Markus Löchtefeld, Petteri Nurmi,Florian Michahelles, Carsten Magerkurth, Patrik Floréen and Antonio Krüger
Zürich, Switzerland, September 8th, 2013
About
The
workshop on Pervasive Technologies in Retail Environments (PeTRE) is
the continuation of MIRE 2011 (http://dfki.de/mire held at MobileHCI
2011) and provides an established forum for researchers from academy and
industry exploring how pervasive technologies can be embedded into
retail environments to create new shopping experiences and services. The
goals of the workshop are to
discuss the integration of pervasive technologies into retailing;
construct a roadmap for future integration of pervasive technologies in retailing
strengthen and extend the community of this rapidly developing field.
We
invite both case studies discussing real-world deployments as well as
original research contributions in one of the following topic areas:
mobile applications for retail contexts,
location sensing and customer flow analysis
pervasive public displays
personalization and user/customer modeling for the retail domain
human product interaction
infrastructure standards
integration and interaction with robots and drones
infrastructure combining eCommerce with brick and mortar stores
social media in the retail context,
business models and social impact.
Workshop format and submissions
The
workshop on Pervasive Technologies in Retail Environments (PeTRE) is a
full-day workshop with an extended thematic scope and aims to bring
together researchers and practitioners from academia and industry with
multidisciplinary insights being explicitly encouraged. We ask for
papers (two-pages position-statement-paper or four-pages research-paper)
that address one or more of the research questions mentioned above, or
that describe findings that relate to these research questions based on
systems the authors have built.
We highly encourage bringing a demonstration of your prototype if available and presenting it at the Workshop!
Papers should be formatted according to the Ubicomp 2013 Workshop Format. (http://www.ubicomp.org/ubicomp2013/calls/templates.php
please remove the copyright notice). Papers should be submitted using
the electronic submission system available on the website (http://www.pervasive-retail.com). At least one author of an accepted paper is required to register for the workshop.
Each
paper will be reviewed by at least two members of an international
program committee. All accepted papers will be made available online on
the workshop website as well as in the ACM Digital Library.
Important dates
May 20, 2013: Submission Deadline June 3, 2013: Author Notification June 20, 2013: Submission of camera-ready version September 8, 2013: Workshop in Zurich, Switzerland
Website and more information
http://www.pervasive-retail.com
If you have any additional questions please contact us via email:
markus.loechtefeld@dfki.de
Organizers
Markus Löchtefeld, German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI), Germany
Petteri Nurmi, Helsinki Institute for Information Technology (HIIT), Finland
Florian Michahelles, Auto-ID Labs, ETH Zurich, Switzerland
Carsten Magerkurth, SAP (Switzerland) AG, Switzerland
Patrik Floréen, Helsinki Institute for Information Technology (HIIT), Finland
Antonio Krüger, German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI), Germany
Judy Kay announced the tenth and last Pervasive Conference (as it will be merged with Ubicomp and disappear in the name). Then I was surprised to see the Gaia paper [1] receiving the 10yrs impact award. Probably this paper would not have been accepted at any of the recent Pervasive conference as it misses a user study;)
Sanjiv Nanda, vice president of engineering of Qualcomm, open the conference as the first keynote speaker about "Intelligent Devices and Smart Environments". His review of the history of the mobile phone starting as portable devices was quite charming but also a bit boring for conference audience. Pointing out the development of low power as a main challenge was not that surprising either. However, whereas his several examples of inferring day-in-the-life situations as a bottom up approach for achieving always-on intelligent devices were kind of common place, too, only later I understood that the actual mission of Qualcomm was to embed 10 years of activity recognition research on chip. Thus, positioning Qualcomm as the provider of context recognition technology in our future smart appliances did indeed convince me.
The organizers of the conference put huge efforts into providing "pervasive experience" with interaction kiosk for browsing the programm, active RFID badges taking pictures of participants in certain places, and a twitter display highlighting comments. Still I was surprised how much more it takes to even motivate the techie
I really enjoyed the talk [2] of Sarah Mennicken which reviewed the different roles of actors when smart homes would become reality. Of course, as always at ubicomp and pervasive, there were mixed opinions about this paper whether this type of ethnographic research is on pal with technical work of building systems. Nevertheless, I'm pretty sure if someone would look back on smart homes in a few years it will be rather the technical papers becoming outdated than this ethnographic studies revealing stereotypes and roles of people involved with smart homes.
