Artificial Intelligence was originally devised with a clear purpose in mind: replicate human abilities into computational systems. To achieve this goal, systems need to be provided with the means to sense and act, perceive, and understand. Acting has been faced from the agency model field, sensing from a more technological field in seeking for devices capable of replicating human senses, and finally perceiving and understanding have been faced from the knowledge management and reasoning field. This workshop on Sensing, Understanding and Modeling for the Smart City is intended to explore the recent advances in any of these three fields of knowledge, although from the specific perspective of solutions for perceiving and understanding human actions. Comprehensive solutions devoted to fields such as Ubiquitous Computing, Ambient Assisted Living, Ambient Intelligence and special Smart City spaces are encouraged. Smart City is a popular topic nowadays:

For any number of applications — traffic control, dispatching emergency services, public transportation, energy distribution, delivering many kinds of information to individuals via their cell phones, or perhaps all at once — you would want to maintain some kind of over-arching model of what is going on in the city.

To create and maintain that model requires integrating the information coming from many sensors: traffic monitors, cameras, news feeds, special-event listings, information about the position of emergency and public-transit vehicles, power consumption meters, temperature and pollution monitors, etc.

And on top of all that, there is the problem of providing a useful and easily understood user interface — especially important if (some of) the information is being made available to the general public.

The topic of this special issue might include, but are not constrained to, the following issues:

Perceiving and cognitive systems;

Biological-inspired sensors for reasoning systems;

Sensor fusion systems;

Smarter video analytics;

Video-based human action understanding;

Distributed approaches to modeling action understanding;

Distributed sensing systems, frameworks or methods;

Distributed intelligence;

Comprehensive solutions and frameworks to intelligent spaces;

Multi-agent system solutions for modeling, managing, and understanding human actions;

Modeling and reasoning approaches for perceiving and understanding human actions;

Common-sense reasoning systems;

Solutions for modeling, managing and reasoning about spatio-temporal aspects of human actions