Category Archives: loca

May 2009 Program Co-Chair LoCA, Tokyo Japan


Last week on May 7-8 I attended LOCA 2009 in Tokyo as one of the Program Co-Chairs for the 4th International Symposium on Location and Context Awareness. We started the symposium with a very engaging keynote from Dr.Shionozaki of Koozyt. He spoke about moving from PlaceEngine to Location Amplifier i.e. their experience with rolling out commercial Location Based Services. This was a very relevant keynote as LBS are now going main stream in certain countries and ramping up in many others. They provide exemplars and cautionary tales for those looking to explore, develop and commercialize location and context aware systems.

During LoCA presentations were of a very high quality and the papers have made some very impressive contributions to both location and context awareness. Our proceedings were published, more or less, in the Lecture Notes series in Computer Science in their Subseries: Information Systems and Applications, incl. Internet/Web, and HCI , Vol. 5561. LOCA 2009 has published new and significant research on systems, services, and applications to detect, interpret and use location and other contextual information. With context, we can expect computers to deliver information, services, and entertainment in a way that maximises convenience and minimises intrusion. Developing this awareness involves research in sensing, systems, machine learning, human computer interaction and design.

Prior to the conference the International Program Committee and Chairs selected the best paper from the submitted and reviewed papers. The award for the best paper was awarded to Sasank Reddy (University of California Los Angeles, US); Katie Shilton (University of California Los Angeles, US); Jeff Burke (University of California Los Angeles, US); Deborah Estrin (University of California at Los Angeles, US); Mark Hansen (University of California, Los Angeles, US); Mani Srivastava (University of California, Los Angeles, US) for their paper, “Using Context Annotated Mobility Profiles to Recruit Data Collectors in Participatory Sensing”.

Three papers were nominated for the best paper award:

  • Using Context Annotated Mobility Profiles to Recruit Data Collectors in Participatory Sensing
  • Multi Activity Recognition based on Bodymodel-Derived Primitives
  • Where Will They Turn: Predicting Turn Proportions At Intersections


During the course of the symposium John Krumm from Microsoft Research Seattle was awarded the best presentation award for his presentation on his paper “Where Will They Turn: Predicting Turn Proportions At Intersections”.

Thanks to my co-chair Tanzeem Choudhury from Dartmouth College, our local chair Koji Suginuma from Sony Corporation who did an amazing job with local organisation and to our general chair Thomas Strang from DLR.

April 2009 – Proceedings of LoCA 2009

New Edited Proceedings
The Proceedings of LoCA 2009 are now online

Location and Context Awareness
4th International Symposium, LoCA 2009 Tokyo, Japan, May 7-8, 2009 Proceedings
Series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science
Subseries: Information Systems and Applications, incl. Internet/Web, and HCI , Vol. 5561
Choudhury, T.; Quigley, A.; Strang, Th.; Suginuma, K. (Eds.)
2009, VIII, 283 p., ISBN: 978-3-642-01720-9
[ Springer-Verlag Site ]

Feb 2009 – LoCA program chair meeting and decisions


Myself and Tanzeem Choudhury from Dartmouth College are the program chairs for the Fourth International Symposium on Location- and Context-Awareness to be held in Tokyo Japan from the 7-8 May 2009. LoCA 2009 is colocated with Pervasive 2009 the Seventh International Conference on Pervasive Computing, which will be held May 11-14, 2009 in Nara, Japan.

A total of 77 abstracts and 54 papers were submitted to LoCA 2009 and after careful peer review by the program committee and discussion by the chairs, 18 papers were selected to form what we feel is a high-quality program. Best paper and presentation awards will be presented during the symposium. And all accepted papers will be contained in the symposium proceedings which will be published in the Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS) series by Springer.

While we had more good papers than we could accept, those in the program will form an exciting and engaging research program for everyone who attends LoCA 2009. Some of the terms and expressions (adapted a little to preserve anonymity) used in the reviews of these accepted papers include:

  • “New Concept”, “Novel Concept”, “An interesting novel idea”
  • “…the research jumps head-on into a large open problem”
  • “…strong rigorous evaluations which are well written and well argued”
  • “…the authors offer insightful descriptions”
  • “… well written, well explained, and thoroughly evaluated research contribution that is quite relevant for …”
  • “… an interesting paper, well-presented and -evaluated and addressing an important problem.”
  • “..the paper makes good use of state-of-the art techniques to solve the problem of …”
  • “..I think this is a real problem of interest to the community”

Peer review can be a both upliftting and shocking process but the tireless efforts of all those on the LoCA PC are to be very much commended as hundreds of reviews had to be written to help select just 18 papers.

Dr.Shonozaki of Koozyt (PlaceEngine) will be a Keynote Speaker for LoCA 2009 and the early bird registration for LoCA 2009 is March 5.

I would like to thank all the members of the PC, our reviewers, general and local chairs and in particular my program co-chair Dr. Tanzeem Choudhury for a very smooth, professional and high quality peer-review process for LoCA 2009.

東京でお会い

May 2008 LoCA 2009 Co-Chair

LoCA 2009 Logo

Along with Tanzeem Choudhury of Dartmouth College, USA I am the program co-chair for LoCA 2009 in Tokyo Japan.

4th International Symposium on Location and Context Awareness
May 7th-8th, 2009. Tokyo, Japan

The 2009 Symposium on Location and Context Awareness (LoCA) seeks new and significant research on systems, services, and applications to detect, interpret and use location and other contextual information. Context includes physiological, environmental and computational data whether sensed or inferred. In addition, context includes users’ activities, goals, abilities, preferences, interruptibility, affordances, and surroundings. With context, we can expect computers to deliver information, services, and entertainment in a way that maximises convenience and minimises intrusion. Developing awareness involves research in sensing, systems, machine learning, human computer interaction, and design.

LoCA 2009 Poster [ Download Poster ]