Special Issue Editorial: Next generation ICTs - How distant is ubiquitous computing?

Traditional design development processes have come a long way from the use of drawing boards. The accelerated use of ICT-based digital systems means that the industry has steadily moved towards a digitized future. A future where increasingly unstructured information is created, shared, manipulated, stored, and archived in various digital media support the four pillars of visualization, integration, communication, and intelligence on which typical construction projects currently stand. The ICT field's growth, combined with the unprecedented advances in communication and network media usage, has resulted in hyper-interconnectivity globally. This hyper-connectivity through developments such as the Internet of Things (IoT) creates global opportunities for collaboration, which was not previously possible. It links 'human' and 'social' networks with 'technical' systems. With the vast volumes of digitally connected systems and the systems' data, new opportunities for learning have surfaced in the construction domain. The special issue targeted the state-of-the-art developments of next generation ICTs in the global arena. As with any new developments, new opportunities emerge and new challenges surface. The cautious late majority and the laggards, adopt a skeptical approach, that which is reserved and strewn in doubt. The innovators and the early majority on the other hand pave the way to technology adoption and help drive change in the industry. This special issue recognises that the emergence of next-generation ICTs, combined with developments in ubiquitous computing, presentopportunities that challenge the current status quo of the construction sector. This special issue recognizes that for an industry to remain truly competitive, due consideration need to be given to the ongoing and emerging technological developments, and a deep understanding of which would lead to novel responsive approaches for their significant uptake. The collection of papers in this special issue gives a comprehensive overview of research and developments in the field of next-generation ICTs. It bridges the gap between the two domains of construction and computer science. Of the ten papers in this collection, two (by Akamu et al, and Karmarkar and Delhi) were invited papers and include a world view on thewider applicability of next-generation ICTs in the construction domain, the opportunities they present and the challenges that emerge. The remaining papers, amongst other aspects, cover theinnovative application of next-gen ICTs in specific industry sectors(e.g., in the water industry by Alani et al, 2021)or in meeting specific project goals such as to manage energy consumption (Watfa et al), improve information retrieval (Wang et al), integrate AR and BIM for specific building submission processes (Schranz et al), identify challenges to collaborative working within globally dispersed virtual project teams (Anderson and Ramalingam), and ontology for robot navigation and data fusion (Karimi et al).