Some Interesting Papers and random Photos from Pervasive 2009

Pervasive 2009 had a really exciting program and provided a good overview of current research in pervasive and ubiquitous computing. Have a look at the proceedings of the pervasive 2009 conference. The Noh theater in Nara was a very special and enjoyable venue and it was organized perfectly – as one would expect when travelling to Japan.

The idea of having short and long papers together in the main track worked very well in my view. The number of demos and posters was much higher than in the years before – and that was great and very inspiring. Have a look at the photos for some of the posters and demos.
The program consisted of 20 full papers (18 pages) and 7 notes (8 pages) which were selected in a peer review process out of 147 submissions (113 full papers, 34 notes) which is a acceptance rate of 18%.

John Krumm presented his paper Realistic driving tips for location privacy – again having a good idea making the presentation interesting beyond its content (having review snippets in the footer of the slides – including a fake review). The paper explores the difficulties that arise when creating fake GPS tracks. He motivated that the probabilities need to be taken into account (e.g. you are usually on a road). I liked the approach and the paper is worthwhile to read. I think it could be interesting to compare the approach is not create the tracks but just share them between users (e.g. other people can use parts of my track as fake track and in return I get some tracks that I can use as fake tracks). http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-01516-8_4

If you phone knows where you are you can use this information to control your heating system. This was the basic idea of the research presented by Stephen Intille. They explored using GPS location of the users to automate control of the heating / air condition control in a house. It seems there is quite some potential for saving energy with technology typically used in the US (one temperature control for the whole house). In Europe where heating systems typically offer finer control (e.g. room level) the potential is probably larger.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-01516-8_8

James Scott presented a paper that showed how you can use force gestures to interact with a device. In contrast to previous research (e.g. GUMMI) the approach works with a ridged device and could be used with current screen technologies.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-01516-8_10

What do you need to figure out who is holding and using the remote control? This question is addressed in the paper „Inferring Identity Using Accelerometers in Television Remote Controls“ that was presented by Jeff Hightower. They looked at how well button press sequences and accelerometer data give you information about which person is using the device.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-01516-8_11

Geo-fencing: confining Wi-Fi Coverage to Physical Boundaries is an example of how to create technological solutions to fit a user’s conceptual model of the world. As people have experience with the physical world and they have mechanisms to negotiate and use space and hence linking technologies that have typically other characteristics (e.g. wireless radio coverage) to the known concept is really interesting.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-01516-8_19

Situvis, a tool for visualizing sensor data, was presented by Adrian Clear from Aaron’s group in Dublin. The software, papers and a video is available at: http://situvis.com/. The basic idea is to have a parallel coordinate visualization of the different sensor information and to provide interaction mechanisms with the data.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-01516-8_22

Nathan Eagle presented the paper „Methodologies for continuous cellular tower data analysis“. He talked about the opportunities that arise when we have massive amounts of information from users – e.g. tracks from 200 million mobile phone user. It really is interesting that based on such methods we may get completely new insights into human behavior and social processes.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-01516-8_23

If you have seen a further interesting paper in the conference (and there are surely some) that I have missed feel free to give a link to them in the comments to this post.

Keynote at Pervasive 2009 – Toshio Iwai

Toshio Iwai gave the keynote at Pervasive 2009 on expanding media art. He introduced us to the basics of moving images and films. The examples were fun and I think I will copy some for my introductory class on user interfaces for explaining the visual system (afterimages with a black-and-white negative image; the concept of combining images on two sides of a disk; the idea of moving images by using a flip book).

In his introduction he also went back to explain what he learned as a child and I found this very interesting and encouraging to expose smaller children more to technology than we usually tend to do (especially in Germany I think we do not give children much chance to explore technologies while they are in kindergarten and primary school). Hope to go with Vivien to the space center in Florida in few weeks 🙂

Following up from the basic visual effects he showed some really funny life video effects. He introduced a delay to some parts (lines) in the picture when displaying which led to ghostly movements. Everything that is not moving appears in its real shape and everything that is in motion will be deformed.

In the final part of his talk he argued that the Theremin is the only electronic instrument that has been newly invented in the 20th century. For him an instrument has to have unique interaction, unique shape, and unique sound. Additional for the interaction it is essential that the interaction can be perceived by the audience (you can see how one plays a violin but not how one makes digital music with a laptop computer). Based on this he show a new musical instrument he developed that is inspired by a music box. The instrument is the TENORI-ON [1]. It has a surface with 16×16 switches (that include an LED) and 16×16 LEDs on the back. It has a unique interaction, its shape and sound is unique and it supports visibility of interaction as the sound is combined with light pattern. The basic idea is that the horizontal direction is the time line and the vertical the pitch (similar to a music box).

[1] Yu Nishibori, Toshio Iwai. TENORI-ON. Proceedings of the 2006 International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression (NIME06), Paris, France. http://www.nime.org/2006/proc/nime2006_172.pdf

Workshop on Pervasive Computing in Advertising

We got a good set of submission for our workshop and had about 20 participants who joined us in Nara to discuss how pervasive computing will shape advertising in the future. The papers and a selection of talks is online on the workshop website: http://pervasiveadvertising.org

One question that was central to our discussion was: what is advertising and how is it different from information. It became quickly clear that there is a lot of information that has an influence on behavior and in particular shopping decisions and some of it is considered advertising but much is not. Hence it seems really interesting to imagine a world where advertising is replaced by information. One could image that replacing advertising by information (e.g. as it happens already in some domains such a hotel recommendations) would change the whole approach for creating product or providing services.

We have presented in the workshop our work on contextual mobile displays. The idea is that in the future we could have mobile displays (that replace current printed items, like bumper stickers, bags with printed logos, and t-shirts with prints) could become active and could act as contextual displays. Have a look at the paper for more details [1].

[1] Florian Alt, Albrecht Schmidt, Christoph Evers. Mobile Contextual display system. Pervasive Advertising Workshop at Pervasive 2009. (contact Florian Alt for a copy of the paper)

Japan – sightseeing (an less phone usage than expected)

To get cheaper flights we took a flight on Thursday/Friday to fly from Europe to Japan (never really understood the pricing model of flights). So we had two days off before the actual conference and many colleagues (who also took cheap flights) were also there. We went to do some sightseeing in Nara and Kyoto – which was great.

In Kyoto we got personal guides – students from a University in Kyoto – who offered to show us run and use this to practice their English. It was great for us as we got many insights we would have missed by ourselves and it was great to talk to some locals. Hopefully they enjoyed their time with us, too. In the evening we learned once more that the Japanese people are very social; we met the Nara Air Rescue team in a restaurant – and this was proof :-).

One thing that surprised me greatly was that very few people in Nara and Kyoto used their phone in public. On the train nearly nobody spoke on the phone, watch mobile TV or browsed the web. This is obviously very different from Tokyo. Overall Nara and Kyoto are very enjoyable and calming places. I hope to have at some point the time to spend more time in Japan (… when is my next sabbatical? 😉

For more photos see: http://foto.ubisys.org/pervasive2009/

PS: an some people find a disco in the street…