| Creating the magic with information technology | | BIBA | Full-Text | 1-2 | |
| Markus Gross | |||
| Advanced information technology has become a key enabler in modern media and entertainment. This comprises the production of animation or live action films, the design of next-generation toys and consumer products, or the creation of richer experiences in theme parks. At Disney Research Zurich, more than 200 researchers and scientists are working at the forefront of innovation in entertainment technology. Our research covers a wide spectrum of different fields, including graphics and animation, human computer interaction, wireless communication, computer vision, materials and design, robotics, and more. In this talk I will demonstrate how innovations in information technology and computational methods developed at Disney Research are serving as platforms for future content creation. I will emphasize the transformative power of 3D printing, digital fabrication, and our increasing ability to make the whole world responsive and interactive. | |||
| Understanding the coverage and scalability of place-centric crowdsensing | | BIBA | Full-Text | 3-12 | |
| Yohan Chon; Nicholas D. Lane; Yunjong Kim; Feng Zhao; Hojung Cha | |||
| Crowd-enabled place-centric systems gather and reason over large mobile sensor datasets and target everyday user locations (such as stores, workplaces, and restaurants). Such systems are transforming various consumer services (for example, local search) and data-driven organizations (city planning). As the demand for these systems increases, our understanding of how to design and deploy successful crowdsensing systems must improve. In this paper, we present a systematic study of the coverage and scaling properties of place-centric crowdsensing. During a two-month deployment, we collected smartphone sensor data from 85 participants using a representative crowdsensing system that captures 48,000 different place visits. Our analysis of this dataset examines issues of core interest to place-centric crowdsensing, including place-temporal coverage, the relationship between the user population and coverage, privacy concerns, and the characterization of the collected data. Collectively, our findings provide valuable insights to guide the building of future place-centric crowdsensing systems and applications. | |||
| Sensing the pulse of urban refueling behavior | | BIBA | Full-Text | 13-22 | |
| Fuzheng Zhang; David Wilkie; Yu Zheng; Xing Xie | |||
| Urban transportation is increasingly studied due to its complexity and economic importance. It is also a major component of urban energy use and pollution. The importance of this topic will only increase as urbanization continues around the world. A less researched aspect of transportation is the refueling behavior of drivers. In this paper, we propose a step toward real-time sensing of refueling behavior and citywide petrol consumption. We use reported trajectories from a fleet of GPS-equipped taxicabs to detect gas station visits, measure the time spent, and estimate overall demand. For times and stations with sparse data, we use collaborative filtering to estimate conditions. Our system provides real-time estimates of gas stations' waiting times, from which recommendations could be made, an indicator of overall gas usage, from which macro-scale economic decisions could be made, and a geographic view of the efficiency of gas station placement. | |||
| If you see something, swipe towards it: crowdsourced event localization using smartphones | | BIBA | Full-Text | 23-32 | |
| Robin Wentao Ouyang; Animesh Srivastava; Prithvi Prabahar; Romit Roy Choudhury; Merideth Addicott; F. Joseph McClernon | |||
| This paper presents iSee, a crowdsourced approach to detecting and localizing events in outdoor environments. Upon spotting an event, an iSee user only needs to swipe on her smartphone's touchscreen in the direction of the event. These swiping directions are often inaccurate and so are the compass measurements. Moreover, the swipes do not encode any notion of how far the event is located from the user, neither is the GPS location of the user accurate. Furthermore, multiple events may occur simultaneously and users do not explicitly indicate which events they are swiping towards. Nonetheless, as more users start contributing data, we show that our proposed system is able to quickly detect and estimate the locations of the events. We have implemented iSee on Android phones and have experimented in real-world settings by planting virtual "events" in our campus and asking volunteers to swipe on seeing one. Results show that iSee performs appreciably better than established triangulation and clustering-based approaches, in terms of localization accuracy, detection coverage, and robustness to sensor noise. | |||
| Headio: zero-configured heading acquisition for indoor mobile devices through multimodal context sensing | | BIBA | Full-Text | 33-42 | |
| Zheng Sun; Shijia Pan; Yu-Chi Su; Pei Zhang | |||
| Heading information becomes widely used in ubiquitous computing applications for mobile devices. Digital magnetometers, also known as geomagnetic field sensors, provide absolute device headings relative to the earth's magnetic north. However, magnetometer readings are prone to significant errors in indoor environments due to the existence of magnetic interferences, such as from printers, walls, or metallic shelves. These errors adversely affect the performance and quality of user experience of the applications requiring device headings. In this paper, we propose Headio, a novel approach to provide reliable device headings in indoor environments. Headio achieves this by aggregating ceiling images of an indoor environment, and by using computer vision-based pattern detection techniques to provide directional references. To achieve zero-configured and energy-efficient heading sensing, Headio also utilizes multimodal sensing techniques to dynamically schedule sensing tasks. To fully evaluate the system, we implemented Headio on both Android and iOS mobile platforms, and performed comprehensive experiments in both small-scale controlled and large-scale public indoor environments. Evaluation results show that Headio constantly provides accurate heading detection performance in diverse situations, achieving better than 1 degree average heading accuracy, up to 33X improvement over existing techniques. | |||
| Crowd++: unsupervised speaker count with smartphones | | BIBA | Full-Text | 43-52 | |
| Chenren Xu; Sugang Li; Gang Liu; Yanyong Zhang; Emiliano Miluzzo; Yih-Farn Chen; Jun Li; Bernhard Firner | |||
| Smartphones are excellent mobile sensing platforms, with the microphone in particular being exercised in several audio inference applications. We take smartphone audio inference a step further and demonstrate for the first time that it's possible to accurately estimate the number of people talking in a certain place -- with an average error distance of 1.5 speakers -- through unsupervised machine learning analysis on audio segments captured by the smartphones. Inference occurs transparently to the user and no human intervention is needed to derive the classification model. Our results are based on the design, implementation, and evaluation of a system called Crowd++, involving 120 participants in 10 very different environments. We show that no dedicated external hardware or cumbersome supervised learning approaches are needed but only off-the-shelf smartphones used in a transparent manner. We believe our findings have profound implications in many research fields, including social sensing and personal wellbeing assessment. | |||
| Lumina: a soft kinetic material for morphing architectural skins and organic user interfaces | | BIBA | Full-Text | 53-62 | |
| Chin Koi Khoo; Flora D. Salim | |||
| The pervasive computing era has seen sensor and actuator technologies integrated into the design of kinetic building skins. This paper presents an investigation of a new soft kinetic material that has potential applications for morphing architectural building skins and organic user interfaces. The material capacities of Lumina to sense the ambient environment, morph and change forms, and emit light are demonstrated in the two prototypes presented in the paper. The first prototype is Blind, a form-changing organic user interface with multiple eye-like apertures that can be programmed to accept data input for visual communication. The second prototype is Blanket, a responsive morphing architectural skin with minimal mechanical and discrete components that sense real-time space occupancy data, manipulate light effects, perform active illumination, and act as an ambient display. | |||
| A field study of multi-device workflows in distributed workspaces | | BIBA | Full-Text | 63-72 | |
| Stephanie Santosa; Daniel Wigdor | |||
| With the selection of devices encompassing a wider range of computing surfaces, along with the near ubiquity of wireless networks, the nature of the workspace has become distributed over multiple locations and digital artifacts. We interviewed 22 professionals across a wide range of industries about their use of artifacts in their workflows to dis-cover new cross-device interaction paradigms and issues. We explore the impact of today's cloud services and app-based computing on how devices are used together. Gaps in data management and cross-device interactions were identified as the main obstacles and opportunities for improvement for multi-device interaction. | |||
| The break-time barometer: an exploratory system forworkplace break-time social awareness | | BIBA | Full-Text | 73-82 | |
| Reuben Kirkham; Sebastian Mellor; David Green; Jiun-Shian Lin; Karim Ladha; Cassim Ladha; Daniel Jackson; Patrick Olivier; Peter Wright; Thomas Ploetz | |||
| The Break-Time Barometer is a social awareness system, which was developed as part of an exploratory study of the use of situated sensing and displays to promote cohesion in a newly-dispersed workplace. The Break-Time Barometer specifically aims to use an ambient persuasion approach in order to encourage people to join existing breaks, which take place within this community. Drawing upon a privacy-sensitive ubiquitous sensing infrastructure, the system of-fers information about potentially break-related activity in social spaces within this workplace, including alerts when specific events are detected. The system was developed using a user-centered iterative design approach. A qualitative mixed methods evaluation of a full deployment identified a diverse set of reactions to both the system and the design goal, and further elaborated the challenges of designing for social connectedness in this complex workplace context. | |||
| CoenoFire: monitoring performance indicators of firefighters in real-world missions using smartphones | | BIBA | Full-Text | 83-92 | |
| Sebastian Feese; Bert Arnrich; Gerhard Troster; Michael Burtscher; Bertolt Meyer; Klaus Jonas | |||
| Firefighting is a dangerous task and many research projects have aimed at supporting firefighters during missions by developing new and often costly equipment. In contrast to previous approaches, we use the smartphone to monitor firefighters during real-world missions in order to provide objective data that can be used in post-incident briefings and trainings. In this paper, we present CoenoFire, a smartphone based sensing system aimed at monitoring temporal and behavioral performance indicators of firefighting missions. We validate the performance metrics showing that they can indicate why certain teams performed faster than others in a training scenario conducted by 16 firefighting teams. Furthermore, we deployed CoenoFire over a period of six weeks in a professional fire brigade. In total, 71 firefighters participated in our study and the collected data includes 76 real-world missions totaling to over 148 hours of mission data. Additionally, we visualize real-world mission data and show how mission feedback is supported by the data. | |||
| Learning from a learning thermostat: lessons for intelligent systems for the home | | BIBA | Full-Text | 93-102 | |
| Rayoung Yang; Mark W. Newman | |||
| Everyday systems and devices in the home are becoming smarter. In order to better understand the challenges of deploying an intelligent system in the home, we studied the experience of living with an advanced thermostat, the Nest. The Nest utilizes machine learning, sensing, and networking technology, as well as eco-feedback features. We conducted interviews with 23 participants, ten of whom also participated in a three-week diary study. Our findings show that while the Nest was well-received overall, the intelligent features of the Nest were not perceived to be as useful or intuitive as expected, in particular due to the system's inability to understand the intent behind sensed behavior and users' difficulty in understanding how the Nest works. A number of participants developed workarounds for the shortcomings they encountered. Based on our observations, we propose three avenues for future development of interactive intelligent technologies for the home: exception flagging, incidental intelligibility, and constrained engagement. | |||
| TherML: occupancy prediction for thermostat control | | BIBA | Full-Text | 103-112 | |
| Christian Koehler; Brian D. Ziebart; Jennifer Mankoff; Anind K. Dey | |||
| Reducing the large energy consumption of temperature regulation systems is a challenge for researchers and practitioners alike. In this paper, we explore and compare two common types of solutions: A manual systems that encourages reduced energy use, and an intelligent automatic control system. We deployed an eco-feedback system with the ability to remotely control one's thermostat to ten participants for three months. Participants appreciated the ability to remotely control the thermostat, and controlled their heating system with 78.8% accuracy, a 6.3% improvement over not having this system. However, despite having feedback and remote control, they still wasted a lot of energy heating when away from home for the day. Using data from our deployment, we developed TherML, an occupancy prediction algorithm that uses GPS data from a user's smartphone to automatically control the indoor temperature of a home with 92.1% accuracy. We compare TherML to other state-of-the-art techniques, and show that the higher accuracy of our approach optimizes both energy usage and user comfort. We end with recommendations for a mixed initiative system that leverages aspects of both the manual and automated approaches that can better match heating control to users' routines and preferences. | |||
| Understanding adaptive thermal comfort: new directions for UbiComp | | BIBA | Full-Text | 113-122 | |
| Adrian K. Clear; Janine Morley; Mike Hazas; Adrian Friday; Oliver Bates | |||
| In many parts of the world, mechanical heating and cooling is used to regulate indoor climates, with the aim of maintaining a uniform temperature. Achieving this is energy-intensive, since large indoor spaces must be constantly heated or cooled, and the difference to the outdoor temperature is large. This paper starts from the premise that comfort is not delivered to us by the indoor environment, but is instead something that is pursued as a normal part of daily life, through a variety of means. Based on a detailed study of four university students over several months, we explore how Ubicomp technologies can help create a more sustainable reality where people are more active in pursuing and maintaining their thermal comfort, and environments are less tightly controlled and less energy-intensive, and we outline areas for future research in this domain. | |||
| Detecting cocaine use with wearable electrocardiogram sensors | | BIBA | Full-Text | 123-132 | |
| Annamalai Natarajan; Abhinav Parate; Edward Gaiser; Gustavo Angarita; Robert Malison; Benjamin Marlin; Deepak Ganesan | |||
| Ubiquitous physiological sensing has the potential to profoundly improve our understanding of human behavior, leading to more targeted treatments for a variety of disorders. The long term goal of this work is development of novel computational tools to support the study of addiction in the context of cocaine use. The current paper takes the first step in this important direction by posing a simple, but crucial question: Can cocaine use be reliably detected using wearable electrocardiogram (ECG) sensors? The main contributions in this paper include the presentation of a novel clinical study of cocaine use, the development of a computational pipeline for inferring morphological features from noisy ECG waveforms, and the evaluation of feature sets for cocaine use detection. Our results show that 32mg/70kg doses of cocaine can be detected with the area under the receiver operating characteristic curve levels above 0.9 both within and between-subjects. | |||
| Supporting disease insight through data analysis: refinements of the monarca self-assessment system | | BIBA | Full-Text | 133-142 | |
| Mads Frost; Afsaneh Doryab; Maria Faurholt-Jepsen; Lars Vedel Kessing; Jakob E. Bardram | |||
| There is a growing interest in personal health technologies that sample behavioral data from a patient and visualize this data back to the patient for increased health awareness. However, a core challenge for patients is often to understand the connection between specific behaviors and health, i.e. to go beyond health awareness to disease insight. This paper presents MONARCA 2.0, which records subjective and objective data from patients suffering from bipolar disorder, processes this, and informs both the patient and clinicians on the importance of the different data items according to the patient's mood. The goal is to provide patients with a increased insight into the parameters influencing the nature of their disease. The paper describes the user-centered design and the technical implementation of the system, as well as findings from an initial field deployment. | |||
| A wearable projector-based gait assistance system and its application for elderly people | | BIBA | Full-Text | 143-152 | |
| Satoshi Murata; Masanori Suzuki; Kaori Fujinami | |||
| The ability to walk is particularly important to maintain a person's quality of life (QOL). In today's aged society, ways to support the impaired gait of elderly people with a decline in physical function is in great demand. This paper proposes wearable projector-based gait assistance as a novel application of mobile projectors. The technical challenge is to compensate the projected image with the intended position and size during walking. To verify the concept, we developed a self-gait training assistance system that displays stride length information on the floor while the user is walking. We conducted a study with ten healthy older adults (ages: 76-91). The results show the effectiveness of visual clues in controlling stride length and elderly people's acceptance of the wearable projector device. | |||
| FYI: communication style preferences underlie differences in location-sharing adoption and usage | | BIBA | Full-Text | 153-162 | |
| Xinru Page; Bart P. Knijnenburg; Alfred Kobsa | |||
| In a mixed-methods study on adoption of location-sharing social networks (LSSN), we discovered that variations in adoption and usage behavior could be explained by one's predisposition to communicate in a certain style. Specifically, we found that certain individuals prefer a communication style we call FYI (For Your Information). FYI communicators like to infer availability and to keep in touch with others without having to interact with them, which is the predominant style in current LSSN. Using structural equation modeling on a U.S. nationwide survey (N=1021), we show how the FYI communication style predicts the adoption of LSSN while also showing a negative effect on one's desire to call someone on the phone. Moreover, we find that as age increases, FYI preference significantly decreases. In a follow-on survey (N=180), we refine the FYI construct and show that it affects users' level of disclosure and participation in social media. Furthermore, we show that it completely mediates the effect of certain Big-5 personality traits on social media participation and LSSN usage. The results suggest that to cater to a wider segment of the population, LSSN (and arguably any social media) should support an active communication style. | |||
| Placer: semantic place labels from diary data | | BIBA | Full-Text | 163-172 | |
| John Krumm; Dany Rouhana | |||
| Semantic place labels are labels like "home", "work", and "school" given to geographic locations where a person spends time. Such labels are important both for giving understandable location information to people and for automatically inferring activities. Deployed products often compute semantic labels with heuristics, which are difficult to program reliably. In this paper, we develop Placer, an algorithm to infer semantic places labels. It uses data from two large, government diary studies to create a principled algorithm for labeling places based on machine learning. Our labeling reduces to a classification problem, where we classify locations into different label categories based on individual demographics, the timing of visits, and nearby businesses. Using these government studies gives us an unprecedented amount of training and test data. For instance, one of our experiments used training data from 87,600 place visits (from 10,372 distinct people) evaluated on 1,135,053 visits (from 124,517 distinct people). We show labeling accuracy for a number of experiments, including one that gives a 14 percentage point increase in accuracy when labeling is a function of nearby businesses in addition to demographic and time features. We also test on GPS data from 28 subjects. | |||
| Experiences with a social travel information system | | BIBA | Full-Text | 173-182 | |
| Mike Harding; Joseph Finney; Nigel Davies; Mark Rouncefield; James Hannon | |||
| This paper documents a programme of research to explore the development of mobile social travel information systems, where dynamic travel information is produced by travellers themselves and distributed within communities united by similar travel patterns and everyday activities. The resulting system, called OurTravel, was the subject of a series of real-world trials involving three diverse physical communities: a rural village, a group of urban office workers and the attendees of a contemporary arts festival. We describe the design and implementation of the OurTravel system, our experiences of running these trials and the insights gained. | |||
| Contextual dissonance: design bias in sensor-based experience sampling methods | | BIBA | Full-Text | 183-192 | |
| Neal Lathia; Kiran K. Rachuri; Cecilia Mascolo; Peter J. Rentfrow | |||
| The Experience Sampling Method (ESM) has been widely used to collect longitudinal survey data from participants; in this domain, smartphone sensors are now used to augment the context-awareness of sampling strategies. In this paper, we study the effect of ESM design choices on the inferences that can be made from participants' sensor data, and on the variance in survey responses that can be collected. In particular, we answer the question: are the behavioural inferences that a researcher makes with a trigger-defined subsample of sensor data biased by the sampling strategy's design? We demonstrate that different single-sensor sampling strategies will result in what we refer to as contextual dissonance: a disagreement in how much different behaviours are represented in the aggregated sensor data. These results are not only relevant to researchers who use the ESM, but call for future work into strategies that may alleviate the biases that we measure. | |||
| SOUK: social observation of human kinetics | | BIBA | Full-Text | 193-196 | |
| Marc-Olivier Killijian; Matthieu Roy; Gilles Trédan; Christophe Zanon | |||
| Simulating human-centered pervasive systems requires accurate assumptions on
the behavior of human groups. Recent models consider this behavior as a
combination of both social and spatial factors. Yet, establishing accurate
traces of human groups is difficult: current techniques capture either
positions, or contacts, with a limited accuracy.
In this paper we introduce a new technique to capture such behaviors. The interest of this approach lies in the unprecedented accuracy at which both positions and orientations of humans, even gathered in a crowd, are captured. From the mobility to the topological connectivity, the open-source framework we developed offers a layered approach that can be tailored, allowing to compare and reason about models and traces. We introduce a new trace of 50 individuals on which the validity and accuracy of this approach is demonstrated. To showcase the interest of our software pipeline, we compare it against the random waypoint model. Our fine-grained analyses, that take into account social interactions between users, show that the random waypoint model is not a reasonable approximation of any of the phenomena we observed. | |||
| Your reactions suggest you liked the movie: automatic content rating via reaction sensing | | BIBA | Full-Text | 197-206 | |
| Xuan Bao; Songchun Fan; Alexander Varshavsky; Kevin Li; Romit Roy Choudhury | |||
| This paper describes a system for automatically rating content -- mainly movies and videos -- at multiple granularities. Our key observation is that the rich set of sensors available on today's smartphones and tablets could be used to capture a wide spectrum of user reactions while users are watching movies on these devices. Examples range from acoustic signatures of laughter to detect which scenes were funny, to the stillness of the tablet indicating intense drama. Moreover, unlike in most conventional systems, these ratings need not result in just one numeric score, but could be expanded to capture the user's experience. We combine these ideas into an Android based prototype called Pulse, and test it with 11 users each of whom watched 4 to 6 movies on Samsung tablets. Encouraging results show consistent correlation between the user's actual ratings and those generated by the system. With more rigorous testing and optimization, Pulse could be a candidate for real-world adoption. | |||
| Classifying social actions with a single accelerometer | | BIBA | Full-Text | 207-210 | |
| Hayley Hung; Gwenn Englebienne; Jeroen Kools | |||
| In this paper, we estimate different types of social actions from a single body-worn accelerometer in a crowded social setting. Accelerometers have many advantages in such settings: they are impervious to environmental noise, unobtrusive, cheap, low-powered, and their readings are specific to a single person. Our experiments show that they are surprisingly informative of different types of social actions. The social actions we address in this paper are whether a person is speaking, laughing, gesturing, drinking, or stepping. To our knowledge, this is the first work to carry out experiments on estimating social actions from conversational behavior using only a wearable accelerometer. The ability to estimate such actions using just the acceleration opens up the potential for analyzing more about social aspects of people's interactions without explicitly recording what they are saying. | |||
| Exploring capturable everyday memory for autobiographical authentication | | BIBA | Full-Text | 211-220 | |
| Sauvik Das; Eiji Hayashi; Jason I. Hong | |||
| We explore how well the intersection between our own everyday memories and those captured by our smartphones can be used for what we call autobiographical authentication-a challenge-response authentication system that queries users about day-to-day experiences. Through three studies-two on MTurk and one field study-we found that users are good, but make systematic errors at answering autobiographical questions. Using Bayesian modeling to account for these systematic response errors, we derived a formula for computing a confidence rating that the attempting authenticator is the user from a sequence of question-answer responses. We tested our formula against five simulated adversaries based on plausible real-life counterparts. Our simulations indicate that our model of autobiographical authentication generally performs well in assigning high confidence estimates to the user and low confidence estimates to impersonating adversaries. | |||
| Using a 2DST waveguide for usable, physically constrained out-of-band Wi-Fi authentication | | BIBA | Full-Text | 221-224 | |
| Matthias Budde; Marcel Köpke; Matthias Berning; Till Riedel; Michael Beigl | |||
| This paper proposes using a 2D waveguide for a novel means of authentication in public Wi-Fi infrastructures. The design of the system is presented, and its practicability and usability is comparatively discussed with that of five other tag and context based authentication schemes, two of which have not been previously realized. In accordance with the presented application scenarios, all of the schemes were implemented in a platform-independent fashion built on web technology. | |||
| Walk detection and step counting on unconstrained smartphones | | BIBA | Full-Text | 225-234 | |
| Agata Brajdic; Robert Harle | |||
| Smartphone pedometry offers the possibility of ubiquitous health monitoring,
context awareness and indoor location tracking through Pedestrian Dead
Reckoning (PDR) systems. However, there is currently no detailed understanding
of how well pedometry works when applied to smartphones in typical,
unconstrained use.
This paper evaluates common walk detection (WD) and step counting (SC) algorithms applied to smartphone sensor data. Using a large dataset (27 people, 130 walks, 6 smartphone placements) optimal algorithm parameters are provided and applied to the data. The results favour the use of standard deviation thresholding (WD) and windowed peak detection (SC) with error rates of less than 3%. Of the six different placements, only the back trouser pocket is found to degrade the step counting performance significantly, resulting in undercounting for many algorithms. | |||
| ClimbAX: skill assessment for climbing enthusiasts | | BIBA | Full-Text | 235-244 | |
| Cassim Ladha; Nils Y. Hammerla; Patrick Olivier; Thomas Plötz | |||
| In recent years the sport of climbing has seen consistent increase in popularity. Climbing requires a complex skill set for successful and safe exercising. While elite climbers receive intensive expert coaching to refine this skill set, this progression approach is not viable for the amateur population. We have developed ClimbAX -- a climbing performance analysis system that aims for replicating expert assessments and thus represents a first step towards an automatic coaching system for climbing enthusiasts. Through an accelerometer based wearable sensing platform, climber's movements are captured. An automatic analysis procedure detects climbing sessions and moves, which form the basis for subsequent performance assessment. The assessment parameters are derived from sports science literature and include: power, control, stability, speed. ClimbAX was evaluated in a large case study with 53 climbers under competition settings. We report a strong correlation between predicted scores and official competition results, which demonstrate the effectiveness of our automatic skill assessment system. | |||
| Estimating heart rate variation during walking with smartphone | | BIBA | Full-Text | 245-254 | |
| Mayu Sumida; Teruhiro Mizumoto; Keiichi Yasumoto | |||
| Aiming to realize the application which supports users to enjoy walking with an appropriate physical load, we propose a method to estimate physical load and its variation during walking only with available functions of a smartphone. Since physical load has a linear relationship with heart rate, our purpose is to estimate heart rate with a smartphone. To this end, we build heart rate prediction models which predict heart rate variation from walking data including acceleration and walking speed by machine learning. In order to track unexpected change of physical load, we focus attention on oxygen uptake which has a similar property to heart rate and devise a novel technique to estimate the oxygen uptake from acceleration and GPS data so that it is used as an input of the model. Moreover, to adapt to difference of heart rate variation among individuals, we devise techniques to optimize parameters for each profile-based category of users and to normalize heart rate to absorb individual difference. We applied the proposed method to actual walking data on various routes by different persons and confirmed that the method estimates heart rate variation with the mean error of less than 7 beat per minute. | |||
| A cloud-powered driver-less printing system for smartphones | | BIBA | Full-Text | 255-264 | |
| Seungeun Chung; Shuiqing Wang; Injong Rhee | |||
| Smart devices such as smartphones and tablets are becoming more powerful and versatile enough to replace conventional personal computers. Despite the rapid evolution in their capabilities, controlling peripherals such as network printers directly from smart devices is still in the primitive stage due to the lack of dedicated drivers. We propose and prototype a cloud-powered, driver-less printing system called CloudBridge for ubiquitous printing support from off the shelf smart devices. The CloudBridge service, which runs on a smart device, operates as a communication bridge connecting a network printer and a cloud server. By using cloud's ability to translate the operation commands into a language that the printer can understand, it is possible for a smart device to control the printer without having dedicated drivers. CloudBridge achieves the true meaning of ubiquitous mobile printing: it does not require any prerequisite settings. Compared to most widely used mobile printing solutions, the operation time is reasonable, compensating for the time and effort required for setting up the solution. CloudBridge is further optimized to improve the quality of experience, such as response time and energy consumption of the smart device, by adopting an adaptive compression method. | |||
| CacheKeeper: a system-wide web caching service for smartphones | | BIBA | Full-Text | 265-274 | |
| Yifan Zhang; Chiu Tan; Li Qun | |||
| Efficient web caching in mobile apps eliminates unnecessary network traffic, reduces web accessing latency, and improves smartphone battery life. However, recent research has indicated that current mobile apps suffer from poor implementations of web caching. In this work, we first conducted a comprehensive survey of over 1000 Android apps to identify how different types of mobile apps perform in web caching. Based on our analysis, we designed CacheKeeper, an OS web caching service transparent to mobile apps for smartphones. CacheKeeper can not only effectively reduce overhead caused by poor web caching of mobile apps, but also utilizes cross-app caching opportunities in smartphones. Furthermore, CacheKeeper is backward compatible, meaning that existing apps can take advantage of CacheKeeper without any modifications. We have implemented a prototype of CacheKeeper in Linux kernel. Evaluation on 10 top ranked Android apps shows that our CacheKeeper prototype can save 42% networks traffic with real user browsing behaviors and increase web accessing speed by 2x under real 3G settings. Experiments also show that our prototype incurs negligible overhead in most aspects on cache misses. | |||
| Practical prediction and prefetch for faster access to applications on mobile phones | | BIBA | Full-Text | 275-284 | |
| Abhinav Parate; Matthias Böhmer; David Chu; Deepak Ganesan; Benjamin M. Marlin | |||
| Mobile phones have evolved from communication devices to indispensable accessories with access to real-time content. The increasing reliance on dynamic content comes at the cost of increased latency to pull the content from the Internet before the user can start using it. While prior work has explored parts of this problem, they ignore the bandwidth costs of prefetching, incur significant training overhead, need several sensors to be turned on, and do not consider practical systems issues that arise from the limited background processing capability supported by mobile operating systems. In this paper, we make app prefetch practical on mobile phones. Our contributions are two-fold. First, we design an app prediction algorithm, APPM, that requires no prior training, adapts to usage dynamics, predicts not only which app will be used next but also when it will be used, and provides high accuracy without requiring additional sensor context. Second, we perform parallel prefetch on screen unlock, a mechanism that leverages the benefits of prediction while operating within the constraints of mobile operating systems. Our experiments are conducted on long-term traces, live deployments on the Android Play Market, and user studies, and show that we outperform prior approaches to predicting app usage, while also providing practical ways to prefetch application content on mobile phones. | |||
| The timestreams platform: artist mediated participatory sensing for environmental discourse | | BIBA | Full-Text | 285-294 | |
| Jesse Blum; Martin Flintham; Rachel Jacobs; Victoria Shipp; Genovefa Kefalidou; Michael Brown; Derek McAuley | |||
| Ubiquitous and pervasive computing techniques have been used to inform discourses around climate change and energy insecurity, traditionally through data capture and representation for scientists, policy makers and the public. Research into re-engaging the public with sustainability and climate change issues reveals the significance of emotional and personal engagement alongside locally meaningful, globally-relevant and data-informed climate messaging for the public. New ubiquitous and pervasive computing techniques are emerging to support the next generation of climate change stakeholders, including artists, community practitioners, educators and data hackers, to create scientific data responsive artworks and performances. Grounded in our experiences of community based artistic interventions, we explore the design and deployments of the Timestreams platform, demonstrating usages of ubiquitous and pervasive computing within these new forms of discourse around climate change and energy insecurity. | |||
| The collective infrastructural work of electricity: exploring feedback in a prepaid university dorm in China | | BIBA | Full-Text | 295-304 | |
| Tengfei Liu; Xianghua Ding; Silvia Lindtner; Tun Lu; Ning Gu | |||
| Feedback on resource consumption is often explored as a way to raise awareness and saving resources. This paper reports findings from a user study of a feedback system deployed in a Chinese university dormitory with a prepaid electricity system, a context different from the more common domestic setting in the West explored in prior research. With this work, we move beyond resource conservation and draw attention to an often-neglected aspect of infrastructural work -- the work to ensure the smooth and continuous supply of resources from end users. This paper examines the ways in which people attend to electricity through what we term collective infrastructural work, i.e. people perceive electricity as a marginal concern, and yet invest time to maintain it collectively. We draw out a number of implications for design and evaluation from this work. | |||
| Exploring sustainability research in computing: where we are and where we go next | | BIBA | Full-Text | 305-314 | |
| Bran Knowles; Lynne Blair; Mike Hazas; Stuart Walker | |||
| This paper develops a holistic framework of questions which seem to motivate sustainability research in computing in order to enable new opportunities for critique. Analysis of systematically selected corpora of computing publications demonstrates that several of these question areas are well covered, while others are ripe for further exploration. It also provides insight into which of these questions tend to be addressed by different communities within sustainable computing. The framework itself reveals discursive similarities between other existing environmental discourses, enabling reflection and participation with the broader sustainability debate. It is argued that the current computing discourse on sustainability is reformist and premised in a Triple Bottom Line construction of sustainability. A radical, Quadruple Bottom Line alternative is explored as a new vista for computing research. | |||
| Hallway based automatic indoor floorplan construction using room fingerprints | | BIBA | Full-Text | 315-324 | |
| Yifei Jiang; Yun Xiang; Xin Pan; Kun Li; Qin Lv; Robert P. Dick; Li Shang; Michael Hannigan | |||
| People spend approximately 70% of their time indoors. Understanding the
indoor environments is therefore important for a wide range of emerging mobile
personal and social applications. Knowledge of indoor floorplans is often
required by these applications. However, indoor floorplans are either
unavailable or obtaining them requires slow, tedious, and error-prone manual
labor.
This paper describes an automatic indoor floorplan construction system. Leveraging Wi-Fi fingerprints and user motion information, this system automatically constructs floorplan via three key steps: (1) room adjacency graph construction to determine which rooms are adjacent; (2) hallway layout learning to estimate room sizes and order rooms along each hallway, and (3) force directed dilation to adjust room sizes and optimize the overall floorplan accuracy. Deployment study in three buildings with 189 rooms demonstrates high floorplan accuracy. The system has been implemented as a mobile middleware, which allows emerging mobile applications to generate, leverage, and share indoor floorplans. | |||
| Find my stuff: supporting physical objects search with relative positioning | | BIBA | Full-Text | 325-334 | |
| Jens Nickels; Pascal Knierim; Bastian Könings; Florian Schaub; Björn Wiedersheim; Steffen Musiol; Michael Weber | |||
| Searching for misplaced keys, phones, or wallets is a common nuisance. Find My Stuff (FiMS) provides search support for physical objects inside furniture, on room level, and in multiple locations, e.g., home and office. Stuff tags make objects searchable while all other localization components are integrated into furniture. FiMS requires minimal configuration and automatically adapts to the user's furniture arrangement. Object search is supported with relative position cues, such as "phone is inside top drawer" or "the wallet is between couch and table," which do not require exact object localization. Functional evaluation of our prototype shows the approach's practicality with sufficient accuracy in realistic environments and low energy consumption. We also conducted two user studies, which showed that objects can be retrieved significantly faster with FiMS than manual search and that our relative position cues provide better support than map-based cues. Combined with audiovisual feedback, FiMS also outperforms spotlight-based cues. | |||
| Automatically detecting problematic use of smartphones | | BIBA | Full-Text | 335-344 | |
| Choonsung Shin; Anind K. Dey | |||
| Smartphone adoption has increased significantly and, with the increase in smartphone capabilities, this means that users can access the Internet, communicate, and entertain themselves anywhere and anytime. However, there is growing evidence of problematic use of smartphones that impacts both social and heath aspects of users' lives. Currently, assessment of overuse or problematic use depends on one-time, self-reported behavioral information about phone use. Due to the known issues with self-reports in such types of assessments, we explore an automated, objective and repeatable approach for assessing problematic usage. We collect a wide range of phone usage data from smartphones, identify a number of usage features that are relevant to this assessment, and build detection models based on Adaboost with machine learning algorithms automatically detecting problematic use. We found that the number of apps used per day, the ratio of SMSs to calls, the number of event-initiated sessions, the number of apps used per event initiated session, and the length of non-event-initiated sessions are useful for detecting problematic usage. With these, a detection model can identify users with problematic usage with 89.6% accuracy (F-score of .707). | |||
| A probabilistic ontological framework for the recognition of multilevel human activities | | BIBA | Full-Text | 345-354 | |
| Rim Helaoui; Daniele Riboni; Heiner Stuckenschmidt | |||
| A major challenge of ubiquitous computing resides in the acquisition and modelling of rich and heterogeneous context data, among which, ongoing human activities at different degrees of granularity. In a previous work, we advocated the use of probabilistic description logics (DLs) in a multilevel activity recognition framework. In this paper, we present an in-depth study of activity modeling and reasoning within that framework, as well as an experimental evaluation with a large real-world dataset. Our solution allows us to cope with the uncertain nature of ontological descriptions of activities, while exploiting the expressive power and inference tools of the OWL 2 language. Targeting a large dataset of real human activities, we developed a probabilistic ontology modeling nearly 150 activities and actions of daily living. Experiments with a prototype implementation of our framework confirm the viability of our solution. | |||
| Towards zero-shot learning for human activity recognition using semantic attribute sequence model | | BIBA | Full-Text | 355-358 | |
| Heng-Tze Cheng; Martin Griss; Paul Davis; Jianguo Li; Di You | |||
| Understanding human activities is important for user-centric and context-aware applications. Previous studies showed promising results using various machine learning algorithms. However, most existing methods can only recognize the activities that were previously seen in the training data. In this paper, we present a new zero-shot learning framework for human activity recognition that can recognize an unseen new activity even when there are no training samples of that activity in the dataset. We propose a semantic attribute sequence model that takes into account both the hierarchical and sequential nature of activity data. Evaluation on datasets in two activity domains show that the proposed zero-shot learning approach achieves 70-75% precision and recall recognizing unseen new activities, and outperforms supervised learning with limited labeled data for the new classes. | |||
| Ensembles of multiple sensors for human energy expenditure estimation | | BIBA | Full-Text | 359-362 | |
| Hristijan Gjoreski; Boštjan Kaluza; Matjaz Gams; Radoje Milic; Mitja Luštrek | |||
| Monitoring human energy expenditure is important in many health and sport applications, since the energy expenditure directly reflects the level of physical activity. The actual energy expenditure is unpractical to measure; hence, the field aims at estimating it by measuring the physical activity with accelerometers and other sensors. Current advanced estimators use a context-dependent approach in which a different regression model is invoked for different activities of the user. In this paper, we go a step further and use multiple contexts corresponding to multiple sensors, resulting in an ensemble of models for energy expenditure estimation. This provides a multi-view perspective, which leads to a better estimation of the energy. The proposed method was experimentally evaluated on a comprehensive set of activities where it outperformed the current state-of-the-art. | |||
| Instant inkjet circuits: lab-based inkjet printing to support rapid prototyping of UbiComp devices | | BIBA | Full-Text | 363-372 | |
| Yoshihiro Kawahara; Steve Hodges; Benjamin S. Cook; Cheng Zhang; Gregory D. Abowd | |||
| This paper introduces a low cost, fast and accessible technology to support the rapid prototyping of functional electronic devices. Central to this approach of 'instant inkjet circuits' is the ability to print highly conductive traces and patterns onto flexible substrates such as paper and plastic films cheaply and quickly. In addition to providing an alternative to breadboarding and conventional printed circuits, we demonstrate how this technique readily supports large area sensors and high frequency applications such as antennas. Unlike existing methods for printing conductive patterns, conductivity emerges within a few seconds without the need for special equipment. We demonstrate that this technique is feasible using commodity inkjet printers and commercially available ink, for an initial investment of around US$300. Having presented this exciting new technology, we explain the tools and techniques we have found useful for the first time. Our main research contribution is to characterize the performance of instant inkjet circuits and illustrate a range of possibilities that are enabled by way of several example applications which we have built. We believe that this technology will be of immediate appeal to researchers in the ubiquitous computing domain, since it supports the fabrication of a variety of functional electronic device prototypes. | |||
| Power harvesting from microwave oven electromagnetic leakage | | BIBA | Full-Text | 373-382 | |
| Yoshihiro Kawahara; Xiaoying Bian; Ryo Shigeta; Rushi Vyas; Manos M. Tentzeris; Tohru Asami | |||
| In this paper, we considered the possibility of using electricity harvested from the microwave field leaked from commercial microwave ovens. Our experimental results showed that the leakage received by a dipole antenna was about 0 dBm (1 mW) at a point 5 cm in front of the door. A rectenna consisting of a dipole antenna and charge pump can convert the leaked microwave energy into a DC current. When a microwave oven is operated for 2 min, 9.98 mJ of energy was harvested. We demonstrated that this energy is sufficient for powering a digital cooking timer to count down for 3 min and beep for 2.5 s. The operation of other kitchen devices was also demonstrated. | |||
| Wirelessly powered bistable display tags | | BIBA | Full-Text | 383-386 | |
| Artem Dementyev; Jeremy Gummeson; Derek Thrasher; Aaron Parks; Deepak Ganesan; Joshua R. Smith; Alanson P. Sample | |||
| Paper displays have a number of attractive properties, in particular the
ability to present visual information perpetually with no power source.
However, they are not digitally updatable or re-usable. Bistable display
materials, such as e-paper, promise to enable displays with the best properties
of both paper and electronic displays. However, rewriting a pixelated bistable
display requires substantial energy, both for communication and for setting the
pixel states.
