The International Journal of Interactive Multimedia and Artificial Intelligence - IJIMAI - provides a space in which scientists and professionals can report about new advances in Artificial Intelligence (AI). On this occasion, for the last edition of the year, I am pleased to present a regular issue including different investigations covering aspects and problems in AI and its use in various fields such as medicine, education, image analysis, protection of data, among others.

Research on the relationship between computing and the meaning of human life flourishes proportionally to the increasing digitalization of our world. More and more, reflections on ethics and politics, spiritual values and religious experiences, beliefs, and practices make use of digital media in order to spread their content or express themselves. If we still consider that there is truth in the well-known dictum that “the medium is the message”, then it is worth asking how the content of these reflections and practices are changing today. Every change is the introduction of something new, and this novelty can be interpreted either as the improvement or the worsening of the current situation. Generally speaking, research on either the positive or negative interactions between the advances in AI and the dimension of spirituality and analogue thinking are based on at least three approaches. The first produces analogies between concepts from human studies and concepts from computer science; for instance, speaking of “modeling” for concepts in human sciences, or considering the universe to be intelligently organized in an algorithmic order. The second approach is the application of research on AI and computer science to develop new insights on the extents, limits, and perfectibility of spiritual topics, discussions, or even practices. Finally, the third approach applies sociological, philosophical, aesthetic, or even theological concepts to assess the changes that digitalization introduces in spiritual practices, beliefs, and cultures. This special issue analyzes the current state of the art, and it addresses all three models of the research. By doing so, the issue will place the general question of the distinction between human and machine into sharper relief.

In today’s world, we have witnessed an onset of multimedia content being uploaded/downloaded and shared through a multitude of platforms both online and offline. In support of this trend, multimedia processing and analyzing has become very popular in all kinds of information extraction and attracts research interest from both academia and industry. This is to be expected as the multimedia digital world is worth trillions of dollars worldwide. However, multimedia information is hard to encode, interpret and recognize because it is combined with many complex components. Recently, there are many research areas related to the overall notion of intelligent multimedia processing. Therefore, the collected papers in this special issue provide a systematic overview and state-of-the-art research in the field of intelligent multimedia processing and analyzing system and outline new developments in fundamental, theorems, approaches, methodologies, software systems, recommendations, and real-world applications in this area.

The International Journal of Interactive Multimedia and Artificial Intelligence – IJIMAI (ISSN 1989-1660) provides an interdisciplinary forum in which scientists and professionals can share their research results and report new advances on Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools or tools that use AI with interactive multimedia techniques. The present volume, June volume, consists of 24 articles of diverse applications of great impact in different fields, always having as a common element the use of artificial intelligence techniques or mathematical models with an artificial intelligence base. As it is logical, COVID is present in several manuscripts of this volume, always focused on the prediction and estimation of the presence of the disease. In addition to this expected presence, there are manuscripts of a semantic or syntactic analysis nature as well as works in the field of management and recommender systems. It is also worth mentioning several works in the field of video compression and signal processing. Of course, the Internet of Things and text analysis for several applications could not be missed in this volume. Finally, different manuscripts on usability and satisfaction, investments, solar panels, malware detection, video analysis, audio analysis and learning can also be found in this volume.

Artificial Intelligence has become nowadays one of the main relevant technologies that is driven us to a new revolution, a change in society, just as well as other human inventions, such as navigation, steam machines, or electricity did in our past. There are several ways in which AI might be developed, and the European Union has chosen a path, a way to transit through this revolution, in which Artificial Intelligence will be a tool at the service of Humanity. That was precisely the motto of the 2020 European Conference on Artificial Intelligence (“Paving the way towards Human-Centric AI”), of which these special issue is a selection of the best papers selected by the organizers of some of the Workshops in ECAI 2020.

The present regular issue consists of 10 works with a great variety of topics. It begins with two interesting health-related works: the first one, reviews different approaches that can help fight COVID-19 and the second one, tries to solve an optimal control problem of cancer treatment using an artificial neural network. It continues with algorithms that can help in industrial processes such as reducing the temperature of electronic circuits or carrying out chromium layer thickness forecast. Radically changing the subject, the next paper proposes a method to identify the most influential nodes in social networks that can be the source of rumor spreading. Another different work focuses on how to interact with virtual 3D environments in a cheap way by using multiple embedded markers in a specialized manner. In this issue, a work has also been carried out to improve the identification of polysemy in natural language processing tasks. The following two works are related to assess students satisfaction: on the perception of students when they are evaluated by an artificial intelligence and not by a human, and on the quality of the learning content and the methodology at unit level for any course and at any time. Finally, the issue closes with a paper in which a tool can classify the emotions of users based only on non-invasive techniques like their keyboard typing and mouse usage pattern.
As a novelty, we are pleased to announce that this is the first regular issue in IJIMAI that contains a special section with a collection of works on a specific topic. In this case, the section is presented under the title "Artificial Intelligence and Sensor Informatics: Exploring Smart City and Construction Business Implications” and is edited by Prof. Shaofei Wu from the Wuhan Institute of Technology (China). The section includes 7 exciting works which topics range from industrial robots to energy estimation based on machine learning algorithms.

