Workshops

  1. Third International Workshop on Security and Privacy in Spontaneous Interaction and Mobile Phone Use
  2. First International Workshop on Frontiers in Activity Recognition using Pervasive Sensing
  3. First Workshop on Pervasive Urban Applications (PURBA)
  4. First Workshop on Hybrid Pervasive/Digital Inference
  5. Second International Workshop on the Web of Things
  6. First Workshop on Emerging Mobile Sensing Technology, System, and Application
  7. First International Workshop on Smart Mobile Applications
  8. Pervasive Intelligibility - Workshop on Intelligibility and Control in Pervasive Computing
  9. 4th Workshop on Pervasive Advertising

W1: Third International Workshop on Security and Privacy in Spontaneous Interaction and Mobile Phone Use

Website : http://www.medien.ifi.lmu.de/iwssi2011/

Mobile devices in general, and mobile phones in particular, present unique challenges not only in terms of user interface, battery life, and form factor, but also in terms of ensuring their users' privacy and security. Privacy and security are often in conflict with another and have been the topic of many research projects. Emerging mobile payment and ticketing solutions require the secure transmission and storage of financial information, while electronic health records or access certificates/tokens might imply the use of highly sensitive personal information on such devices. Securing the potentially massive amount of interactions using mobile devices is difficult, because typically there will be no a priori shared information such as passwords, addresses, or PIN codes between the phone, its user, and the service they want to use. Additionally, mobile devices often lack powerful user interfaces to support classical authentication methods.

The 3rd International Workshop on Security and Privacy in Spontaneous Interaction and Mobile Device Use (IWSSI/SPMU'2011) provides a forum to discuss these challenges and to put forward an agenda for future research. The workshop is intended to foster cooperation between research groups and to establish a highly connected research community. Authors of selected workshop submissions will be invited to submit an extended version to a special issue in a renowned international journal.

Organizers:

W2: First International Workshop on Frontiers in Activity Recognition using Pervasive Sensing

Website : http://di.ncl.ac.uk/iwfar/

Activity recognition (AR) emerged as a key area of research in pervasive computing and plays a central role in the field's vision of developing context-aware systems and interaction. The general objective for current activity recognition systems is to analyze continuous sensor data streams and to detect and discriminate certain activities of interest, and to reject portions of sensor data that cover unknown or idle activities. A wealth of algorithmic approaches to activity recognition have been developed that employ state-of-the-art signal processing and machine learning techniques. Reviewing the current literature in the field may give the impression that the general problem of activity recognition has almost been solved. State-of-the-art AR systems achieve recognition rates of well beyond 80 or 90 percent across tasks. This opens up the question which other - more challenging - activity recognition problems should be addressed in the future. More generally speaking, this also relates to the question how a future AR system should look like. What will be the challenges of AR that go beyond the aforementioned classification approach and could, for example, comprise a quantitative measure of the quality of performing an activity rather than only detecting an activity?

IWFAR 2011, a satellite workshop of Pervasive 2011, is supposed to focus on new "frontiers in activity recognition using pervasive sensing" in the aforementioned sense. We want to stimulate and explore the creativity of the community regarding new applications and approaches to AR. The latter could comprise radically new procedures like, for example, biologically inspired AR methods or rigorously exploiting general time-series analysis approaches (e.g. from the financial domain). Recent publications in the AR community represent quite promising starting points (cf. e.g. time-delay embedding for the analysis of repetitive activity patterns, which was inspired by the physics of complex systems). IWFAR 2011 provides a forum for researchers and practitioners to gather and present new ideas, and discuss aspects related to applications and techniques that go beyond classic activity recognition. Covering a more or less "emerging" field, expected contributions would also cover more speculative ideas that are too specific for the broader audience of the main conference. We solicit high-quality technical papers that shall be presented orally while leaving enough time for discussions.

Organizers:

W3: First Workshop on Pervasive Urban Applications (PURBA)

Website : http://purba.mit.edu

Over the past decade, the development of digital networks and operations has produced an unprecedented wealth of information. Handheld electronics, location devices, telecommunications networks, and a wide assortment of tags and sensors are constantly producing a rich stream of data reflecting various aspects of urban life. For urban planners and designers, these accumulations of digital traces are valuable sources of data in capturing the pulse of the city in an astonishing degree of temporal and spatial detail. Yet this condition of the hybrid city – which operates simultaneously in the digital and physical realms – also poses difficult questions about privacy, scale, and design, among many others. These questions must be addressed as we move toward achieving an augmented, fine-grained understanding of how the city functions – socially, economically and yes, even psychologically.

This workshop aims to bring together researchers and practitioners to discuss and explore the research challenges and opportunities in applying the pervasive computing paradigm to urban spaces. We are seeking multi-disciplinary contributions that reveal interesting aspects about urban life and exploit the digital traces to create novel urban applications that benefit citizens, urban planners, and policy makers.

Organizers:

W4: First Workshop on Hybrid Pervasive/Digital Inference

Website : https://sites.google.com/site/hpdi2011/

Two different lines of research have developed around the topic of making inferences from data. One line arises from the analysis of physical data captured directly by sensors of real-world behaviors. These data include streams of GPS and WiFi sensors, accelerometers, compasses, gyroscopes, audio, and video, which are often processed to infer location, motion, co-presence, and identity. Another line arises from data captured about online behaviors. These include email messages, web browsing histories, application traces, and keystroke loggers, online calendars, document repositories, tagging databases, and social networks. Analysis of online data sources is performed to infer topics of interest, retrieve information, and enhance collaboration.

We see these two data stream types coming together in the near future. Smartphones have made it easy to collect physical data about people. Web 2.0 technologies have encouraged users to curate more information online. Together, these colliding trends will inferences more accurate, more detailed, more "24-7" than ever before, and will make completely new kinds of inferences possible.

