Category Archives: pervasive

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

Feb 2009 Program Committee, Conference on Smart Spaces

I’ve been invited to join the PC for the 2nd Conference on Smart Spaces ruSMART 2009 to be held in St.Petersburg, Russia from September 15-16, 2009. I like the outline for this event and topics it covers. The program from 2008 also looks very good.

“Recent advances in the field of wireless networks have moved them beyond their traditional areas of application to a much broader scope. They form a space where users can access a number of wireless technologies to interact with various services. Similarly, existent and future services form a space providing an unlimited set of possibilities ranging from browsing to interactive video conversations. All these layers form a smart environment that can harmonize a number of technologies at each architectural layer to provide the best user experience.

This conference will explore and explain the scope and challenges of smart spaces. In this regard, the conference aims to bring together research professionals from diverse fields including but not limited to wireless communication, ubiquitous networks, software development, multimedia, services, and business in both academia and industry.

The 2nd Conference on Smart Spaces ruSMART 2009 will take place on September 15 – 16, 2009. It will be co-located with the 9th International Conference Next Generation Wired/Wireless Advanced Networking NEW2AN 2009. ruSMART proceedings will be published by SpringerLNCS in joint volume.”

[ Read More ]

Dec 2008 Tutorials Co-Chair Clifton Forlines Tabletop 2009

Clifton from MERLI’m delighted to announce that Clifton Forlines, a Research Associate and Technical Staff member from Mitsubishi Electric Research Labs (MERL) in Cambridge MA will be joining me as Co-Chair for the Tabletop 2009 Tutorials program. This is a fantastic development as Clifton has a vast range of experience in the area of Tabletop computing and has been a prolific publisher in the field. I trust our complementary academic and industry insights will allow us to develop an exciting and high impact program for these, the first ever Tabletop tutorials.

“Clifton Forlines is Research Associate at MERL. His research interests include the design and evaluation of novel user interfaces. Current research projects span from three-dimensional presentation of and navigation through recorded digital video, to collaborative tabletop user interfaces, to using hand-held projectors for augmented reality. He is currently leading the evaluation of three projects, MediaFinder, TimeTunnel, and DiamondSpin. Before coming to MERL, Clifton worked on Carnegie Mellon’s Alice project, which aimed at teaching programming to children through building interactive 3D worlds.” [ more ]

Dec 2008 Two Conference Papers Accepted.

Myself and three of my PhD students have recently had two papers accepted at leading international conferences. Both will be published in upcoming volumes on the Springer Lecture Notes in Computer Science Series.

Firstly, myself Ross, Tom, along with our colleagues Adrian, Simon and Paddy had “Situvis: a visual tool for modeling a user’s behaviour patterns in a pervasive environment” accepted at the Seventh International Conference on Pervasive Computing in Nara Japan. This year the conference had a very low acceptance rate of 18.4% which makes this all the move satisfying personally. The back story to Sitvis is a very interesting one and is a great testament to our new structured PhD program in UCD. Tom developed the core Situvis visualisation framework as part of a project he developed in my InfoVis course in 2007. He worked with Ross on developing it into a graph drawing system by using coupled layouts. We then further developed the idea when Adrian came with the situation and sensor problems and proposed Situvis which we all worked on together. The ebb and flow of ideas in and out of the students areas of core interest goes to show what great outcomes we can have with structured learning.

Secondly, myself and Umer Rashid had a paper accepted at the HCI International Conference 2009 on “Interaction Techniques for Binding Smart Phones: A Desirability Evaluation“. It will be published by Springer in a multi-volume set in the Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS) and Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence (LNAI) series. This conference will be held on 19-24 July 09 in San Diego, CA, USA.

Japan and the USA in 2009.. here we come for these and other papers to come…!