In this special issue, we want to gather some innovative applications that are currently pushing forward the research on Blockchain technologies. In particular, we are interested also in those applications that put the focus on the data, enabling new processes that are able to leverage relevant knowledge from the data. This special issue will be successful if readers gain a better understanding on how Blockchain can be applied to very diverse areas, and might even be interested in designing, implementing and deploying an innovative solution to a completely different field of knowledge. We hope this Special Issue can provide a better understanding and key insights to readers on how Blockchain and artificial intelligence are cross-fertilizing to revolutionize many aspects in our societies.

The present regular issue starts with two articles related to one of the most relevant problems nowadays, which is the COVID-19 pandemic. Over the past years, there have been great advancements in health, but the evidence is that it remains a challenge to deal with pandemics and to achieve global health. IJIMAI has always reserved a space for heath topics and in the last years, a Special Issue on Big Data and e-health or a Special Issue on 3D Medicine and Artificial Intelligence were published. As Mochón and Baldominos state, “from a global perspective, a clear statement can be made: Artificial Intelligence can have an immense positive impact on societies... AI is turning into a key player at the time of diagnosing diseases at an early stage or developing new medicines and specialized treatment”. Being aware of this, a great number of researchers and scientific entities are focusing the efforts in this field and, specifically on the current world pandemic, as the researchers involved in the first two articles of this regular issue.

The International Journal of Interactive Multimedia and Artificial Intelligence - IJIMAI (ISSN 1989 - 1660) provides an interdisciplinary forum in which scientists and professionals can share their research results and report new advances on Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools or tools that use AI with interactive multimedia techniques. Already indexed in the Science Citation Index Expanded by Clarivate Analytics, within the categories “Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence” and “Computer Science, Interdisciplinary Applications”, during the next month the journal will be listed in the 2019 Journal Citation Reports. Again, given this great milestone, the IJIMAI Editorial Board reiterates its appreciation for their support to authors, reviewers and readers.

The International Journal of Interactive Multimedia and Artificial Intelligence (IJIMAI) covers all types of Artificial Intelligence (AI) research. The effort of reviewers, editors and authors have made the journal’s quality to go up every year. Last year, the goal of being included in the Journal Citation Reports index was achieved. It is totally clear to me that the journal could not have grown up that much without all the people that supports the journal. These include the abovementioned editors, reviewers and, specially, the authors, who trust and support the journal with their high-quality work. Let’s continue this trail and keep growing in order to make IJIMAI the influential AI journal that it deserves to be.

Last year, a set of very interesting special issues were published in this journal. Some of them are, for instance, the Special Issue on Uses Cases of Artificial Intelligence, Digital Marketing and Neuroscience, the Special Issue on Artificial Intelligence Applications or the Special Issue on Big Data and Open Education. This time, for the first issue of the year, we are glad to present a Special Issue on Soft Computing. Soft Computing is an AI branch that focuses on solving problems that have incomplete, inexact or fuzzy information. In other words, Soft Computing area includes algorithms and methods that are typically used when the imprecision or lack of the dealt data make other type of methods to become useless. Deep Learning, Machine learning and Fuzzy Systems related methods have achieved really good results even when the available data is not as good as desired. This success has converted the Soft Computing area in one of the most important ones inside the AI field.

This special issue’s goal is to reunite some of the most recent research on the Soft Computing area. The selected research covers different aspects and problems on the AI area in an effort to provide a clear overview of the state of the art on the topic.

After its recent tenth anniversary, the journal has achieved an important milestone. From 2015 to 2018 IJIMAI was indexed at Web of Science through Emerging Science Citation Index. This meant a great increase in visibility and number of received papers. This year, Clarivate Analytics has accepted the inclusion of IJIMAI in the Journal Citation Reports. Specifically, IJIMAI will be indexed and abstracted in Science Citation Index Expanded, Journal Citation Reports/Science Edition and Current Contents®/Engineering Computing and Technology. The Web of Science Categories in which IJIMAI is included are “Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence” and “Computer Science, Interdisciplinary Applications. This way, IJIMAI is indexed in Science Citation Index Expanded beginning with vol. 4(3) March 2017 so that the journal will be listed in the 2019 Journal Citation Reports with a Journal Impact Factor when released in June 2020. Given this great achievement, IJIMAI Editorial Board  has to thank authors for all the papers sent and all the papers published, as well as reviewers for their support to obtain high-quality in papers, and specially our readers  because without them this milestone would not have been possible.

The present regular issue includes research works based on different AI methods such as convolutional neural networks, genetic algorithms, Lightning Attachment Procedure Optimization, or those of multi-agent systems. These methods are applied into various fields as video surveillance, gesture recognition, sentiment analysis, territory planning, search engines, epidemiological surveillance or robotics.