This paper describes a bistable display tag that, from an energy standpoint, is capable of perpetual operation. A commercial off-the-shelf NFC-enabled phone generates RF signals carrying both the information and energy necessary to update the display. After the update is complete, the display continues to present the information with no further power input. We present one example implementation, a companion display for a mobile phone that can be used to capture and preserve a screenshot. We also discuss other potential applications of energy neutral bistable display tags. | |||
| WebClip: a connector for ubiquitous physical input and output for touch screen devices | | BIBA | Full-Text | 387-390 | |
| Thomas Kubitza; Norman Pohl; Tilman Dingler; Albrecht Schmidt | |||
| It has become extremely easy for developers to build custom software for smartphone and tablet computers. However, it is still hard to extend those devices with external electronics, e.g. additional sensors and actuators. In the moment when external hardware can be easily attached to phones and tablets a wide new application space will be opened up. With WebClip we present a device offering digital and analogue I/O ports that can be controlled and monitored by just clipping the device onto a capacitive touch screen. A web page in the browser of the touch screen device is used to control the bi-directional communication. Data from the WebClip to the device is sent by emulating touches on the screen whereas the reverse direction uses light sensors on the bottom side of the clip to receive light sequences emitted by the web page. A simple Javascript API is offered to build custom web applications. We have successfully tested our prototype with a variety of phones and tablet computers and report on performance and limitations. | |||
| A tangible programming tool for creation of context-aware applications | | BIBA | Full-Text | 391-400 | |
| Jisoo Lee; Luis Garduño; Erin Walker; Winslow Burleson | |||
| End-user programming tools, if properly designed, have the potential to empower end-users to create context-aware applications tailored to their own needs and lives, in order to help them break bad habits and change their behaviors. In this work, we present GALLAG Strip, an easy to use mobile and tangible tool that allows users to create context-aware applications without the need of programming experience. It enables programming by physical demonstration of envisioned interactions with the same sensors and objects that users will later encounter in their finished application. After an initial pilot to verify the usability of GALLAG Strip, we conducted a user study to evaluate the effects of tangible programming in terms of ease of use, engagement, and facilitation of the ideation process. We found that tangibility has both benefits and drawbacks, and suggest a mixed tangible and non-tangible approach for better user experience. | |||
| There's no such thing as gaining a pound: reconsidering the bathroom scale user interface | | BIBA | Full-Text | 401-410 | |
| Matthew Kay; Dan Morris; mc schraefel; Julie A. Kientz | |||
| The weight scale is perhaps the most ubiquitous health sensor of all and is important to many health and lifestyle decisions, but its fundamental interface -- a single numerical estimate of a person's current weight -- has remained largely unchanged for 100 years. An opportunity exists to impact public health by re-considering this pervasive interface. Toward that end, we investigated the correspondence between consumers' perceptions of weight data and the realities of weight fluctuation. Through an analysis of online product reviews, a journaling study on weight fluctuations, expert interviews, and a large-scale survey of scale users, we found that consumers' perception of weight scale behavior is often disconnected from scales' capabilities and from clinical relevance, and that accurate understanding of weight fluctuation is associated with greater trust in the scale itself. We propose significant changes to how weight data should be presented and discuss broader implications for the design of other ubiquitous health sensing devices. | |||
| Detecting cooking state with gas sensors during dry cooking | | BIBA | Full-Text | 411-414 | |
| Sen H. Hirano; Jed R. Brubaker; Donald J. Patterson; Gillian R. Hayes | |||
| Gas sensors have the potential to assist cooking by providing feedback on the cooking process and by further automating cooking. In this work, we explored the potential use of gas sensors to monitor food during the cooking process. Focusing on dry cooking, we collected gas emissions using 13 sensors during trials in which food was cooked to various degrees of doneness. Using decision tree classifiers, we were able to predict doneness for waffles and popcorn with 73% and 85% accuracy, respectively. We reflect on the potential reasons for this variation and the ways in which gas sensors might reliably be used in ubicomp applications to support cooking. | |||
| Dog's life: wearable activity recognition for dogs | | BIBA | Full-Text | 415-418 | |
| Cassim Ladha; Nils Hammerla; Emma Hughes; Patrick Olivier; Thomas Ploetz | |||
| Health and well-being of dogs, either domesticated pets or service animals, are major concerns that are taken seriously for ethical, emotional, and financial reasons. Welfare assessments in dogs rely on objective observations of both frequency and variability of individual behaviour traits, which is often difficult to obtain in a dog's everyday life. In this paper we have identified a set of activities, which are linked to behaviour traits that are relevant for a dog's wellbeing. We developed a collar-worn accelerometry platform that records dog behaviours in naturalistic environments. A statistical classification framework is used for recognising dog activities. In an experimental evaluation we analysed the naturalistic behaviour of 18 dogs and were able to recognise a total of 17 different activities with approximately 70% classification accuracy. The presented system is the first of its kind that allows for robust and detailed analysis of dog activities in naturalistic environments. | |||
| AirWave: non-contact haptic feedback using air vortex rings | | BIBA | Full-Text | 419-428 | |
| Sidhant Gupta; Dan Morris; Shwetak N. Patel; Desney Tan | |||
| Input modalities such as speech and gesture allow users to interact with computers without holding or touching a physical device, thus enabling at-a-distance interaction. It remains an open problem, however, to incorporate haptic feedback into such interaction. In this work, we explore the use of air vortex rings for this purpose. Unlike standard jets of air, which are turbulent and dissipate quickly, vortex rings can be focused to travel several meters and impart perceptible feedback. In this paper, we review vortex formation theory and explore specific design parameters that allow us to generate vortices capable of imparting haptic feedback. Applying this theory, we developed a prototype system called AirWave. We show through objective measurements that AirWave can achieve spatial resolution of less than 10 cm at a distance of 2.5 meters. We further demonstrate through a user study that this can be used to direct tactile stimuli to different regions of the human body. | |||
| NLify: lightweight spoken natural language interfaces via exhaustive paraphrasing | | BIBA | Full-Text | 429-438 | |
| Seungyeop Han; Matthai Philipose; Yun-Cheng Ju | |||
| This paper presents the design and implementation of a programming system that enables third-party developers to add spoken natural language (SNL) interfaces to standalone mobile applications. The central challenge is to create statistical recognition models that are accurate and resource-efficient in the face of the variety of natural language, while requiring little specialized knowledge from developers. We show that given a few examples from the developer, it is possible to elicit comprehensive sets of paraphrases of the examples using internet crowds. The exhaustive nature of these paraphrases allows us to use relatively simple, automatically derived statistical models for speech and language understanding that perform well without per-application tuning. We have realized our design fully as an extension to the Visual Studio IDE. Based on a new benchmark dataset with 3500 spoken instances of 27 commands from 20 subjects and a small developer study, we establish the promise of our approach and the impact of various design choices. | |||
| Pursuits: spontaneous interaction with displays based on smooth pursuit eye movement and moving targets | | BIBA | Full-Text | 439-448 | |
| Mélodie Vidal; Andreas Bulling; Hans Gellersen | |||
| Although gaze is an attractive modality for pervasive interactions, the real-world implementation of eye-based interfaces poses significant challenges, such as calibration. We present Pursuits, an innovative interaction technique that enables truly spontaneous interaction with eye-based interfaces. A user can simply walk up to the screen and readily interact with moving targets. Instead of being based on gaze location, Pursuits correlates eye pursuit movements with objects dynamically moving on the interface. We evaluate the influence of target speed, number and trajectory and develop guidelines for designing Pursuits-based interfaces. We then describe six realistic usage scenarios and implement three of them to evaluate the method in a usability study and a field study. Our results show that Pursuits is a versatile and robust technique and that users can interact with Pursuits-based interfaces without prior knowledge or preparation phase. | |||
| The influence of temporal and spatial features on the performance of next-place prediction algorithms | | BIBA | Full-Text | 449-458 | |
| Paul Baumann; Wilhelm Kleiminger; Silvia Santini | |||
| Several algorithms to predict the next place visited by a user have been proposed in the literature. The accuracy of these algorithms -- measured as the ratio of the number of correct predictions and the number of all computed predictions -- is typically very high. In this paper, we show that this good performance is due to the high predictability intrinsic in human mobility. We also show that most algorithms fail to correctly predict transitions, i.e. situations in which users move between different places. To this end, we analyze the performance of 18 prediction algorithms focusing on their ability to predict transitions. We run our analysis on a data set of mobility traces of 37 users collected over a period of 1.5 years. Our results show that even algorithms achieving an overall high accuracy are unable to reliably predict the next location of the user if this is different from the current one. Building upon our analysis we then present a novel next-place prediction algorithm that can both achieve high overall accuracy and reliably predict transitions. Our approach combines all the 18 algorithms considered in our analysis and achieves its good performance at the cost of a higher computational and memory overhead. | |||
| Inferring human mobility patterns from taxicab location traces | | BIBA | Full-Text | 459-468 | |
| Raghu Ganti; Mudhakar Srivatsa; Anand Ranganathan; Jiawei Han | |||
| Taxicabs equipped with real-time location sensing devices are increasingly becoming popular. Such location traces are a rich source of information and can be used for congestion pricing, taxicab placement, and improved city planning. An important problem to enable these application is to identify human mobility patterns from the taxicab traces, which translates to being able to identify pickup and dropoff points for a particular trip. In this paper, we show that while past approaches are effective in detecting hotspots using location traces, they are largely ineffective in identifying trips (pairs of pickup and dropoff points). We propose the use of a graph theory concept -- stretch factor in a novel manner to identify trip(s) made by a taxicab and show that a Hidden Markov Model based algorithm can identify trips (using real datasets from taxicab deployments in Shanghai and partially simulated datasets from Stockholm) with precision and recall of 90-94%, a significant improvement over past approaches that result in a precision and recall of about 50-60%. | |||
| Modelling heterogeneous location habits in human populations for location prediction under data sparsity | | BIBA | Full-Text | 469-478 | |
| James McInerney; Jiangchuan Zheng; Alex Rogers; Nicholas R. Jennings | |||
| In recent years, researchers have sought to capture the daily life location behaviour of groups of people for exploratory, inference, and predictive purposes. However, development of such approaches has been limited by the requirement of personal semantic labels for locations or social/spatial overlap between individuals in the group. To address this shortcoming, we present a Bayesian model of mobility in populations (i.e., groups without spatial or social interconnections) that is not subject to any of these requirements. The model intelligently shares temporal parameters between people, but keeps the spatial parameters specific to individuals. To illustrate the advantages of population modelling, we apply our model to the difficult problem of overcoming data sparsity in location prediction systems, using the Nokia dataset comprising 38 individuals, and find a factor of 2.4 improvement in location prediction performance against a state-of-the-art model when training on only 20 hours of observations. | |||
| Fine-grained preference-aware location search leveraging crowdsourced digital footprints from LBSNs | | BIBA | Full-Text | 479-488 | |
| Dingqi Yang; Daqing Zhang; Zhiyong Yu; Zhiwen Yu | |||
| The crowdsourced digital footprints from Location Based Social Networks (LBSNs) contain not only rich information about locations, but also individual's feeling about locations and associated entities. This new data source provides us with an unprecedented opportunity to massively and cheaply collect location related information, and to subtly characterize individual's fine-grained preference about those places and associated entities. In this paper, we propose SEALs -- a fine-grained preference-aware location search framework leveraging the crowdsourced traces in LBSNs. We first collect user check-ins and tips from Foursquare and use them as direct user feedback on locations. Second, we extract users' sentiment about locations and associated entities from tips to characterize their fine-grained location preference. Third, we incorporate such fine-grained user preference into personalized location ranking using tensor factorization techniques. Experimental results show that SEALs can achieve better location ranking comparing to the state-of-the-art solutions. | |||
| Fine-grained sharing of sensed physical activity: a value sensitive approach | | BIBA | Full-Text | 489-498 | |
| Daniel A. Epstein; Alan Borning; James Fogarty | |||
| Personal informatics applications in a variety of domains are increasingly enabled by low cost personal sensing. Although applications capture fine-grained activity for self reflection, sharing is generally limited to high level summaries. There are potential advantages to fine-grained sharing, but also potential harms. To help investigate this complex design space, we employ Value Sensitive Design to consider whether and how to share fine grained step activity. We identify key values and value tensions, and we develop scenarios to highlight these. We then design a set of data transformations that seek to maximize the benefits while minimizing the harms of detailed sharing. These include a novel approach to interactive modification of fine grained step data, allowing people to remove private data and using motif discovery to generate realistic replacement data. Finally, we conduct semi structured interviews with 12 participants examining these scenarios and transformations. We distill results into a set of design considerations for fine-grained physical activity sharing. | |||
| A model for WLAN signal attenuation of the human body | | BIBA | Full-Text | 499-508 | |
| Ngewi Fet; Marcus Handte; Pedro José Marrón | |||
| Fingerprinting-based indoor localization involves building a signal strength radio map. This map is usually built manually by a person holding the mapping device, which results in orientation-dependent fingerprints due to signal attenuation by the human body. To offset this distortion, fingerprints are typically collected for multiple orientations, but this requires a high effort for large localization areas. In this paper, we propose an approach to reduce the mapping effort by modeling the WLAN signal attenuation caused by the human body. By applying the model to the captured signal to compensate for the attenuation, it is possible to generate an orientation-independent fingerprint. We demonstrate that our model is location and person independent and its output is comparable with manually created radio maps. By using the model, the WLAN scanning effort can be reduced by 75% to 87.5% (depending on the number of orientations). | |||
| Three case studies of UX with moving products | | BIBA | Full-Text | 509-518 | |
| Jinyung Jung; Seok-Hyung Bae; Myung-Suk Kim | |||
| Advances in ubicomp technology are enabling the development of products that move in affective ways. However, there is insufficient empirical knowledge to encourage such designs. As research through design, we built three prototypes of standing-type kinetic products to conduct user experience (UX) field studies with visceral, behavioral, and reflective perspectives. Tasks, the users' body reactions, and their feelings were measured and interpreted to uncover features of a desirable UX with moving products. The findings and discussions contribute to the ubicomp community by expanding the design space for moving products and inspiring the community with practical applications. | |||
| It takes a network to get dinner: designing location-based systems to address local food needs | | BIBA | Full-Text | 519-528 | |
| Lynn Dombrowski; Jed R. Brubaker; Sen H. Hirano; Melissa Mazmanian; Gillian R. Hayes | |||
| Based on an 18-month qualitative study that included the creation and testing of design considerations and a prototype location-based information system (LBIS), this research provides empirical insight into the daily practices of a wide variety of individuals working to address food insecurity in one U.S. county. Qualitative fieldwork reveals that nonprofit organizations in the food assistance ecology engage in location-based information practices that could be enhanced by the design of a LBIS. Two practices that would benefit from a collaborative LBIS are 1) practices of matching in which nonprofit workers help individuals who are seeking assistance to food resources and 2) practices of distribution in which nonprofit workers help organizations access and deliver food resources to clients. In order to support such practices across organizations the cooperative design component of this research suggests that an LIBS should: support the role of intermediaries who engage in practices of matching and distribution; provide interactive mapping tools that match resources to need; enable organizations to control visibility over specific data; and document work and impact. This research further suggests that designers should explore the wide variety of spatial patterns that must align and overlap such that ecologies of nonprofit organizations might synergistically work together to address pressing social needs. | |||
| An informed view on consent for UbiComp | | BIBA | Full-Text | 529-538 | |
| Ewa Luger; Tom Rodden | |||
| Ubiquitous computing systems tend to be complex, seamless, data-driven and interactive. Reacting to both context, and users' implicit actions resulting from the lived experience, they cast all traces of human life as potential 'data'. To augment users' endeavours, such systems are necessarily embedded below the line of human attention, drawing upon new and highly sensitive types of data. This begs the question, where is the moment of user consent and how can this moment be truly informed? We would argue that it is time to revisit our design principles in respect of consent and redress the balance of agency towards the user. We draw upon a series of multidisciplinary interviews with experts to (a) reframe consent for ubicomp, and (b) offer three indicative principles, supportive of consent, for designers to 'balance' against system functionality. We hope that this will afford a new prism through which designers might make value judgements. | |||
| Locality and privacy in people-nearby applications | | BIBA | Full-Text | 539-548 | |
| Eran Toch; Inbal Levi | |||
| People-Nearby applications are becoming a popular way for individuals to search for new social relations in their physical vicinity. This paper presents the results of a qualitative study, based on 25 interviews, examining how privacy and locality are managed in these applications. We describe how location is used as a grounding mechanism, providing a platform for honest and truthful signals in the challenging process of forming new social relations. We discuss our findings by suggesting theoretical frameworks that can be used to analyze the social space induced by the applications, as well as to inform the design of new technologies that foster the creation of new social ties. | |||
| Privacy manipulation and acclimation in a location sharing application | | BIBA | Full-Text | 549-558 | |
| Shomir Wilson; Justin Cranshaw; Norman Sadeh; Alessandro Acquisti; Lorrie Faith Cranor; Jay Springfield; Sae Young Jeong; Arun Balasubramanian | |||
| Location sharing is a popular feature of online social networks, but challenges remain in the effective presentation of privacy choices to users, whose location sharing preferences are complex and diverse. One proposed approach for capturing these nuances builds on the observation that key attributes of users' location sharing preferences can be represented by a small number of privacy profiles, which can provide a basis for configuring individual preferences. However, the impact of this approach on how users view their privacy is relatively unknown. We present a study evaluating the impact of this approach on users' location sharing preferences and their satisfaction with the decisions made by their resulting settings. The results suggest that this approach can influence users to share significantly more without a substantial difference in comfort. This further suggests that the provision of profiles for privacy settings must be carefully considered, as they can substantially alter sharing behavior. | |||
| Protecting privacy for group nearest neighbor queries with crowdsourced data and computing | | BIBA | Full-Text | 559-562 | |
| Tanzima Hashem; Mohammed Eunus Ali; Lars Kulik; Egemen Tanin; Anthony Quattrone | |||
| User privacy in location-based services (LBSs) has become an important research area. We introduce a new direction to protect user privacy that evaluates LBSs with crowdsourced data and computation and eliminates the role of a location-based service provider. We focus on the group nearest neighbor (GNN) query that allows a group to meet at their nearest point of interest such as a restaurant that minimizes the total or maximum distance of the group. We develop a crowdsource-based approach, called PrivateMeetUp, to evaluate GNN queries in a privacy preserving manner and implement a working prototype of PrivateMeetUp. | |||
| Revisiting human-battery interaction with an interactive battery interface | | BIBA | Full-Text | 563-572 | |
| Denzil Ferreira; Eija Ferreira; Jorge Goncalves; Vassilis Kostakos; Anind K. Dey | |||
| Mobile phone user interfaces typically show an icon to indicate remaining battery, but not the amount of time the device can be used for, often forcing users to make faulty estimates and predictions about battery life. Here we report on two studies that capture users' experiences with a user-centered battery interface design. In Study 1, we analyze 12 participants' use of mobile phones, demonstrating that mobile phone users do not know how or what to do to extend their mobile's battery life. We further identify the information they rely on to assess battery life. In Study 2, we use this information to design, prototype and evaluate an interactive battery interface (IBI) with another 22 participants. Our findings describe how users perceive battery life and how we used their mental models of mobile phone batteries to create IBI. Lastly, we report on the users' experiences and IBI's effect on battery lifetime, showing gains of approximately 27% over the course of a day. | |||
| FOCUS: a usable & effective approach to OLED display power management | | BIBA | Full-Text | 573-582 | |
| Kiat Wee Tan; Tadashi Okoshi; Archan Misra; Rajesh Krishna Balan | |||
| In this paper, we present the design and implementation of Focus, a system for effectively and efficiently reducing power consumption of OLED displays on smartphones. These displays, while becoming exceedingly common still consume significant power. The key idea of Focus is that we use the notion of saliency to save display power by dimming portions of the applications that are less important to the user. We envision Focus being especially useful during low battery situations when usability is less important than power savings. We tested Focus using 15 applications running on a Samsung Galaxy S III and show that it saves, on average, between 23 to 34% of the OLED display power with little impact on task completion times. Finally, we present the results of a user study, involving 30 participants that shows that Focus, even with its dimming behaviour, is still quite usable. | |||
| DopLink: using the Doppler effect for multi-device interaction | | BIBA | Full-Text | 583-586 | |
| Md Tanvir Islam Aumi; Sidhant Gupta; Mayank Goel; Eric Larson; Shwetak Patel | |||
| Mobile and embedded electronics are pervasive in today's environment. As such, it is necessary to have a natural and intuitive way for users to indicate the intent to connect to these devices from a distance. We present DopLink, an ultrasonic-based device selection approach. It utilizes the already embedded audio hardware in smart devices to determine if a particular device is being pointed at by another device (i.e., the user waves their mobile phone at a target in a pointing motion). We evaluate the accuracy of DopLink in a controlled user study, showing that, within 3 meters, it has an average accuracy of 95% for device selection and 97% for finding relative device position. Finally, we show three applications of DopLink: rapid device pairing, home automation, and multi-display synchronization. | |||
| Beyond self-monitoring: understanding non-functional aspects of home-based healthcare technology | | BIBA | Full-Text | 587-596 | |
| Erik Grönvall; Nervo Verdezoto | |||
| Monitoring of health parameters in non-clinical settings is one strategy to address the increasingly aging population and age-related disabilities and diseases. However, challenges exist when introducing self-monitoring activities in people's everyday life. An active lifestyle can challenge the appropriation of healthcare technologies and people with comorbidity may have diverse but co-existing monitoring needs. In this paper, we seek to understand home-based health monitoring practices to better design and integrate them into people's everyday life. We perform an analysis of socio-technical complexities in home-based healthcare technologies through three case studies of self-monitoring: 1) pre-eclampsia (i.e. pregnancy poisoning), 2) heart conditions, and 3) preventive care. Through the analysis seven themes emerged (people, resources, places, routines, knowledge, control and motivation) that can facilitate the understanding of home-based healthcare activities. We present three modes of self-monitoring use and provide a set of design recommendations for future Ubicomp designs of home-based healthcare technology. | |||
| COPDTrainer: a smartphone-based motion rehabilitation training system with real-time acoustic feedback | | BIBA | Full-Text | 597-606 | |
| Gabriele Spina; Guannan Huang; Anouk Vaes; Martijn Spruit; Oliver Amft | |||
| Patient motion training requires adaptive, personalized exercise models and systems that are easy to handle. In this paper, we evaluate a training system based on a smartphone that integrates in clinical routines and serves as a tool for therapist and patient. Only the smartphone's build-in inertial sensors were used to monitor exercise execution and providing acoustic feedback on exercise performance and exercise errors. We used a sinusoidal motion model to exploit the typical repetitive structure of motion exercises. A Teach-mode was used to personalize the system by training under the guidance of a therapist and deriving exercise model parameters. Subsequently, in a Train-mode, the system provides exercise feedback. We validate our approach in a validation with healthy volunteers and in an intervention study with COPD patients. System performance, trainee performance, and feedback efficacy were analysed. We further compare the therapist and training system performances and demonstrate that our approach is viable. | |||
| Making family care work: dependence, privacy and remote home monitoring telecare systems | | BIBA | Full-Text | 607-616 | |
| John Vines; Stephen Lindsay; Gary W. Pritchard; Mabel Lie; David Greathead; Patrick Olivier; Katie Brittain | |||
| Supporting independent living for the ageing population in later life is an often-cited application area for ubiquitous computing. Telecare services such as remote monitoring systems are now coming onto the consumer market but there is little knowledge of the impact these technologies may have on relationships between family members and older relatives. We present findings from a live field trial of SHel -- a telecare system that allows nominated caregivers to remotely monitor activities -- in 17 older adult's homes. Interviews were conducted with the 17 older participants and 11 of their nominated caregivers before, during and after using the system. We establish that such technologies transform existing hidden care routines between family members into care work, and the impact they have upon the sense of independence and privacy of those who are being monitored in their home. | |||
| Towards more natural digital content manipulation via user freehand gestural interaction in a living room | | BIBA | Full-Text | 617-626 | |
| Sang-Su Lee; Jeonghun Chae; Hyunjeong Kim; Youn-kyung Lim; Kun-pyo Lee | |||
| Advances in dynamic gesture recognition technologies now make it possible to investigate freehand input techniques. This study tried to understand how users manipulate digital content on a distant screen by hand gesture interaction in a living room environment. While there have been many existing studies that investigate freehand input techniques, we developed and applied a novel study methodology based on a combination of both an existing user elicitation study and conventional Wizard-of-Oz study that involved another non-technical user for providing feedback. Through the study, many useful issues and implications for making freehand gesture interaction design more natural in a living room environment were generated which have not been covered in previous works. Furthermore, we could observe how the initial user-defined gestures are changed over time. | |||
| Home computing unplugged: why, where and when people use different connected devices at home | | BIBA | Full-Text | 627-636 | |
| Fahim Kawsar; A. J. Bernheim Brush | |||
| We investigate how technology usage in homes has changed with the increasing prevalence of mobile devices including Tablets and Smart Phones. We logged Internet usage from 86 Belgium households to determine their six most common Internet Activities. Next, we surveyed households about what devices they own, how they share those devices, and which device they use for different Internet activities. We then conducted semi-structured interviews with 18 of 55 households that responded to the survey in which participants explained their device usage patterns and where they use technology in their home. Our findings suggest that the nature of online activity and social context influence device preference. Many participants reported that their Desktop PC is now a special purpose device, which they use only for specific activities such as working from home or online gaming. Compared to past studies, we observed technology use in many more locations in the home, most notably kitchens and bathrooms. | |||
| Weiser's dream in the Korean home: collaborative study of domestic roles, relationships, and ideal technologies | | BIBA | Full-Text | 637-646 | |
| Hee Rin Lee; Selma Šabanovic | |||
| Following Bell and Dourish's call for a "ubicomp of the present," we visited 14 households in Korea, where Weiser's dreams come true, to study their social dynamics and domestic technologies as a part of these dynamics. We used a participatory research approach in which participants, acting as collaborative ethnographers and co-designers, chose how to describe their homes to us and which existing technologies to discuss. A qualitative analysis of the conversations identified two main themes. The first finding is the highly gendered nature of roles in the Korean home, influenced by traditional Confucian values and reinforced by contemporary neo-liberal norms. The second finding is that domestic technologies are used, adopted, and imagined in the context of these gendered social dynamics rather than just according to functional needs. In conclusion, we emphasize the need to attend to the social dynamics of the home in the design of politically sensitive domestic technologies, which will enable the inclusion of marginalized voices, such as women, in design. | |||
| Understanding user behavior at scale in a mobile video chat application | | BIBA | Full-Text | 647-656 | |
| Lei Tian; Shaosong Li; Junho Ahn; David Chu; Richard Han; Qin Lv; Shivakant Mishra | |||
| Online video chat services such as Chatroulette and Omegle randomly match users in video chat sessions and have become increasingly popular, with tens of thousands of users online at anytime during a day. Our interest is in examining user behavior in the growing domain of mobile video, and in particular how users behave in such video chat services as they are extended onto mobile clients. To date, over four thousand people have downloaded and used our Android-based mobile client, which was developed to be compatible with an existing video chat service. The paper provides a first-ever detailed large scale study of mobile user behavior in a random video chat service over a three week period. This study identifies major characteristics such as mobile user session durations, time of use, demographic distribution and the large number of brief sessions that users click through to find good matches. Through content analysis of video and audio, as well as analysis of texting and clicking behavior, we discover key correlations among these characteristics, e.g., normal mobile users are highly correlated with using the front camera and with the presence of a face, whereas misbehaving mobile users have a high negative correlation with the presence of a face. | |||
| Adaptive information-sharing for privacy-aware mobile social networks | | BIBA | Full-Text | 657-666 | |
| Igor Bilogrevic; Kévin Huguenin; Berker Agir; Murtuza Jadliwala; Jean-Pierre Hubaux | |||
| Personal and contextual information are increasingly shared via mobile social networks. Users' locations, activities and their co-presence can be shared easily with online "friends", as their smartphones already access such information from embedded sensors and storage. Yet, people usually exhibit selective sharing behavior depending on contextual attributes, thus showing that privacy, utility, and usability are paramount to the success of such online services. In this paper, we present SPISM, a novel information-sharing system that decides (semi-)automatically whether to share information with others, whenever they request it, and at what granularity. Based on active machine learning and context, SPISM adapts to each user's behavior and it predicts the level of detail for each sharing decision, without revealing any personal information to a third-party. Based on a personalized survey about information sharing involving 70 participants, our results provide insight into the most influential features behind a sharing decision. Moreover, we investigate the reasons for the users' decisions and their confidence in them. We show that SPISM outperforms other kinds of global and individual policies, by achieving up to 90% of correct decisions. | |||
| Adding an interactive display to a public basketball hoop can motivate players and foster community | | BIBA | Full-Text | 667-676 | |
| Alan Chatham; Florian 'Floyd' Mueller | |||
| Interactive displays that aim to engage people through play have been successfully deployed in urban environments. However, there has been little work bringing interactive displays into existing public game spaces like outdoor basketball courts. To explore this, we designed an interactive display for a public half-court basketball hoop. We studied the impact of 3 different display modes over a 10-week period through interviews with players, spectators, and passers-by. Our findings suggest 3 dimensions for the design space of such interactive displays: balancing noticeability across different user groups, support for different play action, and support for connecting user groups. We also present 6 design tactics along these dimensions to help designers create engaging interactive displays for public game spaces. using it to facilitate engaging playful experiences. | |||
| Storage-aware smartphone energy savings | | BIBA | Full-Text | 677-686 | |
| David T. Nguyen; Gang Zhou; Xin Qi; Ge Peng; Jianing Zhao; Tommy Nguyen; Duy Le | |||
| In this paper, to our best knowledge, we are first to provide an experimental study on how storage techniques affect power levels in smartphones and introduce energy-efficient approaches to reduce energy consumption. We evaluate power degradation at several layers of block I/O, focusing on the block layer and device driver. At each level, we investigate the amount of energy that can be saved, and use that to design and implement a prototype with optimal energy savings named SmartStorage. The system tracks the run-time I/O pattern of a smartphone that is then matched with the closest pattern from the benchmark table. After having obtained the optimal parameters, it dynamically configures storage parameters to reduce energy consumption. We evaluate our prototype by using the 20 most popular Android applications, and our energy-efficient approaches achieve from 23% to 52% of energy savings compared to using the current techniques. | |||
| "We are not in the loop": resource wastage and conservation attitude of employees in Indian workplace | | BIBA | Full-Text | 687-696 | |
| Mohit Jain; Ankit Agrawal; Sunil K. Ghai; Khai N. Truong; Deva P. Seetharam | |||
| Though rapid depletion of natural resources has become a global problem, most of the solutions developed to address it are based on studies done in the developed world. Moreover, the commercial sector is among the primary consumers of resources, yet research work has been mostly limited to residential users. We present a study exploring employees' perception, their beliefs and attitudes, towards environmental sustainability at workplaces in a developing region. To obtain broader context, we also conducted a focus group with the facility team members. Our study highlights that in spite of strong motivations to conserve, employees conservative actions are limited due to lack of controls, knowledge and responsibility. We identify new opportunities for design such as designing location specific buildings, removing inefficient choices, and building communal spaces, to facilitate conservation at workplaces. | |||
| MACH: my automated conversation coach | | BIBA | Full-Text | 697-706 | |
| Mohammed (Ehsan) Hoque; Matthieu Courgeon; Jean-Claude Martin; Bilge Mutlu; Rosalind W. Picard | |||
| MACH -- My Automated Conversation coacH -- is a novel system that provides ubiquitous access to social skills training. The system includes a virtual agent that reads facial expressions, speech, and prosody and responds with verbal and nonverbal behaviors in real time. This paper presents an application of MACH in the context of training for job interviews. During the training, MACH asks interview questions, automatically mimics certain behavior issued by the user, and exhibit appropriate nonverbal behaviors. Following the interaction, MACH provides visual feedback on the user's performance. The development of this application draws on data from 28 interview sessions, involving employment-seeking students and career counselors. The effectiveness of MACH was assessed through a weeklong trial with 90 MIT undergraduates. Students who interacted with MACH were rated by human experts to have improved in overall interview performance, while the ratings of students in control groups did not improve. Post-experiment interviews indicate that participants found the interview experience informative about their behaviors and expressed interest in using MACH in the future. | |||
| Predicting audience responses to movie content from electro-dermal activity signals | | BIBA | Full-Text | 707-716 | |
| Fernando Silveira; Brian Eriksson; Anmol Sheth; Adam Sheppard | |||
| The ability to assess fine-scale user responses has applications in advertising, content creation, recommendation, and psychology research. Unfortunately, current approaches, such as focus groups and audience surveys, are limited in size and scope. In this paper, we propose a combined biometric sensing and analysis methodology to leverage audience-scale electro-dermal activity (EDA) data for the purpose of evaluating user responses to video. We provide detailed characterization of how temporal physiological responses to video stimulus can be modeled, along with first-of-its-kind audience-scale EDA group experiments in uncontrolled real-world environments. Our study provides insights into the techniques used to analyze EDA, the effectiveness of the different temporal features, and group dynamics of audiences. Our experiments demonstrate the ability to classify movie ratings with accuracy of over 70% on specific films. Results of this study suggest the ability to assess emotional reactions of groups using minimally invasive sensing modalities in uncontrolled environments. | |||
| Making a home for social media | | BIBA | Full-Text | 717-720 | |
| Clint Heyer; Irina Shklovski; Nanna Jensen | |||
| In this paper we report on the design and implementation of an initial prototype to explore how to better situate in the home social media content individually generated by family members. We considered whether existing infrastructure and practices of social media might be leveraged to offer new kinds of shared family experiences. We found that families perceived the system to be "cosy" and intimate, especially in contrast to Facebook, and as a result 'shared to care'. While aspects of the design had a strong role to play in faciliating this perception, participants enacted their own boundaries of sharing and disclosure based on pre-existing practices and attitudes toward social technologies. The study demonstrated that there are productive design opportunities in home systems that can leverage content via a broad range of social media applications. | |||
| An unsupervised learning approach to social circles detection in ego bluetooth proximity network | | BIBA | Full-Text | 721-724 | |
| Jiangchuan Zheng; Lionel M. Ni | |||
| Understanding a user's social interactions in the physical world proves important in building context-aware ubiquitous applications. A good way towards that objective is to categorize people to whom a user is socially related into what we call as social circles. In this note, we propose a novel unsupervised approach that learns from the Bluetooth (BT) sensed data recording one's dynamic proximity relations with others to identify her social circles, each of which is formed along a semantically coherent aspect. For each circle we learn its members as well as the temporal dimensions along which it is formed. Our method is innovative in that it well overcomes data sparsity by information sharing, and allows for circle overlaps which is common in reality. Experiments on real data demonstrate the effectiveness of our method, and also show the potentials of relational mobile data in sensing personal behaviors beyond personal data. | |||
| Musical embrace: exploring social awkwardness in digital games | | BIBA | Full-Text | 725-728 | |
| Amy Huggard; Anushka De Mel; Jayden Garner; Cagdas 'Chad' Toprak; Alan Chatham; Florian 'Floyd' Mueller | |||
| Socially awkward experiences are often looked upon as something to be avoided. However, examples from the non-digital entertainment domain suggest that social awkwardness can also facilitate engaging experiences. Yet there has been little research into exploring social awkwardness in digital games. In response, we present Musical Embrace, a digital game that promotes close physical proximity through the use of a novel pillow-like controller to facilitate socially awkward play between strangers. Through our observations from demonstrating Musical Embrace at a number of events, we have derived a set of strategies to engage players by "facilitating social awkwardness", allowing players to "transform social awkwardness" while also letting players "take control of social awkwardness". With our work we hope to inspire game designers to consider the potential of social awkwardness in digital games and guide them when using it to facilitate engaging play experiences. | |||
| Combining embedded accelerometers with computer vision for recognizing food preparation activities | | BIBA | Full-Text | 729-738 | |
| Sebastian Stein; Stephen J. McKenna | |||
| This paper introduces a publicly available dataset of complex activities that involve manipulative gestures. The dataset captures people preparing mixed salads and contains more than 4.5 hours of accelerometer and RGB-D video data, detailed annotations, and an evaluation protocol for comparison of activity recognition algorithms. Providing baseline results for one possible activity recognition task, this paper further investigates modality fusion methods at different stages of the recognition pipeline: (i) prior to feature extraction through accelerometer localization, (ii) at feature level via feature concatenation, and (iii) at classification level by combining classifier outputs. Empirical evaluation shows that fusing information captured by these sensor types can considerably improve recognition performance. | |||
| Technological approaches for addressing privacy concerns when recognizing eating behaviors with wearable cameras | | BIBA | Full-Text | 739-748 | |
| Edison Thomaz; Aman Parnami; Jonathan Bidwell; Irfan Essa; Gregory D. Abowd | |||
| First-person point-of-view (FPPOV) images taken by wearable cameras can be used to better understand people's eating habits. Human computation is a way to provide effective analysis of FPPOV images in cases where algorithmic approaches currently fail. However, privacy is a serious concern. We provide a framework, the privacy-saliency matrix, for understanding the balance between the eating information in an image and its potential privacy concerns. Using data gathered by 5 participants wearing a lanyard-mounted smartphone, we show how the framework can be used to quantitatively assess the effectiveness of four automated techniques (face detection, image cropping, location filtering and motion filtering) at reducing the privacy-infringing content of images while still maintaining evidence of eating behaviors throughout the day. | |||
| FoodBoard: surface contact imaging for food recognition | | BIBA | Full-Text | 749-752 | |
| Cuong Pham; Daniel Jackson; Johannes Schoening; Tom Bartindale; Thomas Ploetz; Patrick Olivier | |||
| We describe FoodBoard, an instrumented chopping board that uses optical fibers and embedded camera imaging to identify unpackaged ingredients during food preparation on its surface. By embedding the sensing directly, and robustly, in the surface of a chopping board we also demonstrate how surface contact optical sensing can be used to realize the portability and privacy required of technology used in a setting such as a domestic kitchen. FoodBoard was subjected to a close to real-world evaluation in which 12 users prepared actual meals. FoodBoard compared favourably with existing unpackaged food recognition systems, classifying a larger number of distinct food ingredients (12 incl. meat, fruit, vegetables) with an average accuracy of 82.8%. | |||
| Crowdsourcing on the spot: altruistic use of public displays, feasibility, performance, and behaviours | | BIBA | Full-Text | 753-762 | |
| Jorge Goncalves; Denzil Ferreira; Simo Hosio; Yong Liu; Jakob Rogstadius; Hannu Kukka; Vassilis Kostakos | |||
| This study is the first attempt to investigate altruistic use of interactive public displays in natural usage settings as a crowdsourcing mechanism. We test a non-paid crowdsourcing service on public displays with eight different motivation settings and analyse users' behavioural patterns and crowdsourcing performance (e.g., accuracy, time spent, tasks completed). The results show that altruistic use, such as for crowdsourcing, is feasible on public displays, and through the controlled use of motivational design and validation check mechanisms, performance can be improved. The results shed insights on three research challenges in the field: i) how does crowdsourcing performance on public displays compare to that of online crowdsourcing, ii) how to improve the quality of feedback collected from public displays which tends to be noisy, and iii) identify users' behavioural patterns towards crowdsourcing on public displays in natural usage settings. | |||
| The media façade toolkit: prototyping and simulating interaction with media façades | | BIBA | Full-Text | 763-772 | |
| Sven Gehring; Elias Hartz; Markus Löchtefeld; Antonio Krüger | |||
| Digital technologies are rapidly finding their way into urban spaces. One prominent example is media façades. Due to their size, visibility and their technical capabilities, they offer great potential for interaction and for becoming the future displays of public spaces. To explore their potential, researchers have recently started to develop interactive applications for various media façades. Existing development tools are mostly tailored to one specific media façade in one specific setting. They usually provide limited means to incorporate interaction by a user, and the applications developed are limited to running on only one particular media façade. In this paper, we present a flexible, generalized media façade toolkit, which is capable of mimicking arbitrary media façade installations. The toolkit is capable of running interactive applications on media façades with different form factors, sizes and technical capabilities. Furthermore, it ensures application portability between different media façades and offers the possibility of providing interactivity by enabling user input with different modalities and different interaction devices. | |||
| Ambient recommendations in the pop-up shop | | BIBA | Full-Text | 773-776 | |
| Gonzalo Garcia-Perate; Nicholas Dalton; Ruth Conroy-Dalton; Duncan Wilson | |||
| In this paper we present the design and first-stage analysis of a purposely built, smart, pop-up wine shop. Our shop learns from visitors' choices and recommends wine using collaborative filtering and ambient feedback displays integrated into its furniture. Our ambient recommender system was tested in a controlled laboratory environment. We report on the qualitative feedback and between subjects study, testing the influence the system had in wine choice behavior. Participants reported the system helpful, and results from our empirical analysis suggest it influenced buying behavior. | |||
| Detecting and correcting WiFi positioning errors | | BIBA | Full-Text | 777-786 | |
| Yuki Tsuda; Quan Kong; Takuya Maekawa | |||
| Recent advances in GPS and WiFi-based positioning technologies for mobile
phones have triggered many location-based services. However, GPS positioning
quickly drains a phone's battery and cannot be used indoors. On the other hand,
WiFi positioning provides energy-efficient indoor and outdoor positioning with
reasonable accuracy. However, WiFi positioning sometimes makes large errors
caused by various reasons, e.g., the movement of reference WiFi access points.
In this paper we attempt to detect and correct such errors automatically by
performing outlier detection in time series.
So, we solve this problem by comparing a user's current measurement at time T with her coordinate point at time T predicted from her past coordinate history, and judging whether the current measurement is correct or not by computing the distance between the measurement location and the predicted location. However, it is difficult to predict the user's coordinates accurately with a single prediction method (predictor) because the user's context (e.g., migration speed and sparseness of past coordinates) greatly affects predictor performance. We thus design a context-aware error detection method by employing an ensemble of predictors that have different strengths and weaknesses. | |||
| Opportunistic position update protocols for mobile devices | | BIBA | Full-Text | 787-796 | |
| Patrick Baier; Frank Dürr; Kurt Rothermel | |||
| Many location-based applications such as geo-social networks rely on
location services storing mobile object positions. To update positions on
location servers, position update protocols are used. On the one hand, these
protocols decide when an update has to be sent to ensure a certain quality of
position information. On the other hand, they try to minimize the energy
consumption of the mobile device by reducing communication to a minimum.
In this paper, we show how to improve the energy efficiency of different update protocols by taking the energy characteristics of the mobile network interface into account. In particular, we show that the energy consumption can be reduced on average by 70% using an opportunistic update strategy sending position updates together with messages of other applications. We present a Markov model to predict the arrival of messages and an online optimization algorithm calculating an optimized schedule to send position updates. | |||
| An RF doormat for tracking people's room locations | | BIBA | Full-Text | 797-800 | |
| Juhi Ranjan; Yu Yao; Kamin Whitehouse | |||
| Many occupant-oriented smarthome applications such as automated lighting, heating and cooling, and activity recognition need room location information of residents within a building. Surveillance based tracking systems used to track people in commercial buildings, are privacy invasive in homes. In this paper, we present the RF Doormat -- a RF threshold system that can accurately track people's room locations by monitoring their movement through the doorways in the home. We also present a set of guidelines and a visualization to easily and rapidly setup the RF-Doormat system on any doorway. To evaluate our system, we perform 580 doorway crossings across 11 different doorways in a home. Results indicate that our system can detect doorway crossings made by people with an average accuracy of 98%. To our knowledge, the RF Doormat is the first highly accurate room location tracking system that can be used for long time periods without the need for privacy invasive cameras. | |||
| UniPad: orchestrating collaborative activities through shared tablets and an integrated wall display | | BIBA | Full-Text | 801-810 | |
| Stefan Kreitmayer; Yvonne Rogers; Robin Laney; Stephen Peake | |||
| UniPad is a face-to-face, digital simulation for use in classroom settings that runs on shared tablets and a wall display. The goal is to encourage students to talk, collaborate and make decisions together in real-time, by switching between working on shared 'small group' devices and a 'whole classroom' public display -- instead of working by themselves using their own device. It is intended to improve peer discussion and teacher involvement by focusing and constraining shared attention at different stages of an activity. The domain for this study is finance management. The system was designed using an iterative, participatory design method with expert finance educators and then trialed using an in-the-wild study at a school. The findings show how the set-up helped in facilitating verbal participation in the classroom. We discuss how lightweight, multi-device shared technology systems, such as UniPad, can be designed and used for a range of classroom activities. | |||
| Embracing calibration in body sensing: using self-tweaking to enhance ownership and performance | | BIBA | Full-Text | 811-820 | |
| Rose Johnson; Nadia Bianchi-Berthouze; Yvonne Rogers; Janet van der Linden | |||
| Calibration is a necessary step in many sensor-based ubicomp applications to prepare a system for operation. Particularly when dealing with sensors for movement-based interaction calibration is required to individualize the system to the person's body. However, calibration is often viewed as a tedious necessity of a purely technical nature. In this paper we argue that calibration can be used as a valuable and informative step for users molding a technology for their own use. We explain this through two case studies that use body sensing technologies to teach physical skills. Our studies show that calibration can be used by teachers and pupils to set goals. We argue that demystifying calibration and designing to expose the intentions of the technology and its functioning can be beneficial for users, allowing them to shape technology to be in tune with their bodies rather than changing their body to fit the technology. | |||
| AcrySense: interactive carved acrylic board | | BIBA | Full-Text | 1-4 | |
| Marina Mikubo; Koji Tsukada; Itiro Siio | |||
| The carved acrylic boards have become popular along with the diffusion of carving machines (e.g., laser cutters). When a carved acrylic board is illuminated from its side, the carved patterns emerged beautifully. We propose an interactive technique, "AcrySense", which can add input functions to a carved acrylic board in a simple and inexpensive configuration. The AcrySense mainly consists of LEDs, Photo Transistors and a microcomputer attached under a carved acrylic board. This paper describes the concept and implementation of the system. | |||
| Supporting interaction in public space with electrical muscle stimulation | | BIBA | Full-Text | 5-8 | |
| Max Pfeiffer; Stefan Schneegaß; Florian Alt | |||
| As displays in public space are augmented with sensors, such as the Kinect, they enable passersby to interact with the content on the screen. As of today, feedback on the user action in such environments is usually limited to the visual channel. However, we believe that more immediate and intense forms, in particular haptic feedback, do not only increase the user experience, but may also have a strong impact on user attention and memorization of the content encountered during the interaction. Haptic feedback can today be achieved through vibration on the mobile phone, which is strongly dependent on the location of the device. We envision that fabrics, such as underwear, can in the future be equipped with electrical muscle stimulation, thus providing a more natural and direct way of haptic feedback. In this demo we aim to showcase the potential of applying electrical muscle stimulation as direct haptic feedback during interaction in public spaces in the context of a Kinect-based game for public displays. | |||
| SVD-based hierarchical data gathering for environmental monitoring | | BIBA | Full-Text | 9-12 | |
| Yasue Kishino; Yasushi Sakurai; Yutaka Yanagisawa; Takayuki Suyama; Futoshi Naya | |||
| We introduce a new data compression method for efficient data gathering in hierarchical sensor networks. Our proposed method compresses sensor data sequences by decomposing them into local patterns and weight variables using Singular Value Decomposition (SVD). Our proposed method can achieve efficient data gathering for environmental monitoring. | |||
| Browsing reality: dynamic contextualization in human scale smart spaces | | BIBA | Full-Text | 13-16 | |
| Zulqarnain Rashid; Kamruddin Nur; Anna Carreras; Rafael Pous | |||
| Augmented Reality (AR) systems can provide a method for browsing information that is situated in the real-world. We have developed a system that enable the user to browse the objects in the real-world with the help of AR. Our system is an AR application that incorporates information obtained by a Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) system. Our application runs on a smartphone or a tablet and its target space is a shelf. By aiming a mobile phone or tablet camera at a collection of items present on a shelf, a user can browse and interact with the items through the smartphone or tablet. The shelf is termed as smart shelf and it is equipped with the RFID system that makes it a smart space. All the items present on a shelf are RFID-tagged, so they can be inventoried and their locations are calculated with the help of the RFID system. The project is focused on enhancing and enriching the user experience in browsing physical reality. | |||
| OpenLight: a concept of urban lighting to make urbanites aware of each other | | BIBA | Full-Text | 17-20 | |
| Noriyuki Fujimura; Masa Inakage; Hideki Sunahara; Satoru Tokuhisa; Atsuro Ueki; Masato Yamanouchi | |||
| hough there are many examples of attempts to create interactive lighting installations in urban public space, its meaning for urbanites has not been fully explored and defined. What could interactive lighting contribute to urban public space? Using the concept of Third Place, this research focuses on the social potential of urban public space using the concepts of, especially the role of space in connecting people and fostering social capital. Our hypothesis is that interactive urban lighting can assist this role of urban public space. Openlight is a concept of networked interactive lighting that provides urbanites with open access to penetrate psychological barriers between individuals and groups in urban public space. Hence the interaction would provide more possibilities for urbanites becoming more aware of and getting to know each other. For this first attempt, we have created a scaled prototype for a Café/Restaurant setting. | |||
| Efficient in-pocket detection with mobile phones | | BIBA | Full-Text | 31-34 | |
| Jun Yang; Emmanuel Munguia-Tapia; Simon Gibbs | |||
| In this demonstration paper, we show a novel approach to detect the common placements of a mobile phone, such as "in pocket", "in bag" or "out of pocket or bag", from embedded proximity (IR) and light sensors. We use sensor data fusion and pattern recognition to extract distinct features from sensor signals and classify the boundaries among these three phone placement contexts. The detection results are demonstrated on a Samsung Tizen mobile phone. | |||
| Lab of things: a platform for conducting studies with connected devices in multiple homes | | BIBA | Full-Text | 35-38 | |
| A. J. Bernheim Brush; Evgeni Filippov; Danny Huang; Jaeyeon Jung; Ratul Mahajan; Frank Martinez; Khurshed Mazhar; Amar Phanishayee; Arjmand Samuel; James Scott; Rayman Preet Singh | |||
| Researchers who develop new home technologies using connected devices often want to conduct large-scale field studies in homes to evaluate their technology, but conducting such studies today is extremely challenging. Inspired by the success of PlanetLab, which enabled development and evaluation of global network services, we are developing a shared infrastructure for home environments, called Lab of Things. Our goal is to substantially lower the barrier to developing and evaluating new technologies for the home environment. | |||
| Portable CAVE using a mobile projector | | BIBA | Full-Text | 39-42 | |
| Olli Koskenranta; Ashley Colley; Jonna Häkkilä | |||
| Virtual environments have traditionally been accessed either with conventional 2D displays, or with complex equipment such as wearable displays or CAVEs. In this demo, we show how a projector phone can be utilized to create an ad-hoc, low-fidelity immersive environment. The user holding a projector phone stands in the middle of a virtual sphere, or cube, that is revealed by the projection which can be pointed in any direction. | |||
| Demo abstract: saving energy in smart commercial buildings through social gaming | | BIBA | Full-Text | 43-46 | |
| Shijia Pan; Yulai Shen; Zheng Sun; Priya Mahajan; Lin Zhang; Pei Zhang | |||
| Energy consumption in commercial buildings is tremendous, resulting in significant monetary cost and waste of natural resources. Designing a low-cost system that serves the goal of saving energy while not forcing people to compromise their personal comfort is important for future smart commercial buildings. Proactive energy saving actions from users in the buildings are the key to achieving this goal. In this paper, we present Mahalo, an energy saving system, which leverages users through social gaming. By incentivizing energy saving actions from end users with a sensing-based feedback control system, the system reduces installation needs and improves understanding of the users preferences. | |||
| Bridging the last gap: LedTX -- optical data transmission of sensor data for web-services | | BIBA | Full-Text | 47-50 | |
| Philipp M. Scholl; Nagihan Kücükyildiz; Kristof Van Laerhoven | |||
| Data transmission from small-scale data loggers such as human activity recognition sensors is an inherent system's design challenge. Interfaces based on USB or Bluetooth still require platform-dependent code on the retrieval computer system, and therefore require a large maintenance effort. In this paper, we present LedTX, a system that is able to transmit wirelessly through LEDs and the camera included in most user's hardware. This system runs completely in modern browsers and presents a uni-directional, platform-independent communication channel. We illustrate this system on the UbiLighter, an instrumented lighter that tracks ones smoking behaviour. | |||
| Control and scheduling interface for public displays | | BIBA | Full-Text | 51-54 | |
| Ivan Elhart; Nemanja Memarovic; Marc Langheinrich; Elisa Rubegni | |||
| Social media platforms such as Flicker, Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook have opened up new possibilities for providing content on large public displays. Integrating interactive elements in a public display, such as (virtual) Keyboards and Webcams, can additionally stimulate in-situ content production. Both social media content and such in-situ content are cheap to produce, always fresh, and potentially community sourced, thus increasing relevance for passersby. However, not all social media applications and content entries may be appropriate in a particular display setting and showing user contributed content on public displays requires new forms of content control and scheduling. In this demo we show: 1) a control interface for display owners to manage the overall behavior of their displays, and 2) post-moderation mechanisms for controlling and removing potentially inappropriate user contributed content from public displays. The control interface and moderation mechanisms are designed for a university environment and were inspired by two short pilot test deployments and a focus group with the university officials. | |||
| Social networked displays: integrating networked public displays with social media | | BIBA | Full-Text | 55-58 | |
| Nemanja Memarovic; Ivan Elhart; Andrea Michelotti; Elisa Rubegni; Marc Langheinrich | |||
| With significant price drops of large LCD panels public displays are "painting" the urban landscape. Connected over the Internet they constitute a novel communication medium -- a network of open pubic displays. One of the challenges with such a novel communication medium is integrating it with existing user communicative ecology -- current information and communication technologies that are already well established and highly used by the general population, e.g., Facebook and Instagram. As one of the most popular activities on these networks is photo sharing a possible solution for integrating networked public displays could be in allowing users to use it as both input and output device for images, i.e., allowing them to a) post situated snapshots onto Facebook through an on-display camera and b) show images on the screens taken through Instagram. In order to replicate what is happening with the images online comments and likes posted about images are also shown on the screen. In this demo we show two applications: 1) Moment Machine -- a public display application that allows taking situated snapshots through on-display camera and posting them to Facebook; and 2) Moments Gallery -- a public display application that shows images, comments, and likes for photos submitted through Instagram and Facebook. | |||
| Resonant magnetic coupling indoor localization system | | BIBA | Full-Text | 59-62 | |
| Gerald Pirkl; Paul Lukowicz | |||
| Building on previous work that introduced a novel indoor positioning concept based on magnetic resonant coupling we describe an improved system to be shown during the UBICOMP 2013 demo session. We improved the magnetic field model, implemented a particle filter for position estimation and a software suite for configuration and calibration of the system. | |||
| Some like it hot: automating an electric kettle using PalCom | | BIBA | Full-Text | 63-66 | |
| Boris Magnusson; Björn A. Johnsson | |||
| In this demo we will show how devices from different vendors, using different protocols, can be combined and made to work together without detailed low-level programming by the user. The small example we have chosen uses a radio-controlled power socket from one vendor and a temperature sensor from another vendor. We use these to create a remotely controlled electric kettle, which keeps the water at the point of boiling, ready to make tea at any time. We also show how we very easy can use a mobile phone for remote control and monitoring of the kettle. It is all built with a simple-to-use graphical user interface offered by the PalCom middleware, and will be modified as part of the demo. | |||
| MoodRhythm: tracking and supporting daily rhythms | | BIBA | Full-Text | 67-70 | |
| Stephen Voida; Mark Matthews; Saeed Abdullah; Mengxi (Chrissie) Xi; Matthew Green; Won Jun Jang; Donald Hu; John Weinrich; Prashama Patil; Mashfiqui Rabbi; Tauhidur Rahman; Geri Gay; Ellen Frank; Tanzeem Choudhury | |||
| Rhythms guide our lives. Our biological clocks tell us when we need to sleep, eat and wake. But our use of technology can interrupt and obstruct these rhythms, making it difficult for our bodies to get what they need to stay healthy and balanced. Our MoodRhythm app helps individuals to live a more naturally rhythmic day. The key goals of MoodRhythm are to use patients' smartphones to actively and passively track daily rhythms and to provide affective feedback that can help patients to maintain a regular daily rhythm, while feeding this clinically valuable information back to their physicians. | |||
| Sensing fork and persuasive game for improving eating behavior | | BIBA | Full-Text | 71-74 | |
| Azusa Kadomura; Cheng-Yuan Li; Yen-Chang Chen; Hao-Hua Chu; Koji Tsukada; Itiro Siio | |||
| We present a fork-type sensing device called the Sensing Fork that detects the eating behavior of children (food choice and eating actions), and a smartphone game to address children's eating problems based on their eating behavior. This paper describes the design and implementation of the Sensing Fork prototype and a play-based eating game called Hungry Panda 2, which works with the Sensing Fork. This game focuses on motivating children to eat all kinds of food on their table. | |||
| P.I.A.N.O.: enhancing instrument learning via interactive projected augmentation | | BIBA | Full-Text | 75-78 | |
| Matthias Weing; Amrei Röhlig; Katja Rogers; Jan Gugenheimer; Florian Schaub; Bastian Könings; Enrico Rukzio; Michael Weber | |||
| P.I.A.N.O. aims to support learning to play piano with a steep learning curve. In order to achieve this, traditional, hard-to-learn music notation is substituted for an alternative representation of a composition, which is projected directly onto the piano. Furthermore, we propose three different learning modes which support the natural learning process, incorporate live feedback and performance evaluation, as well as the augmentation of the system with aspects of gamification to achieve early experiences of success and prolonged motivation. | |||
| Local area artworks: collaborative art interpretation on-site | | BIBA | Full-Text | 79-82 | |
| Anna Maria Polli; Matthias Korn; Clemens Nylandsted Klokmose | |||
| In this paper we present Local Area Artworks, a system enabling collaborative art interpretation on-site deployed during an exhibition in a local art gallery. Through the system, we explore ways to re-connect people to the local place by making use of their personal mobile devices as interfaces to the shared physical space. We do this by re-emphasizing the local characteristics of wireless networks over the global connectivity to the Internet. With a collaborative writing system in a semi-public place, we encourage local art discussions and provide a platform for the public to actively participate in interpretations of individual artworks. Our preliminary findings suggest that people were (to our surprise) not questioning the inner workings of our system. Through engaging with the system, individuals felt being part of the exhibition. However, no coherent piece of text emerged during the runtime of the exhibition. | |||
| Prifi beacons: piggybacking privacy implications on wifi beacons | | BIBA | Full-Text | 83-86 | |
| Bastian Könings; Florian Schaub; Michael Weber | |||
| Making users aware of privacy implications in ubiquitous computing is a critical challenge to support user acceptance and trust. However, the invisible and embedded nature of UbiComp systems prevents users from naturally perceiving active sensors or even the presence of systems. Furthermore, autonomous interventions of systems in the user's environments or undesired interactions with the user may be disturbing and could violate a user's privacy expectations. We propose PriFi beacons to support users in perceiving ongoing observations and potential disturbances from systems in the user's current environment. Privacy awareness information is piggybacked on WiFi beacons by leveraging their information elements. The information is extracted by an Android-based privacy client and presented to the user in a privacy awareness interface. | |||
| ConteXinger: a context-aware song generator | | BIBA | Full-Text | 87-90 | |
| Ayano Nishimura; Itiro Siio | |||
| Daily work such as household chores are generally boring and monotonous and tend to be thought of as routine work. Work songs have been written and sung by workers to reduce their labor load. In addition, text-to-song synthesizer software such as Yamaha's VOCALOID is commonly used by a wide variety of computer music creators. We developed a real-time music synthesizer called -- conteXinger -- that sings lyrics based on the listener's context, including the use of home appliances (such as a vacuum cleaner, refrigerator, microwave oven, or dish washer), and Internet information (such as SNS messages, Web news, and weather reports). By presenting the synthesized music to a user through a home audio system or headphones, our system entertains users who may be bored from their everyday work routine. | |||
| Giving context to sounds through mediation of physical objects | | BIBA | Full-Text | 91-94 | |
| Shin-ya Sato; Masami Takahashi; Masato Matsuo | |||
| We describe the concept of and approach for combining conceptual information produced by humans and data that convey situations of the real world without any modification or interpretation, which can be thought of as a method for bridging the Web and the real world. We conducted an experiment to validate our concept by making associations between everyday topics or situations and their characteristic sounds. We discuss the preliminary results obtained in the experiment. | |||
| Smartphone bluetooth based social sensing | | BIBA | Full-Text | 95-98 | |
| Zhixian Yan; Jun Yang; Emmanuel Munguia Tapia | |||
| The increasing mobile technology raises a new paradigm of people-centric sensing using today's smartphones. Towards this paradigm, we present "CoSoBlue", a novel framework for Bluetooth based social sensing. In CoSoBlue, we propose novel Bluetooth semantic and statistical features, in addition to count and similarity features, and apply these discriminative features to infer context and compute sociability. We evaluate CoSoBlue on two Bluetooth datasets: (1) the longitudinal MIT friend-and-family dataset with 9+ millions records, and (2) a new 2-month dataset with ground-truth labels collected using our own developed Android app. Our preliminary experiments show CoSoBlue's efficacy on Bluetooth based social and context sensing. | |||
| TaskShadow-W: NFC-triggered migration of web browsing across personal devices | | BIBA | Full-Text | 99-102 | |
| Yuqiong Xu; Zhiqiang Ye; Longbiao Chen; Shijian Li; Gang Pan | |||
| The era of "multiple devices per user" brings a new requirement of cross-device task migration. Web browsing is one of the most frequent activities in daily life, however it still lacks an effective mechanism to support user-friendly migration of web browsing across multiple devices. In this paper, we develop the TaskShadow-W, an NFC-triggered web session migration system, to address this issue. TaskShadow-W provides the functionality of session management to guarantee the continuous experience of web browsing. It supports an NFC-based interaction to activate the migration in a user-friendly way. The system is compatible with most of the existing websites, and does not require dedicated proxy servers or modifying the existing web servers. In addition, it is also easy to learn & use. | |||
| Smartphone-based monitoring system for activities of daily living for elderly people and their relatives etc | | BIBA | Full-Text | 103-106 | |
| Kazushige Ouchi; Miwako Doi | |||
| We developed a smartphone-based monitoring system to allay the anxiety of elderly people and that of their relatives, friends and caregivers by unobtrusively monitoring an elderly person's activities of daily living. A smartphone of the elderly person continuously recognizes indoor-outdoor activities by using only built-in sensors and uploads the activity log to a web server. By accessing the server, relatives etc. at remote locations can browse the log to make sure the elderly person is safe and sound. We conducted an evaluation experiment and confirmed that the proposed system had practical recognition accuracy and satisfied the users' needs. | |||
| Scaling up ubiquitous robotic systems from home to town (and beyond) | | BIBA | Full-Text | 107-110 | |
| Subhash Sathyakeerthy; Maurizio Di Rocco; Federico Pecora; Alessandro Saffiotti | |||
| Ubiquitous robotics is an emerging paradigm in which smart environments are augmented with robots to provide physical and information added-value services to the citizen. We discuss the challenges and opportunities in extending this paradigm from a single environment (home, factory floor) to the scale of a community of homes, a town, or even a network of towns. To this aim, we introduce the concept of multiple robotic ecologies. This poster is a first step in defining a scalable architecture for a hierarchy of robotic smart-home ecologies, and a framework to provide autonomous services in it. | |||
| Context-aware frame rate adaption for video chat on smartphones | | BIBA | Full-Text | 111-114 | |
| Xin Qi; Qing Yang; David T. Nguyen; Gang Zhou | |||
| As mobile video traffic is becoming dominant, balancing the mobile video quality and bandwidth usage is a relevant but hard problem. Particularly, in this project, we attempt to reduce the bandwidth usage of video chats through frame rate adaption. The key idea of this project is to save bandwidth through reducing frame rate at the sender and interpolate the 'missing' frames at the receiver for a video chat. Additionally, the sender dynamically adapts the frame rate with respect to inertial sensor readings in order to keep the scene change between consecutive frames small and prevent strong artifacts from the frame interpolation. | |||
| Working-relationship detection from fitbit sensor data | | BIBA | Full-Text | 115-118 | |
| Kota Tsubouchi; Ryoma Kawajiri; Masamichi Shimosaka | |||
| This paper proposes an innovative way to detect working relationships by using only the step tracking data acquired from pedometers like Fitbit. The idea makes the cost of working-relationship detection much lower than that of previous approaches. We can find out if people have a working relationship and spend their daily lives together by making them wear a pedometer. Results of an experiment in Japan showed that this approach is very effective and practical. An organization's profile can be written automatically by analyzing the data. | |||
| Digital interventions for sustainable urban mobility: a pilot study | | BIBA | Full-Text | 119-122 | |
| Silvia Gabrielli; Rosa Maimone | |||
| This paper presents results from a pilot study aimed to explore the design of behavior change interventions for sustainable urban mobility. Eight participants were provided with a mobile app deploying a novel combination of goal-setting, self-monitoring, rewards and sharing features in order to observe, over a month period, relevant changes in their transport choices and habits. The digital intervention produced an increase of sustainable transport choices of 14% and contributed to raise participants' environmental awareness, particularly regarding the consequences of their daily transportation choices. | |||
| Inferring social ties in pervasive networks: an on-campus comparative study | | BIBA | Full-Text | 123-126 | |
| Igor Bilogrevic; Kévin Huguenin; Murtuza Jadliwala; Florent Lopez; Jean-Pierre Hubaux; Philip Ginzboorg; Valtteri Niemi | |||
| WiFi base stations are increasingly deployed in both public spaces and private companies, and the increase in their density poses a significant threat to the privacy of users. Prior studies have shown that it is possible to infer the social ties between users from their (co-)location traces but they lack one important component: the comparison of the inference accuracy between an internal attacker (e.g., a curious application running on the device) and a realistic external eavesdropper (e.g., a network of sniffing stations) in the same field trial. We experimentally show that such an eavesdropper can infer the type of social ties between mobile users better than an internal attacker. | |||
| Systematic evaluation of social behaviour modelling with a single accelerometer | | BIBA | Full-Text | 127-130 | |
| Hayley Hung; Gwenn Englebienne | |||
| We describe our ongoing research on systematically analysing what types of socially related attributes and behaviours can be estimated automatically in highly social and crowded situations. This is a challenging task because obtaining the true labels for social behaviours or attributes in practice is non-trivial. Here, individuals hang a sensing device around their neck that records their acceleration during a social event. We then devise models to estimate their social behaviour or attributes based on these measurements and systematically evaluate the feasibility of such a set-up. Since we only use a single triaxial accelerometer per person, our results are surprisingly accurate and suggest that further socially relevant information could also be extracted. Our systematic evaluations provide a deeper understanding of how to better model socially relevant information in the future. | |||
| Visualization of dimension measurement using a consumer grade tablet camera-audio sensor | | BIBA | Full-Text | 131-134 | |
| Yasuyuki Hayashi; Soh Masuko | |||
| We present a dimension measurement visualization technique using a consumer tablet device. A user is able to control the position and size of a virtual dimension image and confirm the specified dimension on the camera view. The system utilizes speaker and microphone sensor as distance detector to extract information needed for correct sizing of the visualized measurement. Our technique does not require the use of a physical marker or a view of the ground. We implemented a module that could cope with a noisy environment. We also implemented a guide mark module that enables use of the system when multiple objects are presented in the camera view. | |||
| Vasque: a privacy preserving casual communication system based on a circular mirror metaphor | | BIBA | Full-Text | 135-138 | |
| Hitomi Tsujita; Kensaku Kawauchi; Jun Rekimoto | |||
| An always-on video communication system can increase the opportunity for casual communication between remotely connected users, but privacy concerns prohibit the wide usage of such a system. To address this problem, we propose a new system for remote communication, which has wide-angle lens that faces the ceiling, and which allows an always-on connection while protecting the privacy of unintended users and keeping the background scenery naturally out of the line of sight. Furthermore, a circular mirror metaphor allows both local and remote users to participate in the conversation as if they were at the same roundtable. | |||
| Using wearable sensor badges to improve scholastic performance | | BIBA | Full-Text | 139-142 | |
| Jun-ichiro Watanabe; Saki Matsuda; Kazuo Yano | |||
| An experiment using wearable sensor badges showed that there was a strong correlation between students' physical behaviors and their scholastic performance. For example, students whose bodily movements were in harmony with those of their classmates during class and students with more face-to-face interaction during break times had better scholastic performance. These results indicate that it may be possible to improve scholastic performance by changing student behaviors, as measured using wearable sensor badges. | |||
| BlueView: a perception assistant system for the visually impaired | | BIBA | Full-Text | 143-146 | |
| Ling Chen; Ibrar Hussain; Ri Chen; WeiKai Huang; Gencai Chen | |||
| In this paper we present a perception assistant system named BlueView. Aim of the system is to assist visually impaired people in improving their perception of points of interest (POIs) in the nearby surrounding. The system allows users to perceive POIs, and accurately locate them with an audio prompting approach. BlueView contains two components: Viewer device and Beacon point. Viewer device is a Bluetooth-enabled mobile phone. Beacon point is a Bluetooth tag with a speaker. Using a within-subject design, six participants (i.e. blind people) were involved in the experiment with the system. Preliminary results suggest that BlueView effectively assist users in perceiving and locating POIs in both single and multi user scenarios. | |||
| Compressed signal representation for inertial sensor signals | | BIBA | Full-Text | 147-150 | |
| Christoph Amma; Hannes Volk; Tanja Schultz | |||
| We present and evaluate a method to generate a compressed representation of multi-dimensional inertial sensor signals using a piecewise linear approximation. The representation can be computed on small sensor nodes and thus allows for a reduction of the amount of data that needs to be transmitted to the main processing node. On an existing gesture database, we present the compression rate that is reached and evaluate the quality of the representation in terms of the accuracy reached for gesture classification. We compare the results to our baseline system using a simpler approach for data reduction. | |||
