Dear Colleagues,

Control rooms for mission critical operations and monitoring networks have changed considerably over the years, relying today on smart technology able to better support human-machine allocation tasks and decision support activities.

The working conditions of the control room operators are characterized by high cognitive workload in terms of user’ attention and decision processes both in daily routine and extraordinary/unexpected circumstances. For that reason, in addition to the security, resilience and reliability issues, control rooms also should be usable, being usability defined by ISO 9241-11 (2018) as "the extent to which a system, product or service can be used by specific users to achieve specific objectives with effectiveness, efficiency, and satisfaction in a given context". Usability is an essential property for understanding the uses and the place of users in smart control rooms.

The adoption of appropriate user centered design methodologies for future intelligent control room interfaces is paramount to achieve system usability and guarantee or restore safe and efficient operations, in a variety of application fields, from emergency, to healthcare, to surveillance, to agriculture, to industry.

Interface design for control rooms may raise challenges of potential interest for researchers working in a variety of areas, including computer-human interaction, organizational psychology and anthropology, big data management and information visualization, Internet of Things, geographical information systems, and software engineering.

As such, the special issue invites submission on new and innovative research results and industrial experience papers in the area of interface applications for smart control rooms. We particularly encourage submission covering any aspects of the problem, including, but not limited to, the following topics of interest:

• Context-Aware Behaviour in Smart Control Rooms;
• Cooperative Interaction in Smart Control Rooms;
• Multimodal/Multitouch Interaction for Smart Control Rooms;
• Smart Control Rooms for Emergency Management;
• Smart Control Rooms for Healthcare Management;
• Smart Control Rooms for the Internet of Things;
• Smart Control Rooms for UAVs, Drones and Robotics;
• Assessment of multiple properties (such as usability, security, etc.) affecting the use of smart control rooms;
• Visualization techniques for monitoring and analyzing data collected in control rooms.

Prof. Dr. Genoveffa Tortora
Prof. Dr. Giuliana Vitiello
Dr. Marco Winckler
Guest Editor

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