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Pervasive Computing @ Home |
Monday May 19, 2008 |
A.J. Brush – Microsoft Research, ajbrush@microsoft.com
Shwetak Patel – Georgia Tech, shwetak@cc.gatech.edu
Brian Meyers – Microsoft Research, brianme@microsoft.com
Albrecht Schmidt – University of Duisburg-Essen, albrecht.schmidt@acm.org
The Pervasive Computing @ Home workshop will focus on Pervasive Technology as applied specifically to a home environment. Two approaches have emerged in the research community for studying behavior in a home setting. The first is building a “living laboratory” (i.e. MIT, Georgia Tech, Intel, and Microsoft), where a very rich set of sensors and infrastructure are available for studying specific behavioral questions. The other is to create deployable versions of sensing technology and methodologies so that researchers can study behavior in a more natural and authentic setting (i.e. Georgia Tech’s Digital Family Portrait, Intel’s CareNet, Microsoft’s Whereabouts clock). Both options provide insight at the expense of numerous drawbacks e.g. the expenses of building a functioning laboratory or the difficulty of ensuring the technology is robust enough for the home. Because of these difficulties there is only the occasional paper on placing Pervasive technology into the home presented during the main conference program. Instead, most of the research focus is on the office environment and mobile settings. In addition, much of the research for the home has been dominated by studying and detecting the occurrence for activities of daily living (ADL), but there are a variety of other compelling applications that have yet to be explored. The question then becomes why do we want to put technologies in people’s home and what does it really take for that to be successful? What are the challenges? How do you run a field study about something that is supposed to work 24x7? What lessons can we learn from the state of technology adoption in the home today? Are there lessons to be learned from Tivos, iPods and Cell Phones?
We encourage participants who have previously placed technology in the home (or living laboratory) or who are planning on doing so in the future to apply to this workshop. The range of topics includes Pervasive research done directly in the home or in support of the home, for example:
· Health Services
· Connected Families
· Education
· Monitoring (babies, teens, baby sitters, guests, elderly)
· Tech support for the home
· Privacy concerns
· Technology adoption in the home
· Logging data (or how much do you really want to know?)
· Sensing technologies for study behavior in situ
· Devices that work today
· From Sensors to applications
· From applications to Appliances
· Home networking
· Memory support tools (finding lost object)
· Cooking services
· Energy monitor and conversation (HVAC, lighting, etc)
In addition to short paper presentations by the attendees, we will have a “Lessons Learned” session to enable sharing and feedback among the participants. We will plan to focus on what distinguishes the home from other sites of technological innovation and identify open research questions. We expect the workshop to result in a community of researchers focused on pervasive computing in the home, a set of lessons learned about deploying technologies in homes and living laboratories, and a list of hot areas for research. We will also post results of the workshop (lessons learned and future directions) on the workshop website. Finally, we will also investigate the potential for a special issue in an appropriate journal.
Selecting
Workshop Participants:
Selection of participants will be based on refereed submissions. We are soliciting 2-4 page position paper submissions (single spaced, size 10 font) and expect to accept 15-20 participants. We ask authors to focus their paper submissions on challenges they faced deploying pervasive technology for home environments with an emphasis on lessons learned. Authors should also include a short biography at the end of the paper submission (included in 4-page limit). We expect that typically one author from each submission will attend the workshop, however please contact us if you wish to submit a position paper with multiple authors who all wish to attend.
We will aim to select diverse topics and include people from different research areas and disciplines. Submissions will be evaluated on its relevance to the workshop, originality, ability to spur discussion at the workshop. The workshop organizers and external experts in the field will review all the submissions and provide feedback to each attendee prior to the conference.
Submissions should be emailed to ajbrush@microsoft.com by February 15, 2008 (11:59 EST) to be considered for review. If you are considering submission we encourage you to email any one of the organizers
Important
Dates:
November 23, 2007 Workshop call posted
February 15, 2008 (11:59 EST) Workshop paper deadline
February 29, 2008 Notification of acceptance/rejection of papers
Workshop
Proceedings:
Accepted papers will be compiled into a workshop proceedings and will be available online at the workshop website. Print proceedings will also be provided for all attendees. Notes from the lessons learned and future directions discussions will be available electronically on the Pervasive Computing @ Home website at the end of the workshop.