Close to the end of the conference I reported about our own work of deploying Facebook comments of Facebook Brand page of a retail store in the store itself [3]. We conducted interviews which were qualitatively and quantitatively analyzed in order to derive perceptions of consumers with regards to brand innovativeness and attractiveness. Finally, we could conclude that FB comments in store have a positive effect on sales, however, not as strong as traditional advertising. Overall, the project was positively received due to it practical implications and real world deployment.
Pervasive crowd to put their comments on social media.
Passing through the exhibition space of the conference I spotted an interesting idea of finding each other in city [4]: localization based on images of each others mobile phone pictures.
My favourite however was [5] which proposed to enable crowdsourcing of microtasks (similar to mechnical turk) but with immediate rewards in the user's situation. The paper described an evaluation of deploying smart phone tasks for passengers of Riskha's in India and giving them a discount for the ride after completion of the task. I saw this a very refreshing and well elaborated new idea.
The RefrigerMeter [6] provided an interesting alternative to RFID for detecting what's in the fridge. The demo showed how to identify items by their foot print in the fridge measured by LED's.
Overall, I enjoyed this very lively and also last series of Pervasive Conferences. I couldn't quite follow the arguments of the steering committee of merging ubicomp and pervasive. I'd have rather proposed to work on making the differences of these two conference more explicit and separate between technical topics, e.g. activity recognition, and ethnographic studies. However, I could understand that in the end it's about prestige of the field where defining only one event per years as the hub of ubicomp research potentially could increase the visibility of the field. I'm looking forward how this works out, I'm pretty sure the merged conference in Zurich will be a success. However, I also expect former 2nd tier conferences, such as MuM, Mobiquitous, MobileHCI catching up and filling the gap of Pervasive Conference quicker than expected. Thus, dynamics and organic growth should be refreshing.
The “IoT Challenge” offers a platform to graduate students, PhD students,
researchers and developers to showcase their recent highly innovative
research and practical solutions to real-world problems. Best ideas will
be awarded.
The “IoT Challenge” offers a platform to
graduate students, PhD students, researchers and developers working in
all areas of Internet of Things to share and showcase their recent
highly innovative research and practical solutions to real-world
problems.The solutions should be highly novel, exiting, and show a
complete and working system, addressing a relevant application area for
IoT, including, but not limited to: supply chain and logistics,
healthcare, M2M, security, environmental monitoring,intelligent
transport systems,smart homes, industrial manufacturing, and critical
infrastructures.
The topics of interest include, but are definitely not limited to:
smart Dust technologies:
highly miniaturized integrated microelectronic or MEMS based
solutions, addressing aspects as energy harvesting, wireless
communication, and efficient processing.
opportunistic networking and participatory sensing:
solutions showing the potential impact of the use of smartphones, and
the integration and sharing of different sensor systems for IoT
wearable computing and smart textiles: showing integrated solutions for body area networking, their interaction with people and environment.
real Time Localization Systems: should demonstrate efficient, scalable, and easy to deploy localization technologies.
Internet integration: showing end-to-end internet based IoT solutions offering scalable and efficient services.
Contestants
are free to choose their topic beyond the ones mentioned above as long
as it is related to the Internet of Things concept, and it clearly
shows a significant progress beyond the State of the Art. Both
individual and group participations are welcome.
To be eligible for the challenge, the
contribution should not only present a working system but also clearly
describe how it solves the real-world problem and how it goes beyond
the State of the Art solutions.
Showcasing excellent results in this occasion
is not left unnoticed, as participants also compete for three different
prices of 3000 euro (for the first place), 1500 euro (for the second place) and 500 euro (for the third place).
The IoT Challenge consists of two selection
rounds: (i) selection based on an extended abstract, and (ii)
showcasing and presentation. A reviewing committee will evaluate the
extended abstracts for their quality, innovation, originality,
challenge, and significance for the community. Authors of the accepted
abstracts need to showcase their solution and hold a presentation
during the conference. Both the showcase and presentation will be
judged by a judging panel to select the top three contestants. The
ranking of the top contestants at the end will be done by the audience.
Submission
Contributions for the challenge are different from
demo contributions in a sense that IoT Challenge seeks solutions that
are highly innovative, significantly contribute to IoT technology, and
present a "wow" factor. Each submission must make clear the novelty,
how the solution works, how it advances the State of the Art, and the
impact. They should strive to clearly state the significance of the
contribution to the Internet of Things. Contributions that fail to
address these aspects will be considered as demo and will consequently
not be eligible for challenge and award prices.
Submissions should include an extended abstract of
four to eight pages, and can optionally include a demo video, whose URL
should be referred to in the submission.
Submissions should be done through EDAS, conference name: IoT 2012, Track name: IoT Challenge Competition.
Submission deadline: August 15 , 2012
Notification of acceptance: September 15, 2012
Accepted IoT Challenge contributions will appear in the final proceedings.
IoT Challenge chairs:
Nirvana Meratnia, University of Twente, the Netherlands
Hans Scholten, University of Twente, the Netherlands
Paul Havinga, University of Twente, the Netherlands
During my Ph.D. from time to time I had doubts whether the research I was doing was really meaningful. We integrated sensors into furniture [1], measured respiration through radar [2] and enjoyed sharing these ideas at ubicomp, pervasive and iswc conferences. Just recently, a colleague pointed me to a paper that describes how to improve the interaction between human and "the worst treated animals in the worlds" (chicken) [3]. First I thought that was joke. But the reviewers at that time obviously did not manage to reject the paper as it is (1) well written, (2) novel, and (3) presents a solid evaluation. Having done something for the first time nobody else has done before may also have reason...The question for me: how can we balance between crazy ideas that open minds and trigger future developments and meaningless dump problems that just waste our time, even worse: if that work gets cited and creates an entire research stream...
Toshio Iwai gave a fascinating keynote today at Pervasive 2009. He speaker startet with a very personal introduction about his childhood and how he got motivated to start his electronic arts work: he was inspired by afterimages, animation flipbooks, punchcard harmoniums.
The speaker startet with a very personal introduction about his childhood and how he got motivated to start his electornic arts work. He spent quite some in showing the underlying concept which gave inspiration to his work: afterimages, old-style animation flipbooks, punchcard harmoniums. This was kind of slow in the beginning but really explained the idea of his Teniro-on pretty well: The idea is that everybody can be a composer in 5 minutes - I'll have to find out sometime myself. Besides that he showed impressive visualization of music. The sound of a piano professional was captured and depicted as flowing light beams emitted from the piano as fireworks depending on speed and pitch of the sounds. A more detailed report here. Than an interesting paper followed by John Krumm. It suggested to create random, but realistic, road-trips in order to hide personal routes requested from central routing services such as google maps. The paper spend tremendous efforts into determining realistic starting and end-points (e.g. not starting at a bridge), interpolating between waypoints for realistic accleration patterns and even creationg real GPS noise [1]. Obviously, the prove of the realisticness of the generated routes was hard to prove. There was also some discussion whether this approach really holds, e.g. what if you do an 'unusual' trip starting from a bridge, than you will be detected - couldn't you just mix routes of others? Stephen Intille presented a solution [2] on how to save heating energy. Since programmable thermostats are rarely used (in the US) it is better to switch of heating once people are way and to heat up when they come up - which can be detected by GPS in their phones. He spend quite sometime on commute time statistics and simulating his results. However, he admitted that programmable thermostats will be still better than his rather dull approach: it does not even distinguish between rooms. He argued about persuasive approaches to convince the users to use their thermostats but that was not really shown. It is really questionable whether this lead into the right direction or just supports lazy behaviour of "don't care" and even discourages the usage of thermostats at all as mentioned in the discussion. Btw, nobody talked about remote-controlled themostats from the phone... Jeffrey Hightower [3] presented to infer user identity from the way of using handling the remote-control. This, definitely, does not solve the world's most sever problems but can help to personalize TV recorder options and could be used to improve TV analysis, e.g. Nielsen branding today only achieves 80% accuracy. A feasibility study of 5 colleagues watching at least 1h revealed significant enough different behaviours - before/during/after button press were used as input from the accelerometer -video capture was used for ground truth. I really like the one slide summary at the start and end of the talk. Florian Alt [4] tackled the interesting question of which advertisements people would be willing to display on their cars, see also here. Stacey Kuznetsov [5] presented an interesting paper that prove a successful candidate of showing an idea that did not work. They tried help people to learn new activities by applying haptic feedback with vibration motors: two medium pulse, strong oscillating, single pulse. The applied blending test, auditory test of learning mandarin and visual recognition. The resuls was that low performers improve a little bit using their system...but free recall is even performed worse. Cues were seen as distracting or pulses were too intense. The lessons to aim at reducing cognitive load, adjusting intensity of pulses to individual perceptions and to add semantic meaning to cues were worthwhile even the initial idea of the authors did not work out.
