10th and last Pervasive Conference: 2012 in Newcastle

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pretty sure if someone would look back on smart homes in a few years it will be rather the technical papers becoming outdated than this ethnographic studies revealing stereotypes and roles of people involved with smart homes.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.

[1] Christopher K. Hess, Manuel Roman, and Roy H. Campbell. 2002. Building Applications for Ubiquitous Computing Environments, Pervasive '02.
[2] Sarah Mennicken, Elaine M. Huang, Hacking the Natural Habitat: An in-the-wild study of smart homes, their development, and the people who live in them, In: Pervasive 2012, Newcastle, UK, 2012-06-19.
[3] Erica Dubach, Christian Hildebrand, Florian Michahelles: Increasing Brand Attractiveness and Sales Through Social Media Comments on Public Displays – Evidence from a Field Experiment in the Retail Industry, Tenth International Conference on Pervasive Computing, Newcastle, UK, June 2012.
[4] Daisuke Kamisaka, Takafumi Watanabe, Shigeki Muramatsu, Arei Kobayashi, Hiroyuki Yokoyama: Estimating Position Relation between Two Pedestrians Using Mobile Phones, Paper/Demo, Tenth International Conference on Pervasive Computing, Newcastle, UK, June 2012.
[5] Navkar Samdaria, Akhil Mathur, Ravin Balakrishnan: Paying in Kind for Crowdsourced Work in Developing Regions, Paper/Demo, Tenth International Conference on Pervasive Computing, Newcastle, UK, June 2012.
[6] Marina Mikubo, Koji Tsukada, Itiro Siio: RefrigeMeter: Automatic Detect/Display System for Items in the Refrigerator, Demo, Tenth International Conference on Pervasive Computing, Newcastle, UK, June 2012.

Ubicomp in the large

Finally, there was a workshop organized by MobileLifeCentre which I considered really important: how to conduct ubicomp in the large considering all these app stores and mobile devices...

First the participants had 3-5 minutes to briefly report about their work and experience with ubicomp in the large. Examples ranged from social soccer fan apps [1] to architecture planning [2] and public displays [3]. Myself I briefly introduced Appaware but quickly realized that most of the people already knew about it when they showed it to me on their phones.

During the second part of the workshop we had a lively discussion about

• how to get users?
• how to keep control of the quality of the results?
• which research questions suitable to be investigated in the large?

Most importantly, the apps to be distributed have to create some value for the users, be it a game or a productivity app. Hitting the blogosphere is great which is probably best achieved by a well-designed app.

Keeping control of the data quality probably is a tricky one as we do not know who the users actually are: a bunch of people with nicknames. This might overcome by linking facebook profiles to the app, but this requires some added-value functionality of the app justifying this link. Throughout the discussions we found out that with every question we add to an embedded questionaire we limit and design the target group of users: only a subsets likes to answer - pure self-selection. Giving rewards and payment might be an incentive, but this again also incentivizes another special subset of users. There is probably nothing to be done than to try to capture as much information as possible from the users which has to be done in a transparent way with opt-out.

Finally, we struggled about why doing research in the large at all?

Reason were: because it matters more, gets closer to reality, finds unexpected uses, promotes the own lab, creates longer lasting results, gives something back to the public, yields more justified statistics...

In order to distinguish from pure app developments there should be a research question beyond simply finding out whether the crowd would accept a certain app.

I'm looking forward to the special issue following up on this topics soon to appear in IJMHCI.

Thanks to Henriette Cramer, Nicolas Belloni, Mattias Rost, Frank Bentley and Didier Chincholle for this great workshop!

Is ubicomp research useful?

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...

[1] Antifakos, S., Michahelles, F., and Schiele, B. 2002. Proactive Instructions for Furniture Assembly. In Proceedings of the 4th international Conference on Ubiquitous Computing (Göteborg, Sweden, September 29 - October 01, 2002). G. Borriello and L. E. Holmquist, Eds. Lecture Notes In Computer Science, vol. 2498. Springer-Verlag, London, 351-360.
[2] Michahelles, F.; Wicki, R.; Schiele, B., "Less contact: heart-rate detection without even touching the user" Wearable Computers, 2004. ISWC 2004. Eighth International Symposium on , vol.1, no., pp. 4-7, 31 Oct.-3 Nov. 2004
[3] Lee, S.P., Cheok, A.D., Teh, K.S.J., Goh, P.L.D., Chio, W.J., Wang, C., and Farbiz, F. 2005. A mobile pet wearable computer and mixed reality system for human–poultry interaction through the internet, Personal and Ubiquitous Computing, 1 (Nov. 2005), 1-17.

From the _Internet_ of Things to the _Web_ of Things?

