Keynote by Cecilia Mascolo at Percom2016: Technology and Experiecne in the Physcial World

Cecilia Mascolo presents the keynote at Percom2016. Her opening statement is: “Technology must enhance and not substitute the physical experience”.

Cecilia makes the point that continuous sensing with mobile devices can overcome many issue that are well known with traditional studies (especially the classical problem of psychologist studying psychology students in a dark lab). One of here early papers (EmotionSense, see [1]) shows how we can move studies into the real world. This is not without difficulties, especially when you try to understand emotions.

Putting research apps into android market changes the game, large numbers of users become within reach. Higher numbers of participants require a clear purpose of the applications (Nielse Henze provide in [2] a nice recipe of how to do this). Her experience is that user engagement through gamification really worked. Even if the duration of participation of individuals is limited to weeks or months this generates very useful information. A short introduction to social sensing by Cecilia can be found in [3].

Different sensors have different energy and privacy cost and also different types of contributions. Correlating the accelerometer and happiness is really interesting. Users who are more active (not just movement, “being out and about”) are happier. Clustering accelerometer data and correlating it with other high level data opens exciting questions, e.g. health. Similarly correlating happiness and location leads to more surprising results: less happy at home and work, more when out and active. Looking at people’s personally and demographics shows that gender, age, employment, etc. has a clear correlation with activity and usage of communication.

Physical space matters! Using active badges they looked at how the change of physical space can impact peoples interactions [4]. The sensing approach allowed to understand how changes in physical space changes the behavior on a really fine grained level.

References:
[1] Rachuri, K. K., Musolesi, M., Mascolo, C., Rentfrow, P. J., Longworth, C., & Aucinas, A. (2010, September). EmotionSense: a mobile phones based adaptive platform for experimental social psychology research. In Proceedings of the 12th ACM international conference on Ubiquitous computing (pp. 281-290). ACM. http://csce.uark.edu/~tingxiny/courses/5013sp14/reading/Rachuri2010EMP.pdf
[2] Henze, N., Shirazi, A. S., Schmidt, A., Pielot, M., & Michahelles, F. (2013). Empirical research through ubiquitous data collection. Computer, 46(6), 0074-76. http://doi.ieeecomputersociety.org/10.1109/MC.2013.202
[3] Mascolo, C. (2010). The power of mobile computing in a social era. IEEE Internet Computing, 14(6), 76. http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.466.2037&rep=rep1&type=pdf
[4] Brown, C., Efstratiou, C., Leontiadis, I., Quercia, D., Mascolo, C., Scott, J., & Key, P. (2014, September). The architecture of innovation: Tracking face-to-face interactions with ubicomp technologies. In Proceedings of the 2014 ACM International Joint Conference on Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing (pp. 811-822). ACM. http://arxiv.org/pdf/1406.6829.pdf

Percom 2012 - call for papers

Percom2012 - Call for papers as PDF or as text-file.

  

PerCom 2012
IEEE International Conference on Pervasive Computing and Communications
March 19 - 23, 2012, Lugano, Switzerland

CALL FOR PAPERS

IEEE PerCom, now in its 10th edition, has established itself as the premier annual scholarly venue in the areas of pervasive computing and communications. Pervasive computing and communications has evolved into an active area of research and development, due to the tremendous advances in a broad spectrum of technologies and topics including wireless networking, mobile and distributed computing, sensor systems, RFID technology, and the ubiquitous mobile phone.

PerCom 2012 will be held in Lugano, an international city and the crossroads and melting pot of European culture. PerCom 2012 will provide a leading edge, scholarly forum for researchers, engineers, and students alike to share their state-of-the art research and developmental work in the broad areas of pervasive computing and communications. The conference will feature a diverse mixture of interactive forums: core technical sessions of high quality cutting-edge research articles; targeted workshops on exciting topics; live demonstrations of pervasive computing in action; insightful keynote speeches; panel discussions from domain experts; and posters of budding ideas. Research contributions are solicited in all areas pertinent to pervasive computing and communications, including:

- Innovative pervasive computing applications
- Context modeling and reasoning
- Programming paradigms for pervasive systems
- Software evolution and maintenance in pervasive systems
- Middleware services and agent technologies
- Adaptive, autonomic and context-aware computing
- Mobile/Wireless computing systems and services in pervasive computing
- Energy-efficient and green pervasive computing
- Communication architectures for pervasive computing
- Ad hoc networks for pervasive communications
- Pervasive opportunistic communications and applications
- Enabling technologies for pervasive systems (e.g., wireless BAN, PAN)
- Positioning and tracking technologies
- Sensors and RFIDs in pervasive systems
- Multimodal sensing and context for pervasive applications
- Pervasive sensing, perception and semantic interpretation
- Smart devices and intelligent environments
- Trust, security and privacy issues in pervasive systems
- User interface, interaction, and persuasion
- Pervasive computing aspect of social network software
- Virtual immersive communications
- Wearable computers
- Standards and interfaces for pervasive computing environments
- Social and economic models for pervasive systems