Dec 2008 Workshop Chair, Pervasive 2010 – The Eighth International Conference on Pervasive Computing

May 2010, Helsinki Finland

Festival Hall at the University of Helsinki

I have been invited to be one of the Workshop Chairs for Pervasive 2010, The Eighth International Conference on Pervasive Computing 17-20 May 2010. Our workshops and the main conference will be held in the Festival Hall at the University of Helsinki Finland. While this event is over 17 months away we will be soliciting targeted workshops and large Pervasive Computing project organisers to come to Helsinki. Example workshops might be collocated with an FP7 project review eg. (day 1 project meeting and day 2 open Pervasive 2010 workshop). Other workshops will be solicited directly from leading research groups in areas of interest to Pervasive but which have not traditionally had a strong presence here. Finally, we will be issuing a general calls for workshops to the entire community, as always.

We expect the open call, targeted call and invited workshops to provide a stimulating and exciting workshop program to compliment the main conference in 2010. If you have an idea now for a workshop, please do get in touch.

Dec 2008 Program Co-Chair, Pervasive Advertising Workshop @ Pervasive 2009

Website goes live.
May 2009 in Nara Japan…..

“The Pervasive Advertising workshop focusses on how Pervasive Technology is shaping the future of advertising. Technologies including digital signage, ambient displays, mobile phones, haptic interfaces and e-newspapers create a pervasive media environment that disrupts established advertising business models such as sponsorship, publishing houses, out-of-home (e.g. billboard) advertising and TV advertising. We believe that pervasive advertising will soon affect a majority of the world’s urban population, both positively and negatively. Potential opportunities
will centre on the ubiquitous provision of calm and interesting information.

Particular threats are pervasive SPAM and pervasive surveillance, as advertisers try to establish who looks at their ads. This workshop aims at bringing together researchers to forecast opportunities and threats from this development and shape the future of urban citizen. We encourage participants who are excited by or afraid of pervasive advertising to apply to attend this workshop.”

Nov 2008 Pervasive 2009 Workshop – Pervasive Advertising

Today Jörg Müller from the University of Münster, Albrecht Schmidt from University of Duisburg-Essen, Bo Begole from PARC USA and myself had our workshop on “Pervasive Computing will change the Future of Advertising” (www.pervasiveadvertising.org) accepted at Pervasive 2009, the Seventh International Conference on Pervasive Computing which will be held May 11-14, 2009 in Nara, Japan. This annual conference is the premier forum for researchers to present their latest results in all areas related to architecture, design, implementation, application and evaluation of pervasive computing. I’m also a member of the steering committee (along with Albrecht and others), so it’s great to see the conference go from strength to strength!

“The Pervasive Advertising workshop focusses on how Pervasive Technology is shaping the future of advertising. Technologies including digital signage, ambient displays, mobile phones, haptic interfaces and e-newspapers create a pervasive media environment that disrupts established advertising business models such as sponsorship, publishing houses, out-of-home (e.g. billboard) advertising and TV advertising. We believe that pervasive advertising will soon affect a majority of the world’s urban population, both positively and negatively. Potential opportunities
will centre on the ubiquitous provision of calm and interesting information.

Particular threats are pervasive SPAM and pervasive surveillance, as advertisers try to establish who looks at their ads. This workshop aims at bringing together researchers to forecast opportunities and threats from this development and shape the future of urban citizen. We encourage participants who are excited by or afraid of pervasive advertising to apply to attend this workshop.”

Albrecht blogged about this earlier in the year and highlighted some interesting uses of Pervasive Computing in advertising with “Beamvertising”.

Other examples I found are.

Advertising in a pervasive computing environment [ACM]

“The advent of the internet has revolutionized the field of advertising by providing a whole new path for reaching potential customers. Studies show that online advertising is, on the whole, extremely effective and that consumer acceptance of online advertising is comparable to traditional media[7][8]. One of the reasons for the high effectiveness of online advertising is that users interact with the web at a far more personal and intimate level than they interact with other advertising media like the radio or television. Pervasive computing environments deal with users at an even more intimate level; hence such environments are even better advertising platforms than the web. Pervasive environments allow the delivery of relevant advertising in suitable ways to selected consumers. In this paper, we examine some of the possibilities of pervasive advertising as well as some of the issues involved.”

And using ubiquitous computing in interactive mobile marketing – S Kurkovsky, K Harihar

Student papers Advertising in Ubiquitous Environment.