Organizers:

W5: Second International Workshop on the Web of Things

Website : http://www.webofthings.com/wot/2011

The world of embedded devices has experienced radical changes; real-world objects such as home appliances, industrial machines and wireless sensor and actuator networks embed powerful computers which often can connect to the Internet. Likewise, more and more common objects are being tagged with RFID tags or barcodes. Considering the recent progress in mobile communications (increased bandwidth for cell phone networks, as well as urban wireless broadband networks), Internet access will very likely become a commodity accessible from most real-world devices. This convergence of physical computing devices (wireless sensor networks, mobile phones, embedded computers, etc.) and the Internet provides new design opportunities and challenges, as digital communication networks will soon not only contain virtual data (images, text, etc.), but also real objects. While the "Internet of Things" has become a well-known brand for a set of research issues in the pervasive and ubiquitous computing communities, the focus of this research theme has been on establishing connectivity in a variety of challenging and constrained networking environments.

Our hypothesis is that the "Web of Things" is the next logical step in the ongoing evolution of how pervasive and ubiquitous computing have enabled new applications and provided new opportunities. The Web of Things takes the next step from establishing connectivity and thus the ability to communicate with Things, to a vision where Things become seamlessly integrated into the Web, not just through Web-based user interfaces of specific applications, but by simply blending into the information space created by the Web and its architectural principles. The "Web of Things" solicits contributions in the areas of architectures for a Web of things, decentralization, services, Web-scale applications, as well as questions of user interface and interaction design, where a Web of Things requires application designers to think beyond standard Web browsers and embrace alternative clients such as mobile devices or even more constrained environments.

Organizers:

W6: First Workshop on Emerging Mobile Sensing Technology, System, and Application

Website : http://sites.google.com/site/mobisense2011/home

Mobile sensing is rapidly gaining attentions in research and industry due to the proliferation of mobile devices equipped with increasing number of sensors, and widespread of sensor based mobile applications. Mobile sensing applications have penetrated into many application domains such as fitness/health, gaming and entertainment, security and privacy, navigation, mobile search and advertising, by taking advantages of the availability of multiple sensors on state-of-the-art mobile devices. In the era of breakthroughs on intelligent pervasive and mobile computing, practitioners and researchers have to address new challenges and requirements in order to meet the ever-growing demands for pervasive intelligent computing systems, and context aware mobile devices.

MobiSense is intended to bring together researchers, developers, and practitioners from academia and industry, to share practical implementations/experiences related to emerging mobile sensing technologies, mobile sensing systems/platforms, and novel sensing applications, and to discuss future trends in research and applications.

Organizers:

W7: First International Workshop on Smart Mobile Applications

Website : http://www.mobile.ifi.uni-muenchen.de/aktuelles/smartapps2011/index.html

Mobile computing is a related area of pervasive computing. Mobile applications are rapidly developing and becoming more and more important.

Currently, smartphones with more advanced computing capabilities and connectivity than classic mobile phones offer more functionalities and run smarter applications. Mobile platforms comprise an increasing number of different sensors such as photosensors, accelerometers, gyroscopes etc, thus allowing sophisticated contextualized applications. In addition, users as well as developers benefit from an increasing number of market places and online stores for mobile applications. The concept of a mobile "app" that can be purchased via centralized hubs is already very common among the growing number of users.

Specifically, we solicit original research contributions in the following areas:

Organizers:

W8: Pervasive Intelligibility - Workshop on Intelligibility and Control in Pervasive Computing

Website : http://research.edm.uhasselt.be/pervasive-intelligibility/

Due to the proactive and complex dynamics of pervasive computing applications, it is important that systems are intelligible to allow end-users to understand “what the systems know, how they know it, and what they are doing”. Furthermore, these systems should put end-users at the center of control by empowering them to better co-ordinate, control, and personalize pervasive systems. Intelligibility and control are crucial to improve the usability of these novel, and possibly unintuitive, systems and to help users understand, appreciate, trust, and ultimately adopt them. With this workshop, we seek to provide a forum for exchanging design principles, programming techniques, toolkits and insights derived from real world studies towards building intelligible and user-controllable pervasive computing systems. Drawing upon the state-of-the-art, our goal is to refine existing and identify new directions for research in intelligibility and control for pervasive computing that will foster further work in the community.

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

We intend to communicate the results of the workshop to the larger pervasive computing community by submitting an article to a magazine (e.g., IEEE Pervasive). If the papers and discussions reflect sufficient progress and cohesiveness, we will try to work toward producing a special issue of a journal or possibly an edited book.

Organizers:

W9: 4th Workshop on Pervasive Advertising

Website : http://pervasiveadvertising.org/

The overall topic of the workshop is the application of Pervasive Computing technologies for advertising purposes. This topic is of particular interest at this time because advertising is considered by multiple researchers as one main business models for pervasive computing and has recently been called the "Killer application for the 21st century". The market is rapidly growing, and major companies (Apple iAd, JCDecaux, Wall, ClearChannel, Google etc.) are invested in pervasive advertising projects. The main hinderance today is that advertisers lack the technological skills, and pervasive computing researchers and practitioners lack the advertising knowledge and experience. Furthermore, these groups rarely talk to each other.

Based on the success of previous workshops we envision to continue and further establish the workshop series as a prime venue bringing together people from academia and practice, hence driving forward research in the field of Pervasive Advertising. We believe that our research community has a responsibility to contribute towards a joint understanding of how pervasive advertising of the future will look like. To this end, this workshop looks at the future of advertising from the perspective of pervasive computing. It aims to provide a foundational structure for the field and will attempt to sketch a roadmap for further research and deployment challenges in this domain.

Organizers: