The artificial intelligence is changing our society. Its application in distributed environments, such as the Internet, electronic commerce, mobile communications, wireless devices, distributed computing, and so on is increasing and is becoming an element of high added value and economic potential, both industrial and research. These technologies are changing constantly as a result of the large research and technical effort being undertaken in both universities and businesses. The exchange of ideas between scientists and technicians from both academic and business areas is essential to facilitate the development of systems that meet the demands of today's society.

The International Symposium on Distributed Computing and Artificial Intelligence (http://dcai.usal.es) is an annual forum that will bring together ideas, projects, lessons, etc.. associated with distributed computing, artificial intelligence and its applications in different themes. This meeting was held in Salamanca in parallels with PAAMS'12 in March 28th-30th, 2012. This symposium will be organized by the Bioinformatic, Intelligent System and Educational Technology Reseach Group (http://bisite.usal.es/) of the University of Salamanca.

This special issue presents a selection of the best papers selected from those that were accepted on the symposium. These articles capture the most innovative results and this year’s trends: Artificial Intelligent Applications: commerce, health care, industry, internet, etc.; Software in Ubiquitous and Distributed Computing; Agent technologies for Ambient Intelligence; Technologies for Production Systems; Mobile computation and mobile Communications.

We would like to thank all the contributing authors, as well as the members of the Program Committee and the Organizing Committee for their hard and highly valuable work. Their work has helped to contribute to the success of this symposium. Finally, the Guest Editors wish to thank Editors-in-Chief of International Journal of Interactive Multimedia and Artificial Intelligence for the publication of this special issue, that notably contributes to improve the quality of the symposium. We hope the reader will share our joy and find this special issue very useful.

Welcome to IJIMAI and thank you very much to my co-editors for allowing me to be here. I also want to thank our readers for the positive feedback we receive constantly.

Our readers to help us constantly to improve and model what is going to be IJIMAI in the future, they suggest turning IJIMAI in a magazine with abroad scope and a practical nature to show the applications of the newest interactive, multimedia and AI systems.
The new special issue is about software engineering. This knowledge area is growing every day and we consider it to show everyone the new researches that our writers are making on their research groups. Of course, we cannot forget the principal scope of the journal and therefore, we decide to include good quality articles which combine artificial intelligence and software engineering.

The journal "International Journal of Interactive Multimedia and Artificial Intelligence" is undergoing a profound process of improvement. There have been many achievements since the inception of the magazine, but the year 2011 has been particularly productive.

Some of the most important achievements we have made are, printed version of the magazine (published by the Pontifical University of Salamanca, Madrid campus); new international scientific committee members, all highly regarded professionals; large increase in the number of articles submitted for publication (we have multiplied by ten the number of items) and increase in the number of external references.

New arrangements for the publication of "Special Issues" for Congress International relevance, such as, RTBI WorkShop SAP – CHINA, Pervasive Multimedia Sensor Networks, IEEE - DCAI 2012: 5th International Symposium on Distributed Computing and Artificial Intelligence.
 
Additionally, it also increased the institutions that index the journal, such as, DOAJ - Directory of Open Access Journals, LatIndex, EBSCO Publishing, etc.
 
So this year 2012, we face the challenge of improving IJIMAI to achieve an increase in prestige, number of publications and readers. Again, welcome to all.
 

This special issue goes far beyond artificial intelligent tools and is at the forefront of many of the hottest areas of Artificial Intelligence. Our reviewers have been selected articles that expose the latest innovative techniques applied in automated diagnosis, prospective scenarios, security, geographical intelligent information systems, and semantic web.
 
Imai research group addresses concerns in applied research and applications of interactive multimedia and artificial intelligence. Articles highlight advances in uses of AI systems for solving tasks in management, industry, engineering, administration, and education; evaluations of existing AI systems and tools, emphasizing comparative studies and user experiences; and the economic, social, and cultural impacts of AI.  Over the years, we have seen how artificial intelligence techniques have been applied in different scenarios ranging from business analysis tools, intelligent image processing, semantic web, to industry latest technologies.
 
On top of that, the challenge of extracting data from the rudimentary databases of four decades ago was significant. Early AI implementations would spit out reams of data, most of which wasn't sharable or adaptive to different business needs. Nowadays business intelligent tools can generate incredible enterprise web applications and executive dashboards from a data warehouse, including active charting, high-speed calculations, and rich interfaces. AI is more practical today for businesses than it has ever been.
 
Nowadays IMAI Research Group is currently concerned about over-exploitation of natural resources by developed and developing countries resulted in various severe problems: destruction of vegetation, land degradation, denudation, soil erosion, landslides, floods, drought and unbalanced ecosystems. We provide an international and multidisciplinary forum for the publication of original contributions and the exchange of knowledge and experience on the management of natural resources using artificial intelligence techniques. This journal acts as a medium for exchanging ideas and thoughts about impacts and results of AI and Multimedia research. Papers from multidisciplinary researchers and other relevant material are welcome.