Workshop Timeline
(Tentative):
Our overall goal is a highly interactive workshop.
9:00 Introduction to the workshop
9:15 Participant Introductions through 1-1 interactions (‘Research Speed Dating’)
10:00 Break
10:30 ‘A home or my lab’? Discussion starters. We will select 1-2 attendees to talk about the choice between in-situ and living laboratories as well as different types of evaluations (field, lab, survey)
11:00 Small group discussion related to ‘Your home or my lab’
12:00 Lunch
1:30 ‘Oops – Lessons learned’ Discussion starters. We will select 1-2 attendees to talk about lessons learned from bad experiences and the pragmatic experience of deploying technologies in home environments.
2:00 Small group discussion on the pragmatics of field studies (mistakes to avoid, selecting participants, length of study…)
3:00 Break
3:30 ‘Where do we go from here?’ Discussion starters. We will select 1-2 attendees to talk about future directions, interesting application areas and interesting technologies.
4:00 Small group discussion of future directions
4:45 Workshop wrap-up and identification of next steps.
The Organizers:
A.J. Brush – Microsoft Research
A.J. Brush works at Microsoft Research as a researcher in the VIBE group. Her main research interest is human-computer interaction with a focus on ubiquitous computing. She enjoys investigating how technology can help people and groups with everyday problems. She has built and deployed LINC, an inkable digital family calendar, and is in the process of conducting research on sharing information between extended families with the SPARCS (Sharing Photos and Relevant Calendar Stuff) prototype. She has published on technology for the home in the Ubicomp, CHI and Graphics Interface conferences and helped to organize and run the ‘Designs for Home Life’ SIG at CHI 2005. A.J. has served on program committees for conferences including Pervasive, UbiComp, CSCW, CHI Notes, CSCW Notes and is currently the VP for Membership and Communications for ACM SIGCHI.
Contact her at ajbrush@microsoft.com
Shwetak Patel – Georgia Tech
Shwetak N. Patel is a PhD Candidate in the College of Computing and GVU Center at the Georgia Institute of Technology. He is also the assistant director of the Aware Home Research Initiative and assistant director of the Aware Home Laboratory. His research focuses on easy-to-deploy and low-cost sensing systems for the home, context-aware mobile phone applications, and technology to support ubiquitous computing applications. He has actively published at the Ubicomp, Pervasive, UIST, and CHI conferences and has received various best paper awards and nomination at those venues. Shwetak has also recently served on the program committee for LoCA 2007. Contact him at GVU Center, Georgia Inst. of Technology, Technology Square Research Bldg., 85 5th St., N.W., Atlanta, GA 30332-0760; shwetak@cc.gatech.edu; www.cc.gatech.edu/~shwetak
Brian Meyers – Microsoft Research
Brian Meyers works at Microsoft Research as a researcher engineer in the VIBE group. His research interests include Ubiquitous Computing, context sensitive computing and new computing input methods. He enjoys designing systems and devices that work together to accomplish more meaningful goals. He is actively building PersonalVibe, a system for collecting and modeling user histories around computer usage. Previously he worked on the EasyLiving project, a prototype smart room. He has published on technology for the home in the UbiComp, CHI and Pervasive conferences and helped to organize and run the UbiComp and Pervasive workshop Exploiting Context Histories in Smart Environments.
Contact information: brianme@microsoft.com
Albrecht Schmidt – University of Duisburg-Essen
Albrecht Schmidt is a professor for Pervasive Computing and User Interface Engineering at the University of Duisburg-Essen in Germany. Previously he was head of department at the Fraunhofer institute for intelligent information and analysis systems. From 2003 to 2006 he headed the embedded interaction research group at the University of Munich. Albrecht studied in Ulm, Karlsruhe and Lancaster, where he completed his PhD on the topic “ubiquitous computing – computing in context”. His teaching and research interests are in media informatics and ubiquitous computing, and in particular in the area of user interface engineering. Albrecht enjoys creating new interaction techniques and interfaces technologies for specific environments such as the home or the car. Over recent years he organized several workshops and served in various committees in pervasive computing community. Contact information: albrecht.schmidt@acm.org, http://www.pervasive.wiwi.uni-due.de/
