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Labeling children's social play behavior is an important process in children's peer-play analysis which is traditionally done by experienced coders. With the growing volume of data, automatic methods for labeling are increasingly required. This paper presents a novel method to classify children's social play behavior in peer-play scenarios into three categories (solitary play, parallel play and group play). Based on the two key cues -- attentiveness and proximity proposed in "The Play Observation Scale", unary features and pairwise features are calculated to describe the relationships between a child and the whole context, and the interactions between two children. Inspired by the recent studies in social behavior analysis and interaction recognition, children's activities are classified by support vector machine (SVM) and hidden conditional random field (HCRF). This method is evaluated by a dataset of children's peer-play scenarios collected by psychology researchers and the results show this method has a good performance in the dataset. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This issue of JAISE is composed of five papers. The review process for the papers in this issue was supervised by our editors Bjoern Gottfried, Andrea Prati, Jinshi Cui, and Vincent Tam, whom we thank for their service. However, the data involved in the monitoring system and the automation processes can be huge and heterogeneous, complicating the system integration processes at the deployment and operation of such systems. [Extracted from the article]

This issue of JAISE is composed of four papers. However, current methods of defining zones heavily depend on the robot's on-board sensing capabilities and often require a direct line of sight between the human user and the robot. The paper B "Representation learning for minority and subtle activities in a smart home environment" b by Sanabria et al. proposes a hierarchical activity classifier based on a two-phase learning scheme. [Extracted from the article]

An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses various reports within the issue on topics including the creation of playful persuasion in designing public spaces, the role of ambient assisted living (AAL) in the achievement of well-being among older people, and a methodology for concrptualizing context for intelligent system.

An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses various reports within the issue on topics including interactive energy management system, estimation of human walking speed and hydraulic bed sensor capturing the superposition of respiration signals and heart rate.

Reviewers whom the "Journal of Ambient Intelligence and Smart Environments" (JAISE) would like to thank for their assistance in the creation of the journal issues from November 2013 to November 2014 are mentioned.