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

[3] Neil A. Gershenfeld: When things start to think, Henry Holt, 2000 (reprint)

[4] Marc Weiser: The Computer for the 21st Century" - Scientific American Special Issue on Communications, Computers, and Networks, September, 1991
[5] ITU Internet Reports 2005: The Internet of Things
[6] Internet of Things 2008. International Conference for Industry and Academia March 26-28, 2008 / Zurich
[7] EPCglobal, The EPCglobal Architecture Framework, Version 1.3, Jan 2009
[8] Dave Raggett: Towards the Web of Things, W3C, September 2007

Cyber Physical System is the US version of the 'internet of things'

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'!

[1] NSF Workshop on Cyber-Physical Systems, http://varma.ece.cmu.edu/cps/

[2] From Internet of Data to Internet of Things. 28 January 2009. Gérald Santucci.

My impressions of Percom 2009

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.

What a great Ambient Intelligence application for Deutsche Bahn (German Railways)

On the way back from AmI I took the train. Since my family with me one could say we quite some significant amount of luggage with us. However, the german railways has the great rule of 'one may take as much luggage on to the train as one can carry' which we could...

However, finally we had to change trains which failed to do since a broken escalator prevented us from catching the train on time. We took the next train just 10minutes but got fined as our ticket was booked for the previous one.

Now the ridiculous explanation of the conductor: 'you should have fetched a certification about the broken escalator!' Who would have ever thought about that!?

Anyway, may be a great ubicomp killer app for the Deutsche Bahn: 'a broken escalator's automatically send's a notification to the railway's public relations office asking for permission to alter the tickets of passengers that missed a trained because of that particular escalator'. I should try to get funding for that - this time I had to undergo the process myself...

Impressions of the Conference of Ambient Intelligence 2008 in Nuremberg

Next day after the workshop the AmI conference started. It was the first time I visited this conference and indeed it was a great experience:
A great portion of the papers (especially from Philips and others from the Netherlands) talked about designing applications for the elderly - interesting, challenging topic and great for funding. In particularly I enjoyed the presentation of [1] testing an navigation aid for the elderly by means of Wizard of Oz. As people with dementia can't remember things for long the standard instructions of navigation system "in 100m turn left" don't work, since these users won't remember. Thus, short-term and rather indirect instructions based on landmarks "after bench at your left turn right" had been tested proven more successful. I guess, learnings from this paper could be valueable for designers of standards navi apps. But, GPS is definitely not accurate enough for that.
Another nice paper [2] was investigating different means of end user programming for designing interactive shop environments. The authors compared 3D simulation vs. PDA mixed reality vs. programming by demonstrations. Apparently designers preferred the 3D environment, whereas the not so technically affine retailers preferred the PDA.

In his keynote, Joe Paradiso was presenting some ongoing projects of his group at MIT media lab dealing with gateways and interfaces between real-world and virtual world (2nd life - I thought it's already dead) [3]: either power plugs, or spinner gateways allow to interact between these two worlds in both ways.

Despite the technical fascination what one can do and build, I really missed the answer to the question my Ph.D. advisor Bernt Schiele was always asking for: "What's the message, what is it good for?" Apparantely, their research methodology looks as follows: build a new sensor device, do a video and let the people think what they would do with it...

Finally, I really enjoyed the work presented by Alireza Sahami Shirazi [4] about using multiple vibration motors for providing more complex haptic feedback to mobile users. Though the work presented was rather rudimentary, the idea of having six motors embedded in a box offers great opportunities for out I imagine, such as circular rotation patterns for navigation apps. Certainly it's about eyes free instead of eye-phone...

[1] F. N. Hagethorn, B. J. A. Kröse, P. de Greef and M. E. Helmer, Creating Design Guidelines for a Navigational Aid for Mild Demented Pedestrians, Ambient Intelligence European Conference, AmI 2008, Nuremberg, Germany, November 19-22, 2008.

[2] Mark van Doorn, Arjen de Vries and Emile Aarts End-User Software Engineering of Smart Retail Environments: The Intelligent Shop WindowAmbient Intelligence European Conference, AmI 2008, Nuremberg, Germany, November 19-22, 2008.

[3] Lifton, J., Feldmeier, M., Ono, Y., Lewis, C., and Paradiso, J. A. 2007. A platform for ubiquitous sensor deployment in occupational and domestic environments. In Proceedings of the 6th international Conference on information Processing in Sensor Networks

[4] Alireza Sahami, Paul Holleis , Albrecht Schmidt and Jonna Häkkilä^, Rich Tactile Output on Mobile Devices, Ambient Intelligence European Conference, AmI 2008, Nuremberg, Germany, November 19-22, 2008. Proceedings

The first robot in my home

Many keynotes and talks concerning ubicomp/pervasive computing and 'internet of things' conclude with "Sensors are only the beginning...actuators will be next...".
Indeed, we are getting there. Robots are slowly entering homes mainly lawn mowers and vacuum cleaners [1]. In [2] the developers of Roomba clearly explain why single purpose robots, e.g. vacuum cleaning, convince consumers instead of everything-else-slaves nobody can yet believe in.
Meanwhile, we bough a robot for our lab. I immediately took it home and tried it out:


My experiences completely match with [3]: Roomba does not really clean well, but it does it automatically, so who cares? It works without intervention and it's just fascinating. The device is rather dumb, which is nicely described as 'random walk': it just goes straight, turns around obstacles and wanders criss cross around the room which the instructions call 'robot intelligence to efficiently clean the whole floor'.
Anyway, Roomba is a rather cheap and robust platform. Even if its dumb, attaching a mobile phone will offer new opportunities for developing applications [4]. Stay tuned...


[1] World Robotics 2008
[2] Jones, J.L., "Robots at the tipping point: the road to iRobot Roomba," Robotics & Automation Magazine, IEEE , vol.13, no.1, pp. 76-78, March 2006.
[3] Forlizzi, J. and DiSalvo, C. 2006. Service robots in the domestic environment: a study of the roomba vacuum in the home. In Proceedings of the 1st ACM SIGCHI/SIGART Conference on Human-Robot interaction (Salt Lake City, Utah, USA, March 02 - 03, 2006). HRI '06. ACM, New York, NY, 258-265.
[4] Tribelhorn, B.; Dodds, Z., "Evaluating the Roomba: A low-cost, ubiquitous platform for robotics research and education," Robotics and Automation, 2007 IEEE International Conference on , vol., no., pp.1393-1399, 10-14 April 2007

Livecasting, Mobile Streaming

I just came across a couple of websites, such as justin.tv, livecast.com, mogulus.com and others with weired names. Once on the websites I desperately look for the "about" button potentially explaining what all these websites are about? I just haven t got it, but people happen to be fascinated of livecasting for quite a while:

1994 Steve Mann -
First person to transmitted his everyday life 24/7.

1996 Jennifer Ringley
JenniCAM—subtitled "life, online"—was a popular website from April 1996 until the end of 2003.
Ringley's innovation was simply to allow others to view her daily activities

1999 Lisa Batey
Started on HereAndNow.net streaming 24/7 in 1999, continuing into 2001.

1999 Josh Harris
"We Live In Public" [10] was a 24/7 Internet conceptual art experiment created in December 1999. With a format similar to TV‘s Big Brother.

2000 DotComGuy
Combined live streaming with social networking to assist the visually challenged.

2002 Joi Ito
First to do web publishing from a mobile device.

2004 Gordon Bell
MyLifeByts , an experiment in digital storage of a person's lifetime, including full-text search, text/audio annotations and hyperlinks.

2004 Justin Kahn
Justin.tv, a platform for live video streaming online

2007 Justine Ezarik
Expansion of justin.tv, Justine Ezarik took a different approach, often aiming the camera at herself

What do people do with all these wastes of giga-bytes?

I must confess: it's quite fascinating seeing qik.com working on my mobile phone streaming live...when...umh...I m doing exciting things... such as reading a newspaper:

But who will ever watch this? Not even myself. But it's fascinating indeed seeing working and perhaps that's already enough. Busines case is old thinking.

Here some publications I found interesting:

1. Privacy-Enhanced Sharing of Personal Content on the Web, Mohammad Mannan
http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1367564

2. User generated content (UGC): trade mark and copyright infringement issues, Dawn Osborne
http://jiplp.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/abstract/jpn120

3. Bubble 2.0: Online Organized Critique of Web 2.0 D, Travers Scott, MIT
http://web.mit.edu/comm-forum/mit5/papers/TraversScott.pdf

4. Zync: the design of synchronized video sharing, Yiming Liu, Yahoo!, Berkeley, CA
http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1389924

5. Social Online Video Experience,JD Weisz
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~jweisz/thesis/jweisz_proposal.pdf

6. Lifesampler: enabling conversational video documentary, Ryan P. Spicer
http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1358628.1358824

7. Mainstream Media Meets Citizen Journalism: In Search of a New Model, R. Goh
http://www.mediagiraffe.org/tufts-thesis/tufts-thesis.pdf

8. Watch What I Watch,David A. Shamma
http://yahooresearchberkeley.com/blog/wpcontent/uploads/2007/07/shamma2007.pdf

9. Streaming live media over a peer-to-peer network, H Deshpande
http://eris.prakinf.tuilmenau.de/res/papers/coopStreaming/BWStrmLiveMediaStanford.pdf