Category Archives: pervasive

May 2008 Pervasive 2008 comes to an end

Pervasive 2008 LogoToday 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.

LoCA 2009

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)

Loca logo

May 2008 Pervasive Computing @ Home Workshop

Today I attended and presented at the Pervasive Computing @ Home workshop in Sydney. This workshop was focused on Pervasive Technology as applied specifically to a home environment. What was discussed was what distinguishes the home from other sites of technological innovation, approaches to studying behavior in a home setting including in-situ studies and living laboratories, and lessons learned from building and studying pervasive technologies intended for use in homes. I was mainly interested in this workshop for our TRIL research and development.
Presentations Included:

  • Pervasive Computing@ICS-Forth – C. Stephanidis, A. Argyros, D. Grammenos, X. Zabulis
  • Home Deployments for Independent Living – A. Quigley, M. McGrath, P. Nixon, and T. Dishongh
  • The eHome – a Practical Smart Home Implementation – L. Kaila, J. Mikkonen, A. Vainio, J. Vanhala End-User Programming for the Home: a Challenge – J. Couta
  • Bringing IMS Services to the DLNA Connected Home – J. Hjelm, T. Oda, A. Fasbender, S. Murakami, A. Damola
  • Adding Convenience to “Cohabitation of Conveience” – U. Rashid and A. Quigley
  • Connecting People Who Connect Devices – M. Newman and M. Ackerman

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 ]

Apr 2008 Pervasive 2008 Tutorial

Context-Rich but Keyboard-Free Pervasive Computing – Pervasive Computing User Interfaces – Aaron J Quigley – Pervasive 2008 Tutorials

Clearly there are classes of computing application which will rely on the classical screen, keyboard and mouse interfaces for sometime to come. However, we are seeing the emergence of pervasive computing applications and scenarios which go beyond the traditional application design or even mobile computing application design. Designing User Interfaces for the disappearing computer is difficult. By its very nature Pervasive Computing is trying to make the computer less of a focal point, making it, dare we say invisible! The challenge therefore becomes to provide simple, seamless, natural and context-aware interfaces to complex, subtle and oft invisible pervasive computing applications. Instead of overwhelming the user with a plethora of options, research as shown the need to develop personalized user interfaces that leverage past and group actions in user interface interaction. This tutorial will provide an overview of the approaches taken in the development of user interfaces for pervasive computing applications to date.

Dec 2007 Co-Chair Pervasive 2008 Late Breaking Results

+————————————————————-+
Preliminary Call for Late Breaking Results Papers

Pervasive 2008
The Sixth International Conference
on Pervasive Computing
Sydney, Australia
May 19-22, 2008
http://pervasive2008.org/

+————————————————————-+

Preliminary Call for Late Breaking Results Papers

Submission Deadline: 1st February 2008, 18:00 EST
Notification of acceptance: 15th March 2008
Camera-ready paper deadline: 29th March 2008

Within the category of Late Breaking Results, PERVASIVE 2008
provides researchers the opportunity to present their results in
three ways, as a poster, published paper and short “1 minute madness”.
We welcome contributions on original and recent research findings,
early stage research, fundamental results, basic research contributions
and novel ideas in the area of pervasive computing technologies,
systems, and application.

Authors are invited to submit late breaking results papers to be peer
reviewed, which if accepted will be published in the Adjunct Proceedings
of PERVASIVE 2008 by the OCG. Authors of accepted late breaking
results papers will present a poster at a dedicated conference poster
session.

All authors of late breaking results papers will be able to present an
overview of their paper/poster during the established “1-minute madness
session” prior to the poster session – a prime spot for showcasing new
and innovative ideas. This open forum stimulates discussion and facilitates
multiple avenues for you to disseminate your research and affords attendees
several ways to access your research.

Areas of interest include, but are not limited to:

* Device, communication, and interaction technologies for pervasive
computing.
* Pervasive sensing, perception and inference for context
technologies.
* Software infrastructure, middleware and frameworks for pervasive
computing systems and environments.
* Analysis, design, implementation and evaluation of pervasive
systems and applications.
* Deployment and management of pervasive systems and services and
emerging industrial scenarios.
* Pervasive computing interaction models, user interfaces and user
experience.
* Privacy, security, and trust in pervasive computing.

Contributions will be peer reviewed and, if accepted, will be published
as short papers in the Adjunct Proceedings of PERVASIVE 2008 with
the Austrian Computer Society (OCG) series and online.