July 2008 Pervasive 2009 Program Committee invitation

Pervasive 2009Today I agreed to serve on the program committee for Pervasive 2009. I was invited to serve by A.J. Brush, Adrian Friday, Yoshito Tobe the program committee co-chairs. This annual conference provides a premier forum for researchers to present their latest results in all areas related to architecture, design, implementation, application and evaluation of pervasive computing as it integrates into our lives.

I look forward to being involved with this conference again this year. The submissions, pre-PC meeting and PC meeting itself are always exciting and challenging for all. The submission deadline this year is October 17th and the program committee meeting will be held in Cambridge, England at Microsoft Research Cambridge. Pervasive 2009, the Seventh International Conference on Pervasive Computing, will be held May 11-14, 2009 in Nara, Japan. It will include a highly selective single-track program for technical papers, accompanied by late-breaking result posters, videos, demonstrations, workshops, a doctoral colloquium and other events. LoCA 2009 the 4th International Symposium on Location and Context Awareness will be held in Tokyo Japan in May 2009 prior to Pervasive 2009.

Websites:
http://www.pervasive2009.org/
http://loca2009.context-aware.org/

June 2008 Journal Special Issue Call

Along with colleagues in Microsoft and Bristol we are editing a special issue of a journal to follow on from our PPD workshop last month in Italy.

Call for Papers for Personal and Ubiquitous Computing Special Issue:
Designing Multi-touch Interaction Techniques for Coupled Public and Personal Displays
Editors: Shahram Izadi, Aaron Quigley, and Sriram Subramanian

Synopsis:
This call for papers for a special issue follows on the successful workshop held at Advanced Visual Interfaces 2008 on the same topic (see http://ppd08.ucd.ie/ for workshop details). The special issue will focus on the research challenges and opportunities afforded by the combination of touch sensitive small personal input displays coupled with large touch sensitive public displays. Different touch-enabled devices rely on different types of touches (passive stylus, active stylus, fingers and tangible objects), the motivating question for this call is how do users switch between these devices and how to facilitate fluid transition from a collection of multiple displays to a single integrated multi-display environment.
Recent developments have seen the wide spread proliferation of both large shared- and small personal- interactive surfaces. Large interactive surfaces offer great potential for face-to-face work and social interaction and provide natural ways to directly manipulate virtual objects whereas small devices afford the individual a personal workspace or “scratch space” to formulate ideas before bringing them to a wider audience. Advanced visual interfaces can be built around a combination of both personal and public touch driven displays. Such computer mediated multi-device interaction between local touch-driven displays and shared public ones present a number of novel and challenging research problems.

Topics of interest to this special issue include (but are not limited to)

* Understanding the design space and identifying factors that influence Multi-touch interactions in Coupled Public and Personal Displays
* The impact of social conventions on the design of suitable interaction techniques for shared and personal displays
* Exploring interaction techniques that facilitate multi-display interfaces
* Personal displays as physical objects for the development of interaction techniques with shared multi-touch displays
* Novel interaction techniques for both personal and public multi-touch devices as part of multi-display environments
* Techniques for supporting input re-direction and distributing information between displays
* Developing evaluation strategies to cope with the complex nature of multi-display environments
* Ethnography and user studies on the use of coupled public and personal display environments
* Comprehensive surveys of the state-of-the-art that extend our understanding of the design space.

Submission details
Submissions should be between 6000 and 8000 words and authors are encouraged to use the Springer guidelines for authors, available at ftp://ftp.springer.de/pub/Word/journals
Submission in pdf electronic format should be emailed to Luke Conroy (luke.conroy@ucd.ie).

Dates
4th August 2008: 300 word abstract and expression of interest (optional)
15th August 2008: Feedback on abstract
29th August 2008: Full submission due
3rd October 2008: First Notification
5th December 2008: Revisions due
9th January 2009: Final Notification
June – Dec 2009: Planned publication

June 2008 PerCom PC 2009

PerCom Logo
I was recently invited to serve of the international program committee for PerCom 2009 the Seventh Annual IEEE International Conference on Pervasive Computing and Communications. I look forward to taking part in this program committee for a conference series I haven’t been involved with before.