miniaturised computing architectures
• Novel materials and fabrication for pervasive devices
• Edge computing and hardware-AI integration

Software

• Software infrastructures and middleware for distributed and context-aware systems
• Scalable cloud-edge orchestration and federated intelligence
• Pervasive operating systems, runtime optimisation, and cross-device coordination

Physical Interaction

• Real-world sensing, perception, and context modelling
• Human–environment interfaces and embodied interaction
• Spatial computing, augmented and mixed reality
• Multimodal interaction across vision, sound, and touch

The Human Experience

• Human–computer interaction (HCI) and user experience (UX) in everyday contexts
• Behavioural modelling, cognition-aware systems, and wellbeing technologies
• Trust, ethics, privacy, and societal implications of pervasive intelligence

Systems and Intelligence

• Distributed and mobile systems for pervasive environments
• Data science and on-device machine learning for contextual intelligence
• Adaptive, self-learning, and self-healing systems
• Integration of sensing, data, and AI for real-time decision-making and prediction

Types of Contributions

Regular Research Articles — Present original contributions that offer conceptual, methodological, or technological advances in pervasive computing and its subdomains (up to 6,000 words).

Survey and Review Articles — Provide a comprehensive and critical synthesis of established or emerging topics, identifying challenges, research gaps, and future opportunities (up to 6,000 words).

Interdisciplinary submissions addressing the intersection of data, AI, and the physical world—including themes such as health and wellbeing, smart infrastructure, sustainability, environmental intelligence, industrial automation, assistive technologies, and ethics of machine perception—are particularly welcome.

Manuscript Preparation

Articles should not exceed 6,000 words (including abstract, references, and figure/table text; count 250 words per figure or table). The abstract should be ≤150 words, clearly summarising the scope, contribution, and significance of the work.

Authors are strongly encouraged to review the Author Guidelines and to use the submission template. Submissions must be made via the IEEE Author Portal.

Open Access

IEEE Pervasive Computing is a hybrid publication, supporting both traditional and Open Access (OA) options. Authors may choose OA to ensure their work is freely accessible and discoverable worldwide under IEEE’s open access policy.

Why Publish in IEEE Pervasive Computing?

• High Visibility: Published by the IEEE Computer and Communications Societies and indexed in major databases.
• Rigorous Review: Editorial Board and Associate Editors drawn from leading institutions worldwide.
• Interdisciplinary Reach: Bridging computing, design, engineering, and data intelligence.
• Real-World Impact: A unique venue that connects academic research with industrial and societal deployment.

Submissions are accepted year-round.

For queries, please contact the editorial office at pervasive@computer.org.

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!