Today saw the end of my responsibilities for Pervasive 2008 the Sixth International Conference on Pervasive Computing, which was held in Sydney. Congratulations and thanks to all the organisers for their hardwork and dedication in bringing this event off without a hitch. I quite enjoyed the conference and it was nice to catch up with some old colleagues along with seeing some younger colleagues progress both their research and their careers. During the conference I was the co-chair for the Late Breaking Results, Video and Demo one-minute madness with my LBR co-chair Dr. Rene Mayrhofer who is a Guest Prof. for Mobile Computing in the Faculty of Computer Science at the University of Vienna. Rene was a pleasure to work with on the late breaking results and I’d like to compliment him for his professionalism and high level of attention to detail through the review, discussion and shepherding process. It’s fair to say I also enjoyed the session as I got to wield a cricket bat to those who went over their time on stage (harmless I promise [ see pic ]). The following day I was a session chair for the Lessons learned from displays, games, and health applications which saw three good quality papers and presentations on a range of user experience issues. The day after (today) was the final day of the conference and along with 7 other colleagues I presented a one hour tutorial on Context-Rich but Keyboard-Free Pervasive Computing: Pervasive Computing User Interfaces. There is a book available for this day long tutorial.

I look forward to seeing everyone at LOCA 2009 the 4th International Symposium on Location and Context Awareness (LoCA) which will be held in Tokyo Japan in May 2009 just before Pervasive 2009 (which will be in Nara).
The important dates for LoCA are:

• 18 December 2008 Submission Deadline
• 13 February 2009 Author Notifications
• 27 February 2009 Camera Ready Copy
• 7-8 May 2009 Symposium (Tokyo, Japan)