Jeffrey Hightower [6] presented another paper where they investigated privacy concerns with personal sensing in a 4month study of experience reactions to sensing - people wore sensors and were asked about their reaction towards new sensors. Not surprisingly, there were no effect about barometer or accelerometer, big very against audio, because of the need to explain to others you were recording them now (in social and professional contexts: laywer-client, doctor- patient). The conclusions were to design systems with minimal invasive sensors, not rocket science, but a well written paper. In the conference there was some debate about whether the results had been defined by how the questions where asked: e.g. omitting the fact of explaining the mining opportunities of accelermoter, re-transforming of filtered audio. Finally a paper really enjoyed [7] was on using battery free tags to measure power transitions from transient signals emitted from the powerline. This was a proof of concept paper documenting a great idea. The discussion was a little bit bizarre as revealed culture and technological differences: "But your systems is limited by range, this means it does not work if lines are build into houses' concrete or stone walls?" - "of course not, but which houses are built of stones and concrete"... Last but not least, Mikko Lehtonen presented our paper [9] on using synchronized secrets, meaning storing consecutive random numbers on RFID tags and infrastructure to protect state-of-the-art RFID tags from cloning. The discussion was heavily focused on the random number generator which we are free to choose in our approach. In addition to the papers there was also a demo and poster, where we also could present our car claim report system: the mobile phone as an aid in sending the details of a car accident to the insurance company [8]. Btw, Albrecht Schmidt wrote a nice report on Pervasive 2009, go here to see his paper favourites.
Pervasive 2009 just again showed me the same pattern of successful papers that has emergeed throughout the last years: come up with a new interaction technique (e.g. force sensing), display (e.g. car ads), but that's not enough. Conduct a thorough user study which reveals unexpected results (e.g. bend is more difficult than twist), do extensive testing. Of course, sometimes answering whether the underlying phenomenon is actually worth all the methodology effort of evaluating it fades away...
[1] John Krumm, "Realistic Driving Trips For Location Privacy", Seventh International Conference on Pervasive Computing (Pervasive 2009), May 11-14, 2009, Nara, Japan. [2] M. Gupta, S. S. Intille, and K. Larson, "Adding GPS-control to traditional thermostats: An exploration of potential energy savings and design challenges" Proceedings of the Seventh International Conference on Pervasive Computing, May 11-14, 2009, Nara, Japan. [3] Keng-hao Chang, Jeffrey Hightower, Branislav Kveton: Inferring Identity Using Accelerometers in Television Remote Control, Proceedings of the Seventh International Conference on Pervasive Computing, May 11-14, 2009, Nara, Japan. [4] Florian Alt, Christoph Evers, Albrecht Schmidt: Users' View on Context-Sensitive Car Advertisements, Proceedings of the Seventh International Conference on Pervasive Computing, May 11-14, 2009, Nara, Japan. [5] Stacey Kuznetsov, Anind K. Dey, Scott E. Hudson: The Effectiveness of Haptic Cues as an Assistive Technology for Human Memory, Proceedings of the Seventh International Conference on Pervasive Computing, May 11-14, 2009, Nara, Japan. [6] Predrag V. Klasnja, Sunny Consolvo, Tanzeem Choudhury, Richard Beckwith, Jeffrey Hightower: Exploring Privacy Concerns about Personal Sensing, Proceedings of the Seventh International Conference on Pervasive Computing, May 11-14, 2009, Nara, Japan. [7] Shwetak N. Patel, Erich P. Stuntebeck, Thomas Robertson: PL-Tags: Detecting Batteryless Tags through the Power Lines in a Building, Proceedings of the Seventh International Conference on Pervasive Computing, May 11-14, 2009, Nara, Japan. [8] Baecker, O., Michahelles, F., Bereuter, A., Mollnau, D., Geller, F., & Fleisch, E. : Mobile First Notice of Loss: Web Service-Based Enterprise Integration of the Android Platform, Demo. In Adjunct Proceedings of the Seventh International Conference on Pervasive Computing (pp. 257-260). Vienna, Austria: Austrian Computer Society. [9] M. Lehtonen, D. Ostojic, A. Ilic, F. Michahelles: Securing RFID systems by detecting tag cloning, In proceedings of H. Tokuda et al. (Eds.): 7th International Conference, Pervasive 2009, Nara, Japan, May 11-14, 2009. LNCS 5538, pp. 291–308.