| Towards context-oriented programming in wireless sensor networks | | BIBA | Full-Text | 151-154 | |
| Mikhail Afanasov; Luca Mottola; Carlo Ghezzi | |||
| We present our ongoing work towards applying the context-oriented programming (COP) paradigm to wireless sensor networks (WSNs). Context -- as a representation of the environment where the system operates -- plays a key role in WSN applications, which must often adapt their operation depending on environmental conditions. We argue that promoting a notion of context as a first-class citizen in WSN programming facilitates the design and implementation of context-dependent functionality. To this end, we conceive a context-oriented programming model expressly tailored to WSNs, coupled with dedicated language constructs. Unlike the existing literature on COP, we embed the latter within low-level C-like languages that do not rely on resource-intensive features such as dynamic memory management. To make our design concrete, we describe a context-oriented extension of nesC -- a widely used WSN programming language -- and report on a preliminary assessment of our design. | |||
| Activity recognition and nutrition monitoring in every day situations with a textile capacitive neckband | | BIBA | Full-Text | 155-158 | |
| Jingyuan Cheng; Bo Zhou; Kai Kunze; Carl Christian Rheinländer; Sebastian Wille; Norbert Wehn; Jens Weppner; Paul Lukowicz | |||
| We build on previous work [5] that demonstrated, in simple isolated experiments, how head and neck related events (e.g. swallowing, head motion) can be detected using an unobtrusive, textile capacitive sensor integrated in a collar like neckband. We have now developed a 2nd generation that allows long term recording in real life environments in conjunction with a low power Bluetooth enabled smart phone. It allows the system to move from the detection of individual swallows which is too unreliable for practical applications to an analysis of the statistical distribution of swallow frequency. Such an analysis allows the detection of "nutrition events" such as having lunch or breakfast. It also allows us to see the general level of activity and distinguish between just being absolutely quiet (no motion) and sleeping. The neckband can be useful in a variety of applications such as cognitive disease monitoring and elderly care. | |||
| Virtual uniforms: using sound frequencies for grouping individuals | | BIBA | Full-Text | 159-162 | |
| Aleksandar Matic; Alban Maxhuni; Venet Osmani; Oscar Mayora | |||
| In this paper, we present the concept of grouping individuals and detecting their proximity by emitting/receiving inaudible tones using their mobile phones. The inspiration stems from uniforms metaphor (of different colors) that groups subjects based on the roles, occupations or teams. The goal is to get an insight into the social context and social interaction patterns. | |||
| FaceLog: capturing user's everyday face using mobile devices | | BIBA | Full-Text | 163-166 | |
| Chungkuk Yoo; Jaemyung Shin; Inseok Hwang; Junehwa Song | |||
| Lifelogging services are emerging as promising mobile applications, pursuing to build a user's autobiographical memories. To date, initial attempts of lifelogging services have been proposed, capturing what I see, hear, meet, and visit. These empirical and environmental contexts, surrounding contexts, may help a user reminisce about the past. On the other hand, we focus on an important key feature of lifelogging which has been unexplored so far, i.e., appearance context. The appearance context is about one's facial expression, body image, gaze, posture, gesture, etc. Appearance monitoring in a fine-grained and momentary manner enables total recall of a user, i.e., not only what the user perceives but also how the user is perceived by others. In this poster, we propose FaceLog, a face logging service which automatically and opportunistically captures user's everyday face. | |||
| Prophet: what app you wish to use next | | BIBA | Full-Text | 167-170 | |
| Xun Zou; Wangsheng Zhang; Shijian Li; Gang Pan | |||
| A variety of applications (app) installed on smart phones do greatly enrich our lives, but make it more difficult to organize our screens and folders. Predicting apps that will be in use next can benefit users a lot. In this poster, we propose some light-weighted Bayesian methods to predict the next app based on the app usage history. The evaluation on Mobile Data Challenge (MDC) dataset gives very encouraging results. In addition, we suggest a natural way to integrate the app prediction features to the user interface. Users would find it convenient to access the predicted apps with simple touches. | |||
| MPower: gain back your android battery life! | | BIBA | Full-Text | 171-174 | |
| Matteo Ferroni; Andrea Cazzola; Domenico Matteo; Alessandro Antonio Nacci; Donatella Sciuto; Marco Domenico Santambrogio | |||
| Nowadays, mobile devices are becoming more flexible and rich in functionalities. As already presented in [6] those devices are highly influenced by constraints, mainly regarding power management. In fact, mobile batteries are limited in time and there are no efficient methods able to manage power consumption. Even knowing the device Time To Live (TTL) is currently left to the user experience. In this paper, we presented MPower, a system able to predict the mobile device TTL, providing also the user with suggestions on the optimal device configuration w.r.t. the desired TTL. This allows the user to manage the available power resources, according to his/her needs, avoiding power wasting. | |||
| Gesture interaction for wall-sized touchscreen display | | BIBA | Full-Text | 175-178 | |
| Yan Zhai; Guoying Zhao; Toni Alatalo; Janne Heikkilä; Timo Ojala; Xinyuan Huang | |||
| In order to improve the user experience in a large touchscreen, this research introduces gesture interaction into wall-sized touchscreen. According to the distance between user and display, we create two interaction modes for touch and body gesture respectively. Challenges encountered and prospects for further improvement are also investigated. | |||
| Antonius: a mobile search engine for the physical world | | BIBA | Full-Text | 179-182 | |
| Markus Funk; Albrecht Schmidt; Lars Erik Holmquist | |||
| We introduce Antonius, a wearable system that is able to detect real-world objects based on their visual appearance. Users can search for objects and be directed to their current location on a 3D map. Our formative evaluation indicates that 3D representation is preferred to 2D maps to show an object's location, and that both stationary and mobile systems would be beneficial depending on the scenario. | |||
| Inch-scale interactive displays for social object annotation | | BIBA | Full-Text | 183-186 | |
| Marcus Winter | |||
| This paper offers an HCI perspective on ubiquitous annotation with a focus on social object annotation. It suggests that user experience issues with static-display visual markers and radio frequency tags are due to a lack of up-to-date information about the related object or service. To provide that information it proposes small situated displays that can encourage engagement and support interaction with dynamic user-generated content services. The paper describes a platform for research into small pervasive displays in the context of social object annotation and briefly discusses the relevance of the research for the wider field. | |||
| Numerical modeling of image discriminability for home storage and organization system on a smart device | | BIBA | Full-Text | 187-190 | |
| Rui Fukui; Keisuke Maeda; Masahiko Watanabe; Masamichi Shimosaka; Tomomasa Sato | |||
| In Home storage and organization system on a smart device, thumbnail pictures (Tag Image) of daily-use objects are often used. Discriminability of Tag Image is important to realize superior usability. In this paper, we have tried to construct a numerical model of Tag Image's discriminability. The proposed model is based on simple linear regression from popular image features and their statistics. In addition, web-based data input system has also been developed to collect training data efficiently. Consequently, the input system has acquired a substantial number of data and a numerical model has been constructed. The constructed model has substantially good but not perfect performance. | |||
| Designing generation Y interaction by eliciting interaction qualities | | BIBA | Full-Text | 191-194 | |
| Wei Liu; Pieter Jan Stappers; Gert Pasman; Jenneke Taal-Fokker | |||
| With more and more products becoming digital, mobile and networked, paying attention to the qualities of interactions with these products should have is also getting more relevant. While interaction qualities have been addressed in a number of scientific studies, little attention is being paid to their implementation into a real life, everyday context. This paper describes the development of a novel office phone, YPhone, which demonstrates the application of a specific set of interaction qualities into the context of office work. | |||
| Constructing trip routes with user preference from location check-in data | | BIBA | Full-Text | 195-198 | |
| Hsun-Ping Hsieh; Cheng-Te Li | |||
| This paper presents a novel trip route construction using location check-in data. Given a set of preference lists of locations from users, we aim to coordinate their preferred locations to visit and construct a route which not only satisfying user preferences as many as possible, but also being popular and reasonable. We formulate such preferred route construction as an optimization problem. We solve it efficiently and effectively by devising some greedy methods. Experiments on Gowalla large-scale check-in data show the promising effectiveness and efficiency of our methods. | |||
| An exploration with online complex activity recognition using cellphone accelerometer | | BIBA | Full-Text | 199-202 | |
| Zhixian Yan; Dipanjan Chakraborty; Sumit Mittal; Archan Misra; Karl Aberer | |||
| We investigate the problem of online detection of complex activities (such as cooking, lunch, work at desk), i.e., recognizing them while the activities are being performed using parts of the sensor data. In contrast to prior work, where complex activity recognition is performed offline with the observation of the activity available for its entire duration and utilizing deeply-instrumented environments, we focus on online activity detection using only accelerometer data from a single body-worn smartphone device. We present window based algorithms for online detection that effectively perform different tradeoffs between classification accuracy and detection latency. We present results of our exploration using a longitudinally-extensive and clearly-annotated cellphone accelerometer data trace that captures the true-life complex activity behavior of five subjects. | |||
| SpiroVest: an e-textile-based wearable spirometer with posture change adaptability | | BIBA | Full-Text | 203-206 | |
| Yu Enokibori; Yoshu Ito; Akihisa Suzuki; Hirotaka Mizuno; Yuuki Shimakami; Tsutomu Kawabe; Kenji Mase | |||
| Daily continuous spirometry is expected to detect lung disease initial symptoms that occur in daily contexts. Current medical spirometers are insufficient for such usage because they force uncomfortable conditions for users, such as pinching their noses with a clip and holding a mouthpiece in their mouths. To solve this issue, we propose an e-textile-based wearable spirometer called SpiroVest that estimates lung behavior from torso-girth movements. It does not require any uncomfortable conditions that interfere with daily activity. In addition, our wearable spirometer is able to estimate accurate respiratory volume against variety of postures by a simple and posture-independent error reduction mechanism. | |||
| E-textile pressure sensor based on conductive fiber and its structure | | BIBA | Full-Text | 207-210 | |
| Yu Enokibori; Akihisa Suzuki; Hirotaka Mizuno; Yuuki Shimakami; Kenji Mase | |||
| This paper proposes a novel e-textile-based pressure sensor. Textile is a common material in our life, used in such items as sheets, seats, and clothing. If these items are equipped with sensor functions, they can invisibly assist humans without significant lifestyle changes. Our sensor is suitable for mass production and durable in daily hard use cases. The sensor is woven with common weaving machines with a special manner and its material is a common low-cost conductive fiber that does not use special and costly materials, such as optical fiber. The sensor mechanism is supported by the textile structure; thus our sensor has durability for frictional force and scratch occurring sometime in daily context. In this paper, we also introduce two example usages of our textile sensor: a bed-size body pressure sensor for anti-pressure-ulcer treatment and a wearable foot-pressure sensor for walk and skill analyses. | |||
| Optical bow position, speed and contact point detection | | BIBA | Full-Text | 211-214 | |
| Tobias Grosshauser; Gerhard Troester | |||
| Sensor technologies for musical instruments enable musicians to capture playing parameters while playing and augment their instruments for enhanced musical expression. A further step into this direction is the following optical, contact free bowing sensing technique for string instruments. In string instrument playing, the combination of bowing speed, position, bow pressure and bow to string contact point and angle are the basic factors of the right hand sound production. To measure these parameters, we developed an optical, contactless sensor system to complete existing pressure measurement systems. It consists of emitters, infrared (IR) or colored light emitting diodes (LEDs) on the bow and IR or color receivers on the violin. The precision of the measurement data obtained with this setup is sufficient to investigate the main parameters of bowing and sound production. | |||
| Towards a micro-blog platform for sensing and easing adolescent psychological pressures | | BIBA | Full-Text | 215-218 | |
| Yuanyuan Xue; Qi Li; Ling Feng; Gari D. Clifford; David A. Clifton | |||
| Adolescent mental health cannot be ignored, and psychological pressure is one of the prominent problems of current teenagers. Micro-blog, as the most important information exchange and broadcast tool in the current society, is becoming an important channel for teenagers' information acquisition, inter-interaction, self-expression, emotion release due to its unique equality, freedom, fragmentation, individuality characteristics. This poster envisions a micro-blog platform, aiming to (1) sense psychological pressures through teenagers' tweets, and (2) assist teenagers to release their stress through micro-blog. A method for timely detecting psychological pressures from teenagers' tweets is particularly described. Our preliminary experimental results on real data demonstrate the validity of the approach. We also discuss ways to assist teenagers to release their pressures through micro-blog at the end of the poster. | |||
| Applying mobile and internet of things technologies in managing parking spaces for people with disabilities | | BIBA | Full-Text | 219-222 | |
| Lambros Lambrinos; Aristotelis Dosis | |||
| Parking in public areas is one of the major problems faced in modern urban environments. This is more so the case for citizens with disabilities who have a limited number of spaces allocated for their exclusive use which are often not enough to meet demand and are sometimes illegitimately occupied. A smart city system that combines mobile and machine-to-machine communications has been designed aiming to alleviate the above issue. The system uses sensors to acquire disabled parking spot availability information which is disseminated to registered users in real time. Utilising such information, users can drive directly towards spots currently available or even reserve one of them. Upon arrival, legitimate users are able to verify themselves through a simple text message, a special device or a smart phone application. User verification enables more efficient monitoring of these precious parking spots. | |||
| PriCal: dynamic privacy adaptation of collaborative calendar displays | | BIBA | Full-Text | 223-226 | |
| Florian Schaub; Peter Lang; Bastian Könings; Michael Weber | |||
| Office wall calendars often contain only entries considered public, which reduces their utility for scheduling meetings or gaining an overview of one's schedule. PriCal is a collaborative calendar display that dynamically adapts to present persons and their privacy preferences. We outline our current prototype, consisting of a calendar agent for display adaptation, a mobile app for managing individual calendars and privacy settings, and a system for detecting present persons and identifying registered users. | |||
| MatkaHupi: a persuasive mobile application for sustainable mobility | | BIBA | Full-Text | 227-230 | |
| Antti Jylhä; Petteri Nurmi; Miika Sirén; Samuli Hemminki; Giulio Jacucci | |||
| With the advances in smartphone technologies, sustainable mobility has become an active research topic in the field of ubiquitous computing. We present a persuasive mobile application that automatically tracks the transportation modes and CO2 emissions of the trips of the user and utilizes this information to present a set of actionable mobility challenges to the user. A longitudinal pilot experiment with the system showed that subjects perceived the concept of challenges as positive, with constructive findings to inform further development of the application especially related to personalized challenges. | |||
| Annotate me: supporting active reading using real-time document image retrieval on mobile devices | | BIBA | Full-Text | 231-234 | |
| Kai Kunze; Katsuma Tanaka; Masakazu Iwamura; Koichi Kise | |||
| We present a novel system to support active reading. Utilizing a mobile device the user can add digital annotations to physical documents like papers and posters. We present first prototype implementations of the mobile phone interface with and without server support. Server support let's you share annotations with your friends. We discuss findings from an initial user evaluation and present an improved prototype. We believe annotating paper using document image retrieval is a promising technology for active reading support. | |||
| A task-management system using future prediction based on personal lifelogs and plans | | BIBA | Full-Text | 235-238 | |
| Toshiki Takeuchi; Kyohei Suwa; Hiroto Tamura; Takuji Narumi; Tomohiro Tanikawa; Michitaka Hirose | |||
| People who are busy generally have to manage a great variety of tasks. But sometimes, they fall behind in minor tasks and gradually, even without them noticing, a huge backlog piles up, far beyond the person's capacity to complete them well and on time. We proposed a task-management system that predicts a user's future state on the basis of the user's lifelog and plans, using a simple linear regression model. We implemented the system using a smartphone and estimated its usefulness with a user test. As a result, the users of our system saw their future diaries and tried to alter their current daily activities. | |||
| Device recognition for intuitive interaction with the web of things | | BIBA | Full-Text | 239-242 | |
| Simon Mayer; Markus Schalch; Marian George; Gábor Sörös | |||
| Supporting human users when interacting with smart devices is important to drive the successful adoption of the Internet of Things in people's homes and at their workplaces. In this poster contribution, we present a system that helps users control Web-enabled smart things in their environment. Our approach involves a handheld interaction device that recognizes smart things in its view using state-of-the-art visual object recognition techniques. It then augments the camera feed with appropriate interaction primitives such as knobs or buttons for control, and can also display measured values, for instance, when recognizing a sensor. The interaction primitives are generated from user interface descriptions that are embedded in the Web representations of the smart things. Our prototype implementation achieves frame rates that allow for interactive use of the system by human users, and indeed proved to facilitate the interaction with smart things in a demonstration testbed in our research group. | |||
| Embedded semantic metadata to support device interaction in smart environments | | BIBA | Full-Text | 243-246 | |
| Simon Mayer; Gianin Basler | |||
| Facilitating the interaction of human users and machines with smart devices is important to drive the successful adoption of the Internet of Things in people's homes and at their workplaces. In this poster contribution, we present an approach to support users controlling smart devices in their environment. To do this, we propose to embed semantic metadata in the representations of smart things. By means of this metadata and a semantic reasoning service, our system enables users to specify a desirable state of their smart environment and produces a machine-readable description that details which steps are necessary to reach this state, where each step corresponds to a Web request to a smart device. A client application that could, for instance, run on the user's smartphone, can distill the necessary steps required to reach the user's goal state from this description and execute them to modify the smart environment on behalf of the user. | |||
| Consumer experience modeling and enrichment using RFID | | BIBA | Full-Text | 247-250 | |
| Zeinab Liaghat; Joan Melia-Segui; Rafael Pous; Ramir De Porrata-Doria | |||
| Nowadays, brick and mortar retailers face a strong competition with online commerce. Instant feedback, product comparison or recommendations are relevant advantages of online commerce over traditional physical retailers. Ubiquitous Computing technologies such as Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) can help to bring the benefits of online commerce to brick and mortar stores. We have been using RFID EPC Gen2 to identify and track garments in fitting rooms and point-of-sales in a real store in Barcelona, Spain. In this work we present the initial results of a real-customer model analysis using RFID data. We demonstrate how by analyzing basket and fitting room information we can extract differentiated patterns in the customers behavior. This model is intended to be used as part of an in-store recommender system and stock information. Future work includes improvement of data collection and customer identification. | |||
| Ubiquitous support for midwives to leverage daily activities | | BIBA | Full-Text | 251-254 | |
| Abdullah Al Mahmud; David V. Keyson | |||
| In this paper we present preliminary outcomes concerning the design of a support system for midwives in the Netherlands to carry out daily activities. The purpose of our design is to make the workflow of mid-wives more efficient. Our user studies confirm that the current workflows of midwives to support pregnant women lack efficiency. The most obvious barrier is the lack of an integrated IT system to provide daily care to pregnant women. Based on the findings we propose some solutions that may help midwives to perform their daily tasks more efficiently. | |||
| Supporting blind navigation using depth sensing and sonification | | BIBA | Full-Text | 255-258 | |
| Michael Brock; Per Ola Kristensson | |||
| We present a system designed to help blind people navigate around obstacles. Our system perceives the environment in front of the user using a depth camera (a Microsoft Kinect). The system identifies nearby structures from the depth map and uses sonification to convey obstacle information to the user. The system has undergone a formative evaluation involving eight blind-folded participants and one blind participant. We found that our system can be learned within minutes and that participants can successfully navigate through an obstacle course with few collisions. | |||
| Ti-Photograph: a tele-immersive photograph system for distributed parents and children | | BIBA | Full-Text | 259-262 | |
| Meiyu Huang; Yiqiang Chen; Linglin Yin; Wen Ji | |||
| With the social development, the demand of a natural remote communication platform for distributed families has greatly emerged. This work presents a Tele-Immersive Photograph system (TI-Photograph), which allows children and their remote parents to take pictures together in a virtual space with interactive behaviors. First, we propose a robust video object cutout method to segment the video of the child and the remote parent from their background surroundings. Second, we introduce a user behavioral intention driven video composition method to adaptively merge the segmented videos of the users into a same shared background customized by natural gesture interaction. Then we create an illusion that the child and the parent are immersed in the same environment. Experimental results demonstrate that the visual appearance in a shared interactive environment provides closer and efficient communication between remote family members. | |||
| PDR-based adaptation for user-progress in interactive navigation system | | BIBA | Full-Text | 263-266 | |
| Shun Yoshimi; Takuya Azumi; Nobuhiko Nishio | |||
| Recently, indoor pedestrian navigation systems have attracted attentions of people. We have been developing an interactive pedestrian navigation system and found that the navigation system could not provide enough sense of reassurance for a user according to our preliminary experiment. In this study, we propose a method to improve the user's sense of reassurance by notifying user's level of achievement sensed by their smart phone sensors and conduct the experiment in the Osaka underground city. According to the questionnaire survey that we conducted after the experiment, people who chose affirmative opinions on a sense of reassurance increased by 45% due to the proposed method. | |||
| Inferring social contextual behavior from bluetooth traces | | BIBA | Full-Text | 267-270 | |
| Zhenyu Chen; Yiqiang Chen; Shuangquan Wang; Junfa Liu; Xingyu Gao; Andrew T. Campbell | |||
| Context-aware computing is increasingly paid much attention, especially makes the people's social contextual behavior very crucial for user-centric dynamic behavior inference. At present, extensive work has focused on detecting specific places inferred by static radio signals like GPS, GSM and WiFi, and recognizing mobility modes inferred by embedded sensor components like accelerometer. This paper proposes a distinct feature based classification approach and context restraint based majority vote rule to infer social contextual behavior in dynamic surroundings. Experimental results indicate that our proposed method can achieve high accuracy for inferring social contextual behavior through the real-life Bluetooth traces. | |||
| Visualizing web mash-ups for in-situ vision-based mobile AR applications | | BIBA | Full-Text | 271-274 | |
| Yu You; Ville-Veikko Mattila | |||
| Augmented reality applications are gaining popularity due to increased capabilities of modern mobile devices. Creating AR content however is tedious and traditionally done on desktop environments by professionals, with extensive knowledge and/or even programming skills required. In this demo, we demonstrate a complete mobile approach for creating vision-based AR in both indoor and outdoor environment. Using hyperlinks, Web mashups are built to dynamically augment the physical world by normal users without programing skills. | |||
| Wearable audio-feedback system for gait rehabilitation in subjects with Parkinson's disease | | BIBA | Full-Text | 275-278 | |
| Filippo Casamassima; Alberto Ferrari; Bojan Milosevic; Laura Rocchi; Elisabetta Farella | |||
| Parkinson's disease (PD) is a degenerative neurological disorder, associated with movement impairments. Recent studies have shown that auxiliary cueing in the form of video, audio, or haptic feedback can improve the gait performance in PD patients. We have developed a new platform to support gait rehabilitation in PD patients based on a wearable system able to produce real-time feedback to the user in a comfortable and effective way. Using a set of custom wearable inertial sensors, with advanced on-board processing capabilities, our application employs a smartphone to analyze in real time the patient's gait and to return an appropriate real time audio bio-feedback (ABF) message to the user to correct and improve gait performance. The main advantages of the system are mobility and unobtrusiveness: it can be comfortably worn and carried by the patient with no range restrictions, giving the possibility to monitor and rehabilitate the patient in real-life scenarios, both indoors and outdoors. | |||
| Study of a monopulse system with RFID antennas for applications oriented to retail industry | | BIBA | Full-Text | 279-282 | |
| Raúl Parada; Anna Carreras; Joan Melià-Seguí; Rafael Pous | |||
| Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) allows the identification and location of items using passive electronic labels. However, current RFID techniques do not locate objects precisely. The monopulse system allows to locate objects with higher accuracy using a combination of Radio Frequency (RF) beams. In this work, we present a two-antenna monopulse system implementation using RFID technologies. By combining RF beams we obtained a focused beam. We also investigated the multipath effect in this work. Our results show a monopulse system using RFID technologies with an accuracy of 84%. It can be applied in the retail industry for applications such as fitting rooms, inventory, customers' location and others. | |||
| My reading life: towards utilizing eyetracking on unmodified tablets and phones | | BIBA | Full-Text | 283-286 | |
| Kai Kunze; Shoya Ishimaru; Yuzuko Utsumi; Koichi Kise | |||
| As reading is an integral part of our knowledge lives, we should know more about our reading activities. This paper introduces a reading application for smart phone and tablets that aims at giving user more quantified information about their reading habits. We present our work towards building an open library for eye tracking on unmodified tablets and smart phones to support some of the applications advanced functionality. We implemented already several eye tracking algorithms from previous work, unfortunately all seem not to be robust enough for our application case. We give an overview about our challenges and potential solutions. | |||
| Dungeons & swimmers: designing an interactive exergame for swimming | | BIBA | Full-Text | 287-290 | |
| Haechan Lee; Miri Moon; Taiwoo Park; Inseok Hwang; Uichin Lee; Junehwa Song | |||
| We propose Dungeons & Swimmers, an interactive audio- and motion-based exergame for swimming. As the first of its kind, we explore its design considerations and opportunities stemming from swimming. We gamify the four different stroke types with an auditory feedback. For minimal interference, we develop a single sensor-based wearable prototype detecting the strokes and stroke types in real time. We conduct a pilot deployment to study initial user experiences. | |||
| iFridge: an intelligent fridge for food management based on RFID technology | | BIBA | Full-Text | 291-294 | |
| Lei Xie; Yafeng Yin; Xiang Lu; Bo Sheng; Sanglu Lu | |||
| It is a tedious task to search and locate a specific food from a massive number of foods arbitrarily placed in a fridge. In this paper, we develop iFridge, an intelligent system which allows the user to effectively manage and accurately locate the foods stored inside the fridge. By leveraging the RFID technology, iFridge is able to automatically collect the food information, perceive the user's activities and locate the specified foods. We develop a smart application "cooking recipe recommendation" by sensing the user's daily eating habits. Moreover, by specifying those foods with roughly known locations as anchor nodes, we are able to locate the specified food by using cluster analysis. | |||
| homeBLOX: making home automation usable | | BIBA | Full-Text | 295-298 | |
| Marcel Walch; Michael Rietzler; Julia Greim; Florian Schaub; Björn Wiedersheim; Michael Weber | |||
| Home automation aims to increase convenience of residential living. The homeBLOX system uses a process-driven execution model to enable complex automation tasks with heterogeneous devices, while providing a user interface that abstracts from lower-level complexity. Complex automation tasks are created as sequences consisting of events and actions linked to physical and virtual devices, which are translated into BPEL code for execution. We outline the key concepts, architecture, and prototype of our system. | |||
| EverCopter: continuous and adaptive over-the-air sensing with detachable wired flying objects | | BIBA | Full-Text | 299-302 | |
| Yutaro Kyono; Takuro Yonezawa; Hiroki Nozaki; Masaki Ogawa; Tomotaka Ito; Jin Nakazawa; Kazunori Takashio; Hideyuki Tokuda | |||
| The paper proposes EverCopter, which provides continuous and adaptive over-the-air sensing with detachable wired flying objects. While a major advantage of sensing systems with battery-operated MAVs is a wide sensing coverage, sensing time is limited due to its limited amount of energy. We propose dynamically rechargeable flying objects, called EverCopter. EverCopter achieves both long sensing time and wide sensing coverage by the following two characteristics. First, multiple EverCopters can be tied in a row by power supply cables. Since the root EverCopter in a row is connected to DC power supply on the ground, each EverCopter can fly without battery. This makes their sensing time forever, unless the power supply on the ground fails. Second, the leaf EverCopter can detach itself from the row in order to enjoy wider sensing coverage. An EverCopter, while it is detached, runs with its own battery-supplied energy. When the remaining energy becomes low, it flies back to the row to recharge the battery. | |||
| Point & control -- interaction in smart environments: you only click twice | | BIBA | Full-Text | 303-306 | |
| Matthias Budde; Matthias Berning; Christopher Baumgärtner; Florian Kinn; Timo Kopf; Sven Ochs; Frederik Reiche; Till Riedel; Michael Beigl | |||
| This work presents a system that makes use of the Microsoft Kinect to enable Point&Click interaction for the control of appliances in smart environments. A backend server determines through collision detection which device the user is pointing at and sends the respective control interface to the user's smartphone. Any commands the user issues are then sent back to the server which in turn controls the appliance. New devices can either be registered manually or using markers such as QR codes to identify them and get their position at the same time. The video demonstrates the interaction concept and our technical implementation. | |||
| Reality editor: programming smarter objects | | BIBA | Full-Text | 307-310 | |
| Valentin Heun; James Hobin; Pattie Maes | |||
| The Reality Editor is a system that supports editing the behavior and interfaces of socalled "smarter objects", i.e. objects or devices that have an embedded processor and communication capability. Using augmented reality techniques, the Reality Editor maps graphical elements directly on top of the tangible interfaces found on physical objects, such as push buttons or knobs. The Reality Editor allows flexible reprogramming of the interfaces and behavior of the objects as well as defining relationships between smarter objects in order to easily create new functionalities. This paper describes the different functionalities of the Reality Editor and presents several examples. | |||
| FRAGWRAP: fragrance-encapsulated and projected soap bubble for scent mapping | | BIBA | Full-Text | 311-314 | |
| Yutaro Kyono; Takuro Yonezawa; Hiroki Nozaki; Jin Nakazawa; Hideyuki Tokuda | |||
| This paper proposes FRAGWRAP which maps scent to real objects in real-time. To achieve this purpose, we leverage fragrance-encapsulated soap bubble with projection mapping technique. Since human olfaction is known as combined utilization of his/her eyes and nose, we encapsulate fragrance into bubble soap to stimulate the nose and also project 3D image of the fragrance to the bubble soap in real-time. In this video, we present our first prototype which automatically inserts fragrance into a soap bubble and also projects images to the moving bubble. All system is activated by speech recognition. | |||
| The UbiComp 2013 doctoral school | | BIB | Full-Text | 315-318 | |
| Elaine M. Huang; Timo Ojala | |||
| Evaluating impact of storage on smartphone energy efficiency | | BIBA | Full-Text | 319-324 | |
| David T. Nguyen | |||
| We present an experimental study of how storage techniques impact energy consumption in smartphones. We design and implement a system that tracks I/O activities of smartphones in real-time and dynamically changes storage configuration by matching I/O patterns in order to reduce energy consumption. Our system is evaluated on the 20 most popular applications from Android Market, and our results show that the optimal configurations save from 21% to 52% of battery life. We believe that they highlight a new and interesting direction in which the topic of smartphone energy consumption can be further evaluated and expanded upon. | |||
| Digital naturalism: interspecies performative tool making for embodied science | | BIBA | Full-Text | 325-330 | |
| Andrew Quitmeyer | |||
| Digital Naturalism investigates the role that digital media can play in field Ethology. While digital technology plays an increasingly larger role in the Ethologist's process, its use tends to be limited to the experimentation and analysis stages. My goal is to work with scientists to develop context-dependent, behavioral tools promoting novel interactions between animal, man, and environment. The aim is to empower the early exploratory phases of their research as well as the later representation of their work. I will test a methodology combining analytical tool making and interaction studies with modern ethology. | |||
| Measuring joint movement through garment-integrated wearable sensing | | BIBA | Full-Text | 331-336 | |
| Guido Gioberto | |||
| Garment-Integrated body sensing is an alternative approach to sense body movements in wearable sensing. Textile-integrated sensors have the potential to equip everyday clothes with smart capabilities, making the detection of body movements accessible during normal life activities. The practicality of this solution preserves variables directly related to the wearer's needs such as Comfort, Perceptibility, and Awareness that must be prioritized equally with Accuracy and Precision of the sensor data. The central contribution of this approach is to improve the quality of the measured data while preserving user comfort. | |||
| Towards food waste interventions: an exploratory approach | | BIBA | Full-Text | 337-342 | |
| Eva Ganglbauer | |||
| Sustainability is a significant topic in HCI and often framed in terms of energy consumption or sustainable food consumption. However, the sustainable issue of wasted food by consumers is a design arena yet to receive more attention. To understand how the passage from food into waste occurs in everyday life, and if, how and where technology can intervene, fieldwork in 17 households has been carried out. The fieldwork and its implications afford inspirations and reveal stimuli where and how technology could potentially intervene. Selected stimuli are explored with two technology probes and a community platform to inform design. | |||
| Understanding and augmenting a paper arrangement-based method | | BIBA | Full-Text | 343-348 | |
| Gunnar Harboe | |||
| I investigate the practices of affinity diagramming, a method for qualitative data analysis and idea generation, and the factors that lead HCI researchers and practitioners to usually perform it on paper rather than on digital devices. Based on my findings, I propose that Ubicomp technology can be used to create an implicit interaction system that allows users to preserve their preferred practices, while offering the benefits of a digital system. Initial prototypes have been built; a more complete prototype system and evaluation of the solution remain to be completed. | |||
| Pervasive monitoring to support reflective learning | | BIBA | Full-Text | 349-354 | |
| Lars Müller | |||
| Reflection on daily work practices can support informal learning and continuous improvement of work practices. This dissertation aims at supporting reflection by employing sensors and corresponding data visualizations to make employees ask the right questions about their work. Two tools have been developed and initial studies have been conducted to evaluate the impact of psychophysiological sensors and proximity sensing for employees in the healthcare domain. The main contribution of this work is the connection of reflective learning and wearable sensors with the goal to persuade employees to reflect. The resulting tools will be evaluated in real work settings. | |||
| Practical food journaling | | BIBA | Full-Text | 355-360 | |
| Edison Thomaz | |||
| Logging dietary intake has been shown to be of benefit to individuals and health researchers, but a practical and objective system for food logging remains elusive despite decades of research. My thesis is that emerging wearable devices such as life-logging cameras, the ubiquity of sensors in mobile devices, and new computational techniques such as human computation, provide the foundation for a new class of food journaling systems that are lightweight and practical in everyday settings. In this proposal I describe my research in understanding how to leverage this new landscape of mainstream ubiquitous computing towards automatic and semi-automatic food journaling. | |||
| Supporting self-experimentation of behavior change strategies | | BIBA | Full-Text | 361-366 | |
| Jisoo Lee | |||
| Empowering individuals with tools and support that enables them to explore, test, and invent behavior change strategies and actualizing solutions to their uniquely personal needs, throughout their everyday lives, is likely to lead to more robust, personalized, and effective solutions. This research aims to understand how tools that foster self-experimentation of behavior change strategies for the creation of user-driven solutions can support fulfillment and increased self-control. I am equipping end-users with the capacity to construct sensor-augmented responsive environments by developing, deploying, and evaluating a toolkit that provides integrated hardware and software coupled with motivational support pertaining to self-efficacy. | |||
| Device-free people counting and localization | | BIBA | Full-Text | 367-372 | |
| Chenren Xu | |||
| Device-free passive (DfP) localization has been proposed as an emerging
technique for localizing people, without requiring them to carry any devices.
Potential applications include elder-care, security enforcement, building
occupancy statistics, etc.
We first present PC-DfP, an accurate and efficient RF-based device-free localization solution. PC-DfP adopts a stochastic fingerprinting approach to mitigate the error caused by the multipath and meanwhile minimize the system calibration overhead. Second, we present SCPL, a RF-based device-free people counting and localization technique. SCPL takes the calibration data collected with one person and the map information to accurately count people sequentially and localize them in parallel. Finally we present Crowd++, an unsupervised speaker counting technique through audio inference with smartphones to estimate the number of people in social hotspot places. | |||
| Adaptive security and privacy management for the internet of things (ASPI 2013) | | BIBA | Full-Text | 373-378 | |
| Stefan Poslad; Mohamed Hamdi; Habtamu Abie | |||
| The Internet of Things (IoT) was initially proposed to connect specific
things via the Internet using devices, such as RFID readers, to realise
intelligent identification and management. This vision has since expanded to
include a more diverse range of devices, services and networks to become an
Internet of anything, anywhere, connected, anyhow. Security and privacy
management for the IoT remains a core challenge.
Many IoT devices maybe may have zero or minimal security by design because they are low resource, low power devices, designed to work as closed vertical services. Security threats and risks may be higher because devices are unattended, use local wireless communication that have no or weak encryption making them more susceptible to eavesdropping and because users find security too unusable to setup and operate and hence leave devices relatively unsecure. It may also be less problematic to reproduce and fake data sources, access nodes and data sinks that interact with IoT devices in order to attack devices or the services they access. Devices can be moved between or removed from private, communal, public and hostile physical spaces. There is a higher risk of a loss of privacy for human users and organisations because of an increased ability to eavesdrop, because of wireless networks with soft boundaries, and because embedded environment devices can sense smaller amounts of physical trails with a greater degree of sensitivity and accuracy. A specific focus is on the need for IoT security to adapt. The adaptation has multiple dimensions. We can adapt existing conventional security models to more effectively secure an IoT. We can adapt security pre-planned and unplanned context changes such as different moving around in different physical spaces. IoT systems can be designed to self-adapt. IoT systems need to adapt to the active (re) configuration and maintenance of IoT devices and systems of devices by users and by artificial agents. The proposed workshop intends to bring together researchers and practitioners from relevant fields to present and disseminate the latest on-going research focussing on adapting security, privacy & management for the Internet of Things. It aims to facilitate knowledge transfer and synergy, bridge gaps between different research communities and groups, to lay down foundation for common purposes, and to help identify opportunities and challenges for interested researchers and technology and system developers. | |||
| Atelier of smart garments and accessories | | BIBA | Full-Text | 379-384 | |
| Maurizio Caon; Yong Yue; Giuseppe Andreoni; Elena Mugellini | |||
| Wearable computing represented an important paradigm shift in engineering and computer science. At the present time, wearable computing is undergoing a new paradigm shift: the wearable systems that used to be transportable devices are actually weaving itself into "the fabric of everyday life" (as predicted by Weiser). Indeed, the current trend of wearable computing is integrating the technology directly in the garments without introducing new body-worn systems. Clothes, shoes, eye-glasses, bracelets and watches are becoming smarter, seamlessly embedding more and more powerful computational resources and communication possibilities. The change has already begun and this workshop aims to bring together researchers from the academia and the industry in order to establish a multidisciplinary community interested in discovering and exploring the challenges and opportunities coming from this natural evolution of wearable computing. | |||
| Smart garments -- the issue of usability and aesthetics | | BIBA | Full-Text | 385-392 | |
| Andreas Sonderegger | |||
| In this position paper, important issues to consider for the development of smart garments are addressed. A special emphasis is placed on usability and its evaluation in a user-centered design approach. Different factors influencing the outcomes of usability tests are discussed. The effect of design aesthetics as a very important influencing factor in usability tests is addressed in detail and its potential influence on the outcomes of usability evaluations of smart garments is discussed. The paper concludes with recommendations for the development of usable and enjoyable smart garments. | |||
| Illumee: aesthetic light bracelet as a wearable information display for everyday life | | BIBA | Full-Text | 393-396 | |
| Jutta Fortmann; Heiko Müller; Susanne Boll; Wilko Heuten | |||
| We present our vision of a wearable light display integrated into a piece of jewellery -- an aesthetic bracelet. As a piece of jewellery, the display is discreetly integrated into some accessoire that is worn anyway and therefore integrates excellently into everyday life. The bracelet can be used for various daily reminder tasks like intake of medication. It can also be used to present feedback on a person's health behaviour, e.g. their daily physical activity. We briefly describe our concept and present a number of research questions that need to be investigated. | |||
| State of the art and perspectives on the fabrication of functional contact lenses | | BIBA | Full-Text | 397-404 | |
| Sajina Tinku; Andrea Adami; Leandro Lorenzelli | |||
| Functional multi-purpose contact lenses have recently attracted attention as suitable means to exploit the characteristics of eyes to diagnose diseases and for drug delivery. In this paper, we provide insights into the design and fabrication of specific prototype contact lenses suitable for wearers with dry eye conditions. The main objective is to integrate a combined system, which constitutes a biosensor for hydration monitoring and a saline solution delivery system, embedded on flexible polymer based substrates. We discuss the state of art and current research progress in smart contact lenses and provide initial hints of the proposed solution and identify specific challenges. | |||
| WagTag: a dog collar accessory for monitoring canine activity levels | | BIBA | Full-Text | 405-414 | |
| Gary M. Weiss; Ashwin Nathan; J. B. Kropp; Jeffrey W. Lockhart | |||
| Technological advancements are leading to the emergence of wearable computing devices as a major consumer category. Several companies have developed, or are developing, wearable accessories to monitor human activity. But the health and wellness applications associated with these accessories can also benefit non-humans, and wearable computing accessories with such apps are now emerging for the pet market. In this paper we describe WagTag, an accessory that can be attached to a dog collar to track a dog's activities and the intensity of these activities. The activity information is visually displayed on the device, while more detailed information can be uploaded to a computer via a Bluetooth connection. We describe key design issues and goals associated with the development of this device, especially with respect to aesthetics, durability, and functionality, and also describe WagTag's prototype activity recognition models. | |||
| Wearable accessories for cycling: tracking memories in urban spaces | | BIBA | Full-Text | 415-424 | |
| Assunta Matassa; Amon Rapp; Rossana Simeoni | |||
| The paper presents a wearable system, distributed in the garments and on the bicycle, that enables the user to manage "memories" in order to change the human-environment affective interaction. The goal is to exploit wearable technologies in order to create a new form of interaction with urban spaces. | |||
| Designing a desirable smart bracelet for older adults | | BIBA | Full-Text | 425-434 | |
| Leonardo Angelini; Maurizio Caon; Stefano Carrino; Luc Bergeron; Nathalie Nyffeler; Mélanie Jean-Mairet; Elena Mugellini | |||
| In this paper, we present the design process of a smart bracelet that aims at enhancing the life of elderly people. The bracelet acts as a personal assistant during the user's everyday life, monitoring the health status and alerting him or her about abnormal conditions, reminding medications and facilitating the everyday life in many outdoor and indoor activities. | |||
| 2nd workshop on recent advances in behavior prediction and pro-active pervasive computing | | BIBA | Full-Text | 435-440 | |
| Klaus David; Bernd Niklas Klein; Sian Lun Lau; Stephan Sigg; Brian Ziebart | |||
| The 2nd Workshop on recent advances in behavior prediction and pro-active pervasive computing focuses on contributions that target recent challenges of context prediction and on applications of context prediction. The main challenges are a lack of benchmarks and common data sets, as well as a lack of development frameworks and that the main focus of context prediction still remains location prediction. Since context prediction is a key requirement to enable proactive applications, the workshop aims to intensify the discussion about the state and direction of context prediction research and to facilitate collaboration among research groups focusing on context prediction. | |||
| Collective suffix tree-based models for location prediction | | BIBA | Full-Text | 441-450 | |
| Muawya Habib Sarnoub Eldaw; Mark Levene; George Roussos | |||
| Models developed for the prediction of location, where a specific individual will be present at a future time, are typically implemented using a one-model-per-user approach which cannot be employed for inferring collective or social behaviours involving other individuals. In this paper, we propose an alternative that allows for inference though a collaborative mechanism which does not require the profiling of individual users. This alternative utilises a suffix tree as its core underlying data structure, where predictions are computed over an aggregate record of behaviours of all users. We evaluate the performance of our model on the Nokia Mobile Data Collection Campaign data set and find that the collective approach performs well compared to individual user models. We also find that the commonly used Hit and Miss score on its own does not provide sufficient indication of prediction accuracy, and that employing additional metrics using the mean error may be preferable. | |||
| Learning and user adaptation in location forecasting | | BIBA | Full-Text | 461-470 | |
| Jorge Alvarez-Lozano; J. Antonio García-Macías; Edgar Chávez | |||
| User location forecasting is central to establish context in proactive
mobile applications. Knowing where the user will be at a given time enables
standby action triggers ahead of time. User location exhibits periodic patterns
grouped by time of day, day of the week, month of the year, etc. This
characteristic has been exploited to model user location as a Markov process
with great accuracy. Using yearly data from public sources it was possible to
predict user location in a time frame of 8 hours with accuracy of up to 69%.
One assumption of the above modeling is that user location is stationary in time. However, it is more natural to assume user location patterns may vary over time. For example one user may change job, or the relationship status, and avoid certain places frecuented in the past. In this paper we propose a learning mechanism adapting user location forecasting to behavior changes over time. Our model is able to predict for up to 94 weeks with 43% of accuracy. | |||
| On the stability of context prediction | | BIBA | Full-Text | 471-480 | |
| Immanuel König; Bernd Niklas Klein; Klaus David | |||
| Context prediction is a key technique for proactive environments adapting to user's needs. To prevent wrong predictions is one key factor to achieve a high user acceptance. A wrong prediction could be caused by faulty or disturbed sensor data. With the triumph of the Smartphone, a wide range of context sources has become ubiquitous. Often, context prediction approaches today do not utilize these multiple context sources to cope with faulty or disturbed sensor data. We propose and evaluate an approach that uses multiple context sources and exploits the correlations between context sources of one user to get a more fault tolerant prediction. | |||
| Wait time prediction: how to avoid waiting in lines? | | BIBA | Full-Text | 481-490 | |
| Ye Zhang; Le T. Nguyen; Joy Zhang | |||
| One of the challenges of organizations providing services to the public is the effective resource allocation. Many service providers such as hospitals, city halls or department of motor vehicles suffer from a service demand, which is unevenly distributed over the day. In this work, we evaluate techniques for predicting the service demand. We use the wait time dataset collected from the websites of California Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV). We extract patterns of the service demand in form of wait time during each hour of a day and each day of a week. This information is used to train multiple machine learning models in order to predict the future wait time at DMV offices. | |||
| Synthesizing daily life logs through gaming and simulation | | BIBA | Full-Text | 451-460 | |
| Mario Caruso; Çagri Ilban; Francesco Leotta; Massimo Mecella; Stavros Vassos | |||
| In the recent years there has been a growing interest in the design and implementation of smart homes, and smart buildings in general. The evaluation of approaches in this area typically requires massive datasets of measurements from deployed sensors in real prototypes. While a few datasets obtained by real smart homes are freely available, they are not sufficient for comparing different approaches and techniques in a variety of configurations. In this work, we propose a smart home dataset generation strategy based on a simulated environment populated with virtual autonomous agents, sensors and devices which allow to customize and reproduce a smart space using a series of useful parameters. The simulation is based on declarative process models for modeling habits performed by agents, an action theory for realizing low-level atomic actions, and a 3D virtual execution environment. We show how different configurations generate a variety of sensory logs that can be used as input to a state-of-the-art activity recognition technique in order to evaluate its performance under parametrized scenarios, as well as provide guidelines for actually building real smart homes. | |||
| CoSDEO 2013: device-free radio-based recognition | | BIBA | Full-Text | 491-498 | |
| Markus Scholz; Stephan Sigg; Moustafa Youssef | |||
| The 4th workshop on Context Systems Design, Evaluation and Optimization
(CoSDEO2013) was organised in conjunction with Ubicomp 2013 in Zurich. This
year, the theme of the workshop was on 'Device-Free Radio-Based Recognition'.
We discuss recent advances in this field, introduce the workshop and summarise
the contributions of the accepted submissions.
From the submissions, we observe that the field is evolving from the recognition of locations of subjects to the recognition of activities from subjects. At the same time, the systems presented have grown more complex compared to recent years. Authors consider multiple subjects simultaneously, multiple frequencies and multiple antennas or receive devices. | |||
| Adaptive clustering for device free user positioning utilizing passive RFID | | BIBA | Full-Text | 499-508 | |
| Benjamin Wagner; Dirk Timmermann | |||
| Context sensing is an important part of building ubiquitous smart and
assistive environments. It is the major data source for intention recognition
and strategy generation systems. Device-free localization systems (DFL) join
the efforts of non-instrumentation of users maintaining their privacy.
In recent publications we propose an innovative approach utilizing a cluster of passive Radio Frequency Identification Transponders (pRFID) for device-free radio-based positioning. Due to the point that the RFID technology is typically not designed for that purpose we have to deal with certain drawbacks. A high number of transponders typically conclude in lower measurement frame rates while generating substantially more information for accurate positioning. To fix this tradeoff this work presents a transponder clustering approach based on inherent EPC protocol based bit masking, which allows us to calculate fast coarse grained localization results and increase the precision by time, so that the user is able to adjust between localization speed and accuracy. We made simulations and conducted experiments in an indoor room DFL scenario for validation. | |||
| Ambient intelligence sensing using array sensor: device-free radio based approach | | BIBA | Full-Text | 509-520 | |
| Jihoon Hong; Tomoaki Ohtsuki | |||
| In this paper we introduce a novel device-free radio based activity recognition with localization method with various applications, such as e-Healthcare and security. Our method uses the properties of the signal subspace, which are estimated using signal eigenvectors of the covariance matrix obtained from an antenna array (array sensor) at the receiver side. To classify human activities (e.g., standing and moving) and/or positions, we apply a machine learning method with support vector machines (SVM). We compare the classification accuracy of the proposed method with signal subspace features and received signal strength (RSS). We analyze the impact of antenna deployment on classification accuracy in non-line-of-sight (NLOS) environments to prove the effectiveness of the proposed method. In addition, we compare our classification method with k-Nearest Neighbor (KNN). The experimental results show that the proposed method with signal subspace features provides accuracy improvements over the RSS-based method. | |||
| Joint localization and activity recognition from ambient FM broadcast signals | | BIBA | Full-Text | 521-530 | |
| Shuyu Shi; Stephan Sigg; Yusheng Ji | |||
| Due to spatial diversity, RF signals derived from a FM broadcast station differ when they arrive at the receivers placed in various locations. Also, the FM signals will be altered by the change of ambient environment. Previous works focused either the FM-based localization or activity recognition. In this study, we propose to simultaneously classify and localize activities conducted in proximity of an FM receiver. We conducted experiments and demonstrated that the location and activities of an individual can be distinguishable with a reasonable overall accuracy in a typical indoor environment from FM broadcast signals. | |||
| RF-Based device-free recognition of simultaneously conducted activities | | BIBA | Full-Text | 531-540 | |
| Stephan Sigg; Shuyu Shi; Yusheng Ji | |||
| We investigate the use of received RF-signals for activity recognition in scenarios with multiple receive nodes and multiple simultaneously active individuals. Our system features a short 0.5 second window over which features are calculated and we report on experiences in the choice of the neighbourhood size of the k-nearest neighbour (k-NN) classifier utilised. In a case study with software defined radio nodes utilised in an active, device-free activity recognition (DFAR) system, we observe a good recognition accuracy for the recognition of multiple simultaneously conducted activities with two and more receive devices. This is the first study to distinguish this particular set of activities from users conducting them simultaneously. For a single individual, we repeat the experiment and report the recognition accuracy in scenarios where the recognition area per receive node is larger than 8m². | |||
| New insights into wifi-based device-free localization | | BIBA | Full-Text | 541-548 | |
| Heba Aly; Moustafa Youssef | |||
| WiFi-based device-free localization is a main indoor localization technique that has attracted much attention recently. Typically, due to the complex wireless propagation in indoor environments, WiFi-based device-free localization requires a construction of a fingerprint map that captures the signal strength characteristics when the human is standing at certain locations in the area of interest. This fingerprint requires significant overhead in construction, and thus has been one of the major drawbacks of WiFi-based device-free localization. In this paper, we leverage an automated tool for fingerprint constructions to study novel scenarios for WiFi-based device-free localization training and testing that are difficult to evaluate in a real environment. In particular, we examine the effect of changing the access points (AP) mounting location, AP technology upgrade, and outsider effect; on the accuracy of the localization system. Our analysis provides recommendations for better localization and provides insights for both researchers and practitioners. | |||
| Device-free indoor localization using ambient radio signals | | BIBA | Full-Text | 549-552 | |
| Andrei Popleteev | |||
| This paper investigates feasibility of device-free indoor localization using single passive receiver. Instead of local wireless nodes sharing one frequency channel, this work leverages multiple ambient FM radio stations. Experimental results demonstrate feasibility of the proposed approach and highlight the role of frequency diversity for passive localization. | |||
| Green food technology: UbiComp opportunities for reducing the environmental impacts of food | | BIBA | Full-Text | 553-558 | |
| Adrian K. Clear; Rob Comber; Adrian Friday; Eva Ganglbauer; Mike Hazas; Yvonne Rogers | |||
| Everyday food and drink consumption makes up a significant proportion of global greenhouse gas emissions (16% of the total footprint for an average UK person [3]). Digital technology offers much scope for helping to reduce this -- promoting reflection, increasing transparency of product and supply chain impacts, and so on -- but the greatest impacts are predicated on a deep understanding of the configuration of everyday practices. This presents an interesting challenge for Ubicomp, stemming from the deep social and cultural influences on what people purchase, eat and throw away. This workshop brings together participants from a diverse range of disciplines to develop an understanding of existing food consumption practices, and reflect on how this domain can profit from novel Ubicomp technology and interaction designs. | |||
| EatChaFood: challenging technology design to slice food waste production | | BIBA | Full-Text | 559-562 | |
| Geremy Farr-Wharton; Marcus Foth; Jaz Hee-jeong Choi | |||
| This paper presents work in progress of EatChaFood -- a prototype app designed to increase user knowledge of the currently available domestic supply and location of food, with a view to reducing expired household food waste. In order to reap the benefits that EatChaFood can provide we explore ways to overcome manual data entry as a barrier to use. Our user study has to recognise the limitations of the prototype app, and conduct an evaluation of the interaction design built into the app to promote behaviour change. Innovations in the near future such as the automatic scanning of barcodes on food items or photo-recognition will close the gap between perceived prototype usability and usefulness. | |||
| Collective spaces and collected action: towards reconnecting food, consumers and nature | | BIBA | Full-Text | 563-570 | |
| Elizabeth Edwards; Louise Mullagh; Graham Dean; Gordon Blair | |||
| Disconnection between food production, its consumers and in turn between
consumers and nature is increasingly seen as problematic for both producers and
society at large. Consumers now know very little about where their food has
come from, leading potentially to less sustainable practices and less
engagement with what they eat and drink.
We present the concept of reconnecting food (in this particular example, coffee) and consumers through design interventions in the High Street, employing digital innovations based on concepts from the Internet of Things and pervasive public displays. Two interventions carried out within the setting of J. Atkinson & Co. coffee and tea merchants in Lancaster City are discussed. We document the research processes, interaction design and their implementation in relation to notions of reconnecting products and consumers. Future interventions within the setting are also presented in order to demonstrate the on-going dialogue between researchers and retailers. We show that through exploring reconnection through storytelling within a retail environment there is potential to tackle the issues raised in the paper and engage with retailers and consumers. | |||
| Understanding underutilisation: methods for studying fruit and vegetable buying behaviours | | BIBA | Full-Text | 571-574 | |
| Victoria Shipp; Martin Flintham; Richard Mortier; Brigitte A. Graf; Mehdi Maqbool; Behrang Parhizkar | |||
| This paper outlines research focused on understanding why people do or do not buy underutilised fruit and vegetables. This will inform the design of future interventions to promote more sustainable food related behaviour. A background to underutilised crops and food sustainability is provided. This is followed by an overview of the proposed method for capturing the entire purchasing and consumption experience using wearable cameras. | |||
| Wild food practices: understanding the wider implications for design and HCI | | BIBA | Full-Text | 575-584 | |
| Alan Chamberlain; Chloe Griffiths | |||
| Ethnographic studies in their many forms have played a major role in informing the design and development of a multitude of systems, from pervasive games to ubiquitous systems that support market traders. This paper presents an alternative response to the understanding of the practices of procurement and usage of wild food, and the way that one might technologically intervene within these group practices in order to support an environmentally aware approach to such activities. The initial findings of this study not only suggest that there are multiple points where technological intervention is possible, but also demonstrate both the complexity and range of technological possibilities in regard to the act of foraging, the culture of wild food and biodiversity. | |||
| Designing a smart phone app for sustainable cooking | | BIBA | Full-Text | 585-588 | |
| Luis Carlos Rubino de Oliveira; Val A. Mitchell; Andrew J. May | |||
| This research is focusing upon the human-computer interaction (HCI), evaluating the relationship between users and cooking appliances mediated by information-communication technologies (ICTs) applications designed specifically to motivate energy saving. User observation, energy monitoring and semi-structured interviews helped to understand user behaviours and its respective determinants. Group discussions and large scale surveys were used to evaluate the acceptance of energy saving techniques and intervention methods. This knowledge informed the development of a persuasive electronic energy saving intervention in the form of a mobile phone application, which is being tested. | |||
| UbiComp for grassroots urban food-growing communities | | BIBA | Full-Text | 589-594 | |
| Sara Heitlinger; Nick Bryan-Kinns; Janis Jefferies | |||
| In this paper we argue that research into ubiquitous computing for sustainability must move its focus beyond designing for individual consumer behaviours. Urban grassroots food-growing communities offer opportunities to learn about the role of participation, community, citizenship and collective action, where sustainability encompasses environmental, social and economic factors. We report on fieldwork at an urban community farm in east London, and initial trial of the Talking Plants Sale prototype, to support the values of the farm. | |||
| Green food through green food: a human centered design approach to green food technology | | BIBA | Full-Text | 595-598 | |
| "Real sustainability will only be possible by consuming less." A ubiquitous computing path to consume less while improving health is to help us consume less processed food (60-70% of US/UK diet) in favor of whole food. The paper shows both the rationales for this focus and identifies key design challenges: interaction cycle, expertise and politics. | |||
| Chairs' summary/proposal for international workshop on human activity sensing corpus and its application (HASCA2013) | | BIBA | Full-Text | 599-604 | |
| Nobuo Kawaguchi; Nobuhiko Nishio; Daniel Roggen; Kaori Fujinami; Susanna Pirttikangas | |||
| Recent advancement of technology enables installations of small sized accelerometers or gyroscopes on various kinds of wearable/portable information devices. By using such wearable sensors, these devices can estimate its posture or status. However, most of current devices only utilize these sensors for simple orientation and gesture recognition. More deep understandings and recognition of human activity through these sensors will enable the next-generation human-oriented computing. To enable the real-world application by these kinds of wearable sensors, a large scale human activity sensing corpus might play an important role. Additionally, we have now a lot of high-performance mobile devices in real-world such as smart-phones. It is a great challenge to utilize such an enormous number of wearable sensors to collect a large-scale activity corpus. In recent years, there are several ongoing projects which are collecting human activities. In this workshop, we are planning to share these experiences of current research on the human activity corpus and its applications among the researchers and the practitioners and to have a deep discussion for future of activity sensing. | |||
| HASC-IPSC: indoor pedestrian sensing corpus with a balance of gender and age for indoor positioning and floor-plan generation researches | | BIBA | Full-Text | 605-610 | |
| Katsuhiko Kaji; Hodaka Watanabe; Ryoji Ban; Nobuo Kawaguchi | |||
| Up till now, the majority of researches related to location estimation and floor plan creation have used different kinds of data and there has simply been no technique to compare the relative advantages and disadvantages. We collected indoor pedestrian sensing data of 100 people with a balance of gender and age. The data is part of the HASC corpus, free to use for research purposes. | |||
| Labeling method for acceleration data using an execution sequence of activities | | BIBA | Full-Text | 611-622 | |
| Kazuya Murao; Tsutomu Terada | |||
| In the area of activity recognition, many systems using accelerometers have been proposed. Common method for activity recognition requires raw data labeled with ground truth to learn the model. To obtain ground truth, a wearer records his/her activities during data logging through video camera or handwritten memo. However, referring a video takes long time and taking a memo interrupts natural activity. We propose a labeling method for activity recognition using an execution sequence of activities. The execution sequence includes activities in performed order, does not include time stamps, and is made based on his/her memory. Our proposed method partitions and classifies unlabeled data into segments and clusters, and assigns a cluster to each segment, then assign labels according to the best-matching assignment of clusters with the user-recorded activities. The proposed method gave a precision of 0.812 for data including seven kinds of activities. We also confirmed that recognition accuracy with training data labeled with our proposal gave a recall of 0.871, which is equivalent to that with ground truth. | |||
| Evaluation function of sensor position for activity recognition considering wearability | | BIBA | Full-Text | 623-632 | |
| Kazuya Murao; Haruka Mogari; Tsutomu Terada; Masahiko Tsukamoto | |||
| In the wearable computing environment, a computer provides many kinds of services by using the values from wearable sensors to recognize the user's movements or situations. In the research on activity recognition, accelerometers are attached on the user's body such as wrists, waist and, feet. Though researches on best sensor placement for context aware systems has been released thus far, they do not use enough number of sensors to really decide the best sensor placement. When using these context aware systems in our daily life, we also need to consider the discomfort that the user gets from attaching the sensors. The sensor might get in the user's way or feel uncomfortable for the user, however, as far as we know, the sensor's wearability is not taken into consideration in these researches. This paper proposes an evaluation function that scores sensor placement considering both recognition accuracy and sensor wearability, with twenty sensors on the user's body and thirty kinds of exercises including aerobic exercise, weight training, and yoga. Then we experimentally evaluated sensor placement, resulted in high degree of accuracy achieved without feeling stressful. | |||
| Improving fault tolerance of wearable sensor-based activity recognition techniques | | BIBA | Full-Text | 633-644 | |
| Ryoma Uchida; Hiroto Horino; Ren Ohmura | |||
| Existing wearable sensor-based activity recognition techniques lack fault tolerance in the case of sensors data loss, such as communication disconnection and sensor failure. Compensating for missing data is one method to improve robustness and can be done by three levels in activity recognition: raw data level, feature value level, and classifier level. Our study proposes a method to compensate for the missing sensor data using an ARAR algorithm and compares this method with a previous method for compensating for the feature value using kernel regression in the feature value level. The ARAR algorithm method predicts future data from existing sequence data. We conducted some experiments to verify the usefulness of the proposed methods. Specifically, the prediction performance was evaluated by applying the ARAR algorithm to compensate for one to five successive windows. As a result of our test data, the F-measure rate was 73.4% in the case of sensor data loss. The ARAR algorithm compensation for one and two successive windows increased the F-measure to 76.8%. Overall, the ARAR algorithm method effectively compensates for instantaneous communication disconnection. On the other hand, the kernel regression method is especially compensates for burst communication disconnection. Therefore, we need to change the compensation method depending on sensor error patterns. Thus, we improved robustness of the activity recognition system by compensating for sensor data loss. | |||
| Pointing gesture recognition using compressed sensing for training data reduction | | BIBA | Full-Text | 645-652 | |
| Masahiro Iwasaki; Kaori Fujinami | |||
| In this paper, we investigate training data reduction for the pointing gesture recognition with compressed sensing. The pointing gesture is one of activities during pointing and calling that is carried out by workers to keep occupational safety and correctness. Compressed sensing is used for gesture recognition and considered the impacts of the gesture duration difference among user. However, the different force among users may affect to the recognition. As a result of the experiment, F-measure is improved 0.18 compared with the DTW even only the data obtained from others is used. Moreover, we found that the user-dependency varies for each subject. Therefore, we tested to recognize the pointing gestures of all subjects by using the training data of only specific users. The test showed that the recognition model with training data from 4 specific subjects provided the same accuracy as the one from 11 subjects. This result suggested the feasibility of reduction for subjects who need to acquire the training data. | |||
| Parameter exploration for response time reduction in accelerometer-based activity recognition | | BIBA | Full-Text | 653-664 | |
| Minoru Yoshizawa; Wataru Takasaki; Ren Ohmura | |||
| In activity recognition techniques, existing wearable sensors have a problem performing the recognition process. Because existing wearable sensors perform recognition process by dividing sensor data into partial sequences, there is lag between the changes in action and the output of the recognition result. Therefore, we focused on the point activities change and have proposed a method to reduce the response time of the activity recognition technique. However, parameters such as window size immediately after the activity changing point and the activity changing point detection in the proposed method have not been studied well. Thus, in this paper, we conducted experiments using the HASC Corpus, which contains large-scale data of human activity. We report results of examining various parameters in the proposed method and features of the proposed method revealed by comparison with a conventional method. To give a concrete example, for IIR band-pass filter bank to be used for activity changing point detection, we clarified the frequency and the appropriate number of filters. In addition, we clarified the relationship between identification accuracy and the size of a special window that is set after activity changing point detection. The proposed method reduced the response time to the 2035ms on average from 2773ms, the of average of the conventional method. In addition, the proposed method can reduce the amount of calculation, achieve both high recognition accuracy and short response time, and output the recognition results in consistent times to reduce the jitter of response time. | |||
| Detecting wi-fi base station behavior inappropriate for positioning method in participatory sensing logs | | BIBA | Full-Text | 665-672 | |
| Nobuhiko Nishio; Yuuki Fukuzaki; Takuya Azumi | |||
| Recently mobile base stations are getting increased, which is considered harmful for the Wi-Fi positioning methods. In this paper, three approaches for detecting Wi-Fi base station behaviors inappropriate for Wi-Fi signature sampling are introduced and their performance evaluations are presented. First approach is for outdoor environment using GPS or Wi-Fi, second for indoor environment using Wi-Fi and accelerometers and last for the first contact stations using the Bayesian estimation method. Bayesian estimation is fine for stationary stations but much severe for mobile stations. | |||
| Automatic correction of annotation boundaries in activity datasets by class separation maximization | | BIBA | Full-Text | 673-678 | |
| Reuben Kirkham; Aftab Khan; Sourav Bhattacharya; Nils Hammerla; Sebastian Mellor; Daniel Roggen; Thomas Ploetz | |||
| t is challenging to precisely identify the boundary of activities in order to annotate the activity datasets required to train activity recognition systems. This is the case for experts, as well as non-experts who may be recruited for crowd-sourcing paradigms to reduce the annotation effort or speed up the process by distributing the task over multiple annotators. We present a method to automatically adjust annotation boundaries, presuming a correct annotation label, but imprecise boundaries, otherwise known as "label jitter". The approach maximizes the Fukunaga Class-Separability, applied to time series. Evaluations on a standard benchmark dataset showed statistically significant improvements from the initial jittery annotations. | |||
| Monitor and understand pilgrims: data collection using smartphones and wearable devices | | BIBA | Full-Text | 679-688 | |
| Amir Muaremi; Julia Seiter; Gerhard Tröster; Agon Bexheti | |||
| Each year, millions of people visit the sacred sites in Makkah and Madinah. Even though the Hajj pilgrimage is one of the biggest annual events in the world, with many of the pilgrims reporting it as a life-changing experience, quite a little is done to objectively monitor the pilgrims and to understand from the crowd and from the individual point of view what makes this event so special. We present a data collection phase of 8 days of pilgrimage in April 2013 with 41 pilgrims carrying Android smartphones and 10 pilgrims wearing two physiological sensors, namely chest belts and wrist-worn devices. We describe the data recording itself, and emphasize the problems raised and the challenges faced during the study. We provide the best practices for performing solid and efficient user studies in such a difficult environment, and give first insights towards measuring important aspects of the Hajj pilgrimage such as recognition of activities and stages, analysis of group behavior, detection of stressful situations and health monitoring of pilgrims in general. | |||
| Parallel, distributed, and differential processing system for human activity sensing flows | | BIBA | Full-Text | 689-700 | |
| Takamichi Toda; Sozo Inoue; Lin Li | |||
| In this paper, we propose a parallel distributed processing system for data-analytic project including human activity sensing flows, which manages dependency among data and analytic programs, and re-execute updated programs and dependent programs for updated data/programs. In the system, a data analyzer can specify the dependency and parts for requiring distributed parallel processing using Hadoop Streaming, and they can be processed only for updated and the dependent part, with flexibly selecting parallel or sequential execution on the fly. The specification can also specify repeated execution of a single program with different data, while their dependencies are checked separately at execution. We describe the mathematical model, the system design, the usage, and the experimental result applying to the essential process in human activity sensing. | |||
| Sharing training data among different activity classes | | BIBA | Full-Text | 701-712 | |
| Quan Kong; Takuya Maekawa | |||
| We propose a new activity recognition system for the daily activity by using a generative/discriminative hybrid model that can learn an activity classification model with small quantities of training data by sharing training data among different activity classes. Many existing activity recognition studies employ a supervised machine learning approach and thus require an end user's labeled training data, this approach places a large burden on the user. In this study, we assume that a user wears sensors (accelerometers) on several parts of the body such as the wrist, waist, and thigh, and by sharing sensor data obtained from only selected accelerometers (e.g., only waist and thigh sensors) among two different activity classes based on a sensor data similarity measure, the quantities of training data can be increased. For further reduction of the burden on the user, we also adopt semi-supervised approach to train the classifier in our study. | |||
| Human interfaces for civic and urban engagement: HiCUE '13 | | BIBA | Full-Text | 713-720 | |
| Simo Hosio; Jorge Goncalves; Vassilis Kostakos; Keith Cheverst; Yvonne Rogers | |||
| How should citizens and communities interact with and in their city? Leveraging urban resources for civic purposes, such as citizen participation and community engagement, has been gaining interest in HCI. Essentially, citizens can be empowered to be heard and engage the city better through the use of modern technology. Examples of these technologies are mobile phones, public displays, sensor networks, digital art installations, or any other type of urban technology. This workshop seeks to investigate the progress in creating public human interfaces for interactive urban engagement. We wish to discuss issues such as citizen participation in public life and decision-making, informing citizens, and civic engagement in all its various forms. | |||
| Engaging in island life: big data, micro data, domestic analytics and smart islands | | BIBA | Full-Text | 721-724 | |
| Alan Chamberlain; Alessio Malizia; Alan J. Dix | |||
| This paper reports upon an engagement-based study that was carried out on the Isle of Tiree (the Inner Hebrides, Scotland). The purpose of the study was to examine the use of a tabletop projection system as a mechanism to allow some of the islands inhabitants to initially discuss their understanding of data, data needs and to further explicate the ways in which communities or researchers might use such systems to engage with communities in a participatory-civic manