Much past Pervasive Computing research has been devoted to systems that interact with a single user or a small user group. However, the confluence of pervasive technologies and social networks is now enabling systems that are grounded in the real world while scaling to participation of very large groups of users (entire communities, and potentially society at large). This is giving rise to Ubicomp in the Large – where mass participation provides a new perspective onto the support of human activity in the world. In this workshop, we will explore mass participatory ubiquitous computing from two complementary angles – the unprecedented scale at which collaborative sensing facilitates observation of the world and activity within; and the collective effects of such large interconnected systems on communities and society.

Collaborative sensing is defined as social sharing of sensory observations in large communities and networks of thousands, tens of thousands or even millions of people. The sensors in people’s mobile phones, their homes and their cars can be leveraged in such networks for data collection and knowledge extraction on very large-scale phenomena – the spread of epidemics, environmental monitoring, consumer behaviour, emergence of social organisations, and so forth. Research challenges range from the technical (infrastructure, data mining, provenance, etc) to the legal and ethical (control, accountability, privacy, etc).

Ubicomp leverages observation of the real world to augment and change activity within the world – in the small for instance influencing what people do through the provision of contextualised services. But what are the collective effects of very large scale interconnected systems, in which activity is impacted on communal and societal level? How can systems be designed to have specific collective effects, for example in the context of traffic and mobility, emergency, security threats and public health, and what unintended impacts can emerge. Research challenges span from the technical (e.g. how to build technology for black swans) to complexity science to ethics.

The primary objective of this workshop is Community-building. This involves the following concrete objectives:

1. Bringing together people working on the broad topic from different angles and in different communities

2. Overview of what is going on in the area and where we currently stand

3. Mapping out interesting research directions and questions

4. Work on common terminology

5. Thinking about establishing forums both physical (regular workshop) and virtual (web 2.0).

6. Putting together a joint position paper and/or a special issue of a journal

 

The participant selection will be done according to two criteria. First, participants will be selected based on the originality and relevance of the submitted position papers. The organiser will not establish a formal program committee as this would be overbearing for assessment of position papers, however we will draw on expert reviewers for an additional opinion on each submitted position.

 

Submissions should be 3-4 pages in length and follow the standard IEEE format. Email the final PDF to: paul <dot> lukowicz <at> uni-passau <dot> de

 

February 1, 2010: deadline for submissions

March 1, 2010: notification of acceptance to authors

May 17, 2010: workshop at Pervasive 2010 in Helsinki, Finland

 

Paul Lukowicz: University of Passau, Germany

Hans Gellersen: Lancaster University, UK

Kamil Kloch: University of Passau, Germany

 

Paul Lukowicz is a Professor of Embedded Systems at the University of Passau. Paul’s research interests are in wearable systems, sensing and activity recognition for pervasive computing, and complexity of pervasive systems. He is the coordinator of SOCIONICAL, an interdisciplinary European project aiming to develop Complexity Science based modelling, prediction and simulation methods for large scale socio-technical systems.

Hans Gellersen is a Professor of Interactive Systems at Lancaster University. Hans’ interests in pervasive computing are in context and activity sensing, collaborative sensing and localisation, and user interface technologies.

 

Kamil Kloch is holding a postdoc position in the Embedded Systems at the University of Passau. He is involed in the coordination of SOCIONICAL. Kamil's interests lie in on-line algorithms, combinatorics and software development.

 

Paul Lukowicz (primary contact)

University of Passau

IT-Zentrum/International House

Innstrasse 43

D-94032 Passau

paul <dot> lukowicz <at> uni-passau <dot> de

Lancaster University

Infolab21, South Drive

Bailrigg

Lancaster LA1 4WA, U.K.

hwg <at> comp <dot> lancs <dot> ac <dot> uk

 

University of Passau

IT-Zentrum/International House

Innstrasse 43

D-94032 Passau

kamil <dot> kloch <at> uni-passau <dot> de