Today, the term Internet of Things finally is pretty established. There is not really single historical root to be found, but its birthplace can be asumed somewhere in the early days of the Auto-ID Center [1] in the vicinity of smart things [2][3], inspired by ubiquitous computing [4] and alike. An important reference you always stumble upon is [5] from ITU - not it is the best source in the field, at least it's very popular and well cited due its publisher the ITU. There has never been a clear definition or discussion how the Internet of Things differs from Pervasive Computing, Ubiquitous Computing, Smart Things, Ambient Intelligence etc. - all areas have many, and undefined, communalities and overlaps. Also, in the end it does not really matter, in a few decades historians may look back and come up with clear definitions in retro-spect.
What the internet is really about, as the first conference has set out in 2008 [6], is the "expansion of the internet into the real world". This "new" internet can be build upon the backbone of internet technology as suggested by [3] or [7] using DNS, TCP etc.. Just recently, one can realize another term getting established - Web of Things (good overview here [8]) - which views the very same phenomenon of expansion from a more high-level perspective of applying web technologies to controlling embedded devices and appliances by URI, HTTP, REST, RSS, etc. Honestly, I haven't quite understood the difference between Internet of Things and Web of Things, perhaps there isn't really one except the ownership of terms;) Anyway, let's just move on, build stuff, develop meaningful apps and let's not worry to much about how to name them. And yes, gee, I forgot, there is of course also the Web2.0 which emerges in to the real world as well being called Web3.0 then...
[1] Toward a Global "Internet of Things", http://java.sun.com/developer/technicalArticles/Ecommerce/rfid/ [2] Neil Gershenfeld, Raffi Krikorian, Danny Cohen: Internet 0: Interdevice Internetworking, Scientific American, 2004
At percom I had the chance to listen to an interesting talk from Ty Znati. It took a while I understood what he was talking about: 'cyber physical systems' [1] is in NSF-language what the EU calls 'internet of things'!
It was an interesting experience for me to finally visit the PerCom conference itself for a first time, after having organized a workshop there quite some time ago [1]. It's hard to distinguish between ubicomp, pervasive, percom and many other second tier venues - but definitely the visitors at percom seem to be much more from an networking and sensor networks background.
The conference was opened with a fabulous keynote from Gregory Abowd. He was stating the fact that more and more scientific meetings center around ubicomp which inherently bears the danger of fracturization of our community. So the difference for papers at the major venues (ubicomp/pervasive/percom) really should be focus on a variety of perspectives instead narrow focus only. I also enjoyed his statement about stopping the quest for the killer-app and yet coming up with new scenarios but rather to listen to the users and domain experts in order to recognize needs and to try to tackle those. He reminded that also Marc Weiser focuses on human activities instead of machines. Gregory predicted that we would made three thirds of the way for making ubicomp as a reality. The interesting time of today is that dreams of 15 years ago can be realized now. Finally, he came up with following guidelines for successful ubicomp research:
Include various disciplines - you can't do all yourself.
Seek out critique: who are your friends motivating you, who are your enemies evaluating you and guiding you?
Solving a real-world problem has the danger of NOT doing research - but it may rewarding anyway.
Remember ubiquity: What can you assume in your home? Start from detectable events, e.g. power noise of switches.
Make it matter, think about meaningful applications.