Submission and Review Process
Submissions must be no longer than 4 pages in OCG Format. A sketch
outlining the planned poster presentation may be attached as an
additional page. Authors should submit electronic versions (in PDF
format) of their papers to EDAS. Once logged in select “Pervasive
2008 Late Breaking Results Papers” to submit your paper or use the
direct URL: http://www.edas.info/newPaper.php?c=6032&

Late Breaking Results Co-Chairs
Aaron Quigley
University College Dublin, Ireland

Rene Mayrhofer
Lancaster University, UK

Oct 2007 Tom Holland starts as IRCSET funded postgrad

I would like to welcome Tom Holland who recently started his Ph.D. with the Systems Research Group in the UCD Complex and Adaptive Systems Laboratory under my supervision with Prof. Paddy Nixon. Tom is starting his research in the area of richly sensorised pervasive computing environments. Tom has received a full scholarship from the Irish Research Council for Science, Engineering and Technology (IRCSET). He is already busy at work on the course work component of his structured PhD program, a small Ubisense location project and we have had initial contacts with an industrial partner for collaboration on his research. Tom completed his B.Sc. in Internet Computing at the University of Hull in 2006 and previously spent 3 years in commercial development roles with digital agencies in Newcastle Upon Tyne and most recently with Acknowledgement Ltd. in London. Welcome to the SRG Tom and your first paper deadline is April for UbiComp 2008!

July 2007 Conference Roles IBM CAS 2007, AmI 2007, IOT 2008, Pervasive 2008

The summer is a busy time for completing research projects ready for publication in the coming year. Along with completing research projects the summer is also a busy time for reviewing papers for conferences coming up at the end of the year and for planning for events in the coming year.

I am the Program Chair for the IBM CAS Software and Systems Engineering Symposium 2007, Dublin Ireland, October 24. This has been a lot of work with the program committee reviewing and deciding on papers for publication. In addition, I’ve been busy reviewing papers for AmI-07 the European Conference on Ambient Intelligence (AmI-07), Darmstadt, Germany November 7-10. Along with acting as program chair and a program committee member this month I’ve also be busy with planning for future events almost 12 months away.

In 2008 I will be the Late Breaking Results Chair for the Sixth International Conference on Pervasive Computing (Pervasive 2008) on May 19-22 in Sydney, Australia. I will also be a member of the international program committee for Pervasive 2008. Another event of interest is the new Internet of Things International Conference for Industry and Academia on March 26-28 2008 in Zurich Switzerland where I will be on the Scientific Program Committee.

For more details see my [ Call for Papers Feed ]

IOT Logo

July 2007 New Papers [Ross Shannon]

The students in my group have been publishing a number of a new papers of late.

Ross Shannon has had two papers accepted in recent months, one on collecting and reasoning about context data from sensors in the environment and another on visualising communications in ad-hoc networks. “Towards Scatterbox: a Context-Aware Message Forwarding Platform”, to be presented at MRC 07 at Context 07, presents ongoing work from our group in designing reasoning frameworks that can collate and reason about large amounts of context data gleaned from a wide range of sensors in a smart environment. In this case we have designed a system that decides to forward only relevant emails to a user’s mobile device, where their attention should only be drawn to important messages.

The second paper, “Visualising Network Communications to Evaluate a Data Dissemination Method for Ubiquitous Systems” presents a novel visualisation application useful for designers of ubiquitous systems to be presented at Ubiquitous Systems Evaluation 2007 in September. As these systems will generally be designed to use ad-hoc networks of heterogeneous devices, many of which will join and leave the network
constantly, the stability of the data within the network is crucially important. The visualisation depicts an evolving network topology, which draws attention to nodes which have not passed their data to
other nodes in the system, thus making them more at risk of data loss if they leave the network before passing on this information. The visualisation can thus be used as an aid to the designer of the
communication protocol to view the emergent behaviours of their data dissemination algorithm.

May 2007 New Papers and Professional Activities

  • Dobson S., Bailey E., Knox S., Shannon R. and Quigley A., “A First Approach to the Closed-Form Specification and Analysis of an Autonomic Control System”, 12th IEEE International Conference on Engineering of Complex Computer Systems (ICECCS 2007), Auckland, New Zealand, 11-14 July 2007
  • West D., Quigley A. and Kay J., “MEMENTO: A Digital Physical Scrapbook for Memory Sharing”, Journal of Personal and Ubiquitous Computing Special Issue on Memory and sharing of experiences, Pages 313-328, Volume 11, Number 4 / April, 2007