Important Dates
- Submissions due: 31 March 2025
- Publication date: December 2025
Call for Papers
Smart ecosystems are emerging worldwide, addressing the need for both resilient and sustainable development, meeting key performance indicators that consider social and economic factors as well as technological ones. The growth of such smart ecosystems is no longer constrained to urban scenarios but encompasses others including rural and peri-urban environments that have their own challenges, such as the drastic population reduction in the former and the extremely fast increase in the later.
This special issue will explore how previous research in smart cities can serve as a cornerstone to support the scalable expansion of smart ecosystems, fostering novel business and societal activities, and developing models with the citizens at their epicenter. It will also provide a forum for new approaches and metrics needed when we conceive of technical solutions to reach sustainability and resilience, especially in the context of the complexities of population growth, climate change, and the astonishing increase of the number of cities around the world. The issue will help highlight the role of a data-driven ecosystem, as it may be an agnostic approach for consolidating both resilient and sustainable paradigms, which include computational concepts such Internet of Things and Services, Data Spaces, Distributed Ledger Technologies, Cloud Edge Computing Continuum, and Artificial Intelligence.
The goal of this special issue is to address the domain of smart communities from a computational point of view, to improve the state of the art, and to present recent technological advances and experiences that are employed in these settings and that take into account a circular economy, climate impact, and the like.
Authors are encouraged to submit original contributions related to resilient and sustainable smart communities. Topics of interest for this special issue include (but are not limited to):
- Smart communities as systems of systems
- Smart city and smart community applications and services
- Smart city and/or smart community pilot projects
- Smart community embedded and cyberphysical systems
- Smart city and smart community management platforms
- Computing for smart communities (IoT, edge/cloud, Industry 4.0, Society 5.0, etc.)
- Communication technologies, including 6G
- Data management and knowledge extraction
- Distributed ledger technologies supporting smart community ecosystems
- Robust smart and circular communities
- Open data initiatives, cases, and applications
- Data spaces for smart ecosystems
- Digital twins and their application to smart communities
- Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) in the smart community domain
- People-centric systems and crowd-based computing in smart communities
- Grassroots movements for resilient and sustainable smart ecosystems
- Tools and techniques for urban co-creation
- Studies on behavioral change aspects for sustainability
- Policy for smart communities and their development
- Business models for resilient and sustainable smart communities
Submission Guidelines
Please read Computer’s Author Information page before submitting a manuscript. For more generalized information on the peer review process, FAQs, and other information, authors can visit the Computer Society’s magazine peer review resource page. For full paper submission, go to the IEEE Author Portal.
Only submissions that describe previously unpublished, original, state-of-the-art research and that are not currently under review by a conference or journal will be considered. Extended versions of conference papers must be at least 30 percent different from the original conference work. There is a strict 6,000-word limit (figures and tables are equivalent to 300 words each) for final manuscripts. Computer also caps references at 20. Authors should be aware that Computer cannot accept or process papers that exceed word count or reference limits. Articles should be understandable by a broad audience of computer science and engineering professionals, avoiding a focus on theory, mathematics, jargon, and abstract concepts. All manuscripts are subject to peer review on both technical merit and relevance to Computer’s readership. Accepted papers must be well written and understandable, as the level of editing will be a light copyedit. For accepted papers, authors will be required to provide electronic files for each figure according to the following guidelines: for graphs and charts, authors must submit them in their original editable source format (PDF, Visio, Excel, Word, PowerPoint, etc.); for screenshots or photographs, authors must submit high-resolution files (300 dpi or higher at the largest possible dimensions) in JPEG or TIFF formats.
Questions?
Please direct any correspondence before submission to the guest editors.
Guest Editors
Dimitrios Serpanos, CTI and University of Patras (Greece)
Luis Muñoz, University of Cantabria (Spain)
Ioannis Chatzigiannakis, Sapienza University of Rome (Italy)