Passion is not sufficient (but necessary): go one step beyond honorable causes
The second day was opened by another remarkable keynote given by Andrew Campbell. He set out quite provocatively, especially for the percom audience: “Motes are dead: they not ubiquitous, suffer of power, people are out of the loop, they don't scale!”. Instead, he praised the emergence of mobile phones equipped with sensors that allow to study social relationships at a much bigger scale. Andrew campbell Motes are dead: not ubiquitous, power problem, people out of the loop, does not scale. He presented some examples from his own research, MetroSense [2], Bikenet [3], and Cenceme [4] - showing the capabilities of phones to detect context and to share on at larger scale. I found it striking that recognition of sitting, standing, walking - which has been shown years before [5] - now has a new quality and actually might become useful in the context of facebook. However, Andrew also had to admit that despite its ubiquity the mobile phone has not been quite build for sensing tasks, since after two hours of sensing the battery might be dead - so people could start de-installing such apps… My question about his experience concerning adoption of his Cenceme was interesting: his students actually did not care about privacy, the off-button was an important design feature, control mechanisms of facebook allowing to grant access to friends he saw as the important features for getting it adopted. Most interestingly, Andrew himself said, he never would share sensor data about himself with others…
On the third day I was very glad of having been invited to the panel discussion about “Ubicomp is still not there, does nobody want it?” moderated by Christian Baecker. In my initial statement I said first of all we should be aware of the limitations of our research, it's not us driving adoption. If we want to do so we have to start listening more to users and stakeholders. Furthermore, it's not that bad, first devices such as Nabaztag, Tikitag, Choudy, picture frames with embedded WLAN actually show first instances of disappearing computing embedded in our homes. Cao build upon that and fostered the need for contuining research in systems that scale. Ty Zanati highlighted the need of understanding the nature of applications, focus on interoperability, privacy, and the seek for standards. Finally, Andrew Campbell was provoking again with questioning a common identity of the community: What defines us? Technology is still visible, what is our achievement, we need an identity. Then the discussion focused much about the prominent role of mobile phones: great platform and large scale adopted ubicomp device on the one hand but bearing the danger of occluding non-human related ubicomp apps on the other hand. After having a really appreciated discussion about that topic, Stephe Ward finally made a nice closing remark, taking out the almost religious belief in Mark Weiser: “The profound visions are those that disappear.”
Finally, I enjoyed two demos, one about robots controlled by RFID for providing a mobile simulation environment for testing WLAN protocols [6], the other one about a mobile shopping assistant placing avatars on mobile phones giving product recommendations [7] which was close to what Felix von Reischach has presented at the conference [8]
[1] Pervasive RFID/NFC Technology and Applications Workshop (PerTec 2007), www.autoidlabs.org/pertec [2] MetroSense, http://metrosense.cs.dartmouth.edu/ [3] Bikenet,bikenet.cs.dartmouth.edu [4] CenceMe, www.cenceme.org [5] Junker, Holger and Ward, Jamie A and Lukowicz, Paul and Tröster, Gerhard: User Activity Related Data Sets for Context Recognition, Proceedings of the Workshop on Benchmarks and a Database for Context Recognition, in conjunction with Pervasive Conference 2004. [6] RFID Based Localization for a Miniaturized Robotic Platform for Wireless Protocols Evaluation", Vikram P. Munishwar, Shailendra Singh, Christopher Mitchell, Xiaoshuang Wang, Kartik Gopalan, Nael B. Abu-Ghazaleh, Computer Science, Binghamton University (State University of New York) and S*ProCom2, The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art (USA) [7] Social Mobile Augmented Reality for Retail, Sinem Güven, Ohan Oda, Mark Podlaseck, Harry Stavropoulos, Sai Kolluri, Gopal Pingali, IBM T. J. Watson Research Center (USA) [8] A Mobile Product Recommendation System Interacting with Tagged Products, F. von Reischach, D. Guinard, F. Michahelles, E. Fleisch, Concise Contribution at the Seventh Annual IEEE International Conference on Pervasive Computing and Communications (PerCom 2009), United States, March 2009.
It has been propagated for long: smart things, disappearing computers, ubiquitous computing, wearable computing, pervasive computing, ambient intelligence, internet of things - various terms viewing from different the very same phenomenon - things are now longer just thingsm but have virtual counterparts that expand their original capabilities. It has been a nice vision, which is becoming deployed now: apple has come up with iTunes, originally only selling music, but today also selling software, Google has started something similar with Android, and Nokia has started promoting their Ovi. The economist has come up with two nice articles discussing this phenomenon in greater detail.