Workshops and affiliated events:

Many workshops will be held in conjunction with the main conference. Workshop papers will be included and indexed in the IEEE digital libraries (Xplore), showing their affiliation with IEEE PerCom. As in the past, PerCom 2012 will also feature a PhD Forum, Demonstrations and a Work-in-Progress Session. Please see the website www.percom.org for details on current and past PerCom conferences.

Important Dates
Paper Registration: Sep 23, 2011
Paper Submission: Sep 26, 2011
Author Notification: Dec 20, 2011
Camera-ready Due: Jan 27, 2012

Submission Guidelines
Submitted papers must be unpublished and not considered elsewhere for publication. They must show significant relevance to pervasive computing and networking. Only electronic submissions in PDF format will be considered. Papers must be 9 pages or less, including references, figures and tables (at least 10pt font, 2-column format). The IEEE LaTeX and Microsoft Word templates, as well as formatting instructions, can be found at the conference web site. Submissions will undergo a rigorous review process handled by the Technical Program Committee. The best paper will receive the prestigious Mark Weiser Best Paper Award. Top selected papers will be considered for a special issue of the Elsevier journal of Pervasive and Mobile Computing (PMC)

For additional information, see www.percom.org for details on current and past PerCom conferences, or contact the PerCom 2012 organizing committee at percom2012@supsi.ch

Organizing Committee

General Co-Chairs
Silvia Giordano, SUPSI, CH
Marc Langheinrich, Univ. of Lugano, CH

Program Chair
Albrecht Schmidt, Univ. of Stuttgart, DE

Vice Program Co-Chairs
Jie Liu, Microsoft Research, USA
Georges Roussos, Univ. of London, UK
Alexander Varshavsky, AT&T Labs, USA

Workshops Co-Chairs
Pedro Marron, Univ. Duisburg-Essen, DE
Marius Portmann, Univ. of Queensland, AU

Steering Committee Chair
Marco Conti, IIT-CNR, IT

Percom 2011 in Seattle, keynote

This year's Percom conference was held in Seattle and offered an exciting and diverse program. Have a look the program to see it for yourself. The two keynotes were both looking at the implications of pervasive computing and communication - especially when thinking about the data is collected and how the data may be used.

Alex Pentland from MIT talked about their work on reality mining. The work looks at how one can capture interactions between people and between people and their environment and how such information can be exploited. One example he gave was on looking at the effect of face to face communication on the performance on workers. The basics insights of this work are thrilling and thinking it through it becomes obvious that we are at the start of new era of mankind. The arguments he made that we can contain and control such information I did not find convincing and I think it may be dangerous to tell decision makers in politics that we can provide solutions. I see no way (that is not restricting people's freedom massively or which reduces productivity massively) that would allow to control the information that will become available through pervasive computing… and all the solutions I have heard either will plainly not work or would require a global agreement over data protection laws…

The keynote on the second day was by Derek McAuley from Nottingham University. One of his topics was on product history and how the availability of product history has the potential to increase the value of products. I think this is a very powerful concept and we will in the near future see this commercially exploited.
Furthermore Dereck discussed interesting issues that come up with crowd sourcing and participatory sensing. One central point is where the data is hold and who controls the data collected. Especially in the context of cloud services this becomes transparent and important at the same time. With regard to the implementation is does not matter; however from a legal perspective it may make a serious difference whether you cloud service runs in German, the US, or on a ship somewhere in the Atlantic. An example he gave are navigation systems in cars which have a back channel. The cars sent back information about their speed and whereabouts and the information is used to predict the state of the road, which is then used to improve the navigation. He raised the questions what happens if this information is held somewhere were legislation has no control? I think this is going to happen and there is no real approach against it…
He made a case that end-users (individuals) should be able to bring together information about them and make use of it. On principle I like this idea to put the individual into control and allow them to exploit this data. For me this is however not a solution for data protection, as a certain part of individuals will sell their data - and in a free country there is probably very little society can do against it.

In summary - we are heading towards an exciting future!

PS: Percom 2012 will be in Lugano with Silvia and Marc chairing the conference. And I have the honor to serve as program chair. See the web page for more information (will be available soon) or the photo of the call for papers here.

Full Paper and Work in Progress at Percom 2010

Together with Matthias Kranz and Carl Fisher we had a full paper at Percom 2010 - and I had the honor to present it [1]. The paper reports work that explored using the existing DECT (the wireless phone standard) infrastructure (available especially in Europe) as basic technology for localization. We compared DECT and Wifi and it is interesting that in most places you see more DECT based stations than Wifi. Overall it is a really interesting alternative to WLAN location.

From the joint work with Docomo-Eurolabs in Munich in the project AmbiVis we presented a work in progress poster. In the project we look at different options for visualizing context information - especially in ambient ways [2]. As display technologies we employed the Nabaztag and a digital picture frame.

[1] Matthias Kranz, Carl Fischer, Albrecht Schmidt: A Comparative Study of DECT and WLAN Signals for Indoor Localization. In: 8th Annual IEEE International Conference on Pervasive Computing and Communications (Percom 2010). IEEE Mannheim 2010, S. 235-243.

[2] Florian Alt, Alireza Sahami Shirazi, Andreas Kaiser, Ken Pfeuffer, Emre Gürkan, Albrecht Schmidt, Paul Holleis, Matthias Wagner: Exploring Ambient Visualizations of Context Information (Work in Progress). In: WIP, Proceedings of the Eighth Annual IEEE International Conference on Pervasive Computing and Communications, PerCom 2010. IEEE, Mannheim, Germany 2010

Keynote by Pertti Huuskonen: Ten Views to Context Awareness

Pertti Huuskonen from Nokia presented his keynote at Percom in Mannheim. I worked with Pertti in 1999 on a European Project TEA - creating context-aware phones [1].

After telling us about CERN and some achievements in physics he raised the issue that an essential skill of humans is that they are context-aware. Basically culture is context-awareness - learning how to appropriately behave in life is essential to be accepted. We do this by looking at other people and by learning how how they act and how others react. "Knowing how to behave" we become fit for social life and this questions the notion of intuitive use as it seems that most of it is learned or copied from others.

He gave a nice overview of how we can context-awareness is useful. One very simple example he showed is that people typically create context at the start of a phone call.

One example of a future to come may be ubiquitous spam - where context may be the enabler but also the enabler for blogging adverts. He also showed the potential of context in the large, see Nokoscope. His keynote was refreshing - and as clearly visible he has a good sense of humor ;-)

[1] Schmidt, A., Aidoo, K. A., Takaluoma, A., Tuomela, U., Laerhoven, K. V., and Velde, W. V. 1999. Advanced Interaction in Context. In Proceedings of the 1st international Symposium on Handheld and Ubiquitous Computing (Karlsruhe, Germany, September 27 - 29, 1999). H. Gellersen, Ed. Lecture Notes In Computer Science, vol. 1707. Springer-Verlag, London, 89-101.

Opening of Percom, Keynote by Kurt Rothermel

About 300 people are at Percom 2010, which is held in the palace in Mannheim - and amazing location! The conference had 233 submission and is truly international (1/3 of the papers come from Europe, 1/3 from America, and 1/3 from Asia/pacific) and highly competitive (acceptance rate of about 12%).

Kurt Rothermel from the University of Stuttgart presented the opening Keynote on Large-scale Context Management. He presented a set of interesting example from Nexus (Collaborative Research Center 627, Spatial World Models for Mobile Context-Aware Applications) that showed the challenge in large scale systems. The size of the problem is can be easily seen when considering that half the population of the planet is using a mobile device and hence needs to be located… Now imagine everyone is contributing sensor data at a rate of one update per minute… For more details on their work see their 2009 percom paper [1]. In his talk he gave also some references to other interesting research platforms in this space: SensorWeb/SensorMap by Microsoft [2] and SensorPlanet by Nokia [3].

[1] Lange, R., Cipriani, N., Geiger, L., Grossmann, M., Weinschrott, H., Brodt, A., Wieland, M., Rizou, S., and Rothermel, K. 2009. Making the World Wide Space happen: New challenges for the Nexus context platform. In Proceedings of the 2009 IEEE international Conference on Pervasive Computing and Communications (March 09 - 13, 2009). PERCOM. IEEE Computer Society, Washington, DC, 1-4. DOI= http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/PERCOM.2009.4912782

[2] Kansal, A., Nath, S., Liu, J., and Zhao, F. 2007. SenseWeb: An Infrastructure for Shared Sensing. IEEE MultiMedia 14, 4 (Oct. 2007), 8-13. DOI= http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/MMUL.2007.82

[3] Abdelzaher, T., Anokwa, Y., Boda, P., Burke, J., Estrin, D., Guibas, L., Kansal, A., Madden, S., and Reich, J. 2007. Mobiscopes for Human Spaces. IEEE Pervasive Computing 6, 2 (Apr. 2007), 20-29. DOI= http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/MPRV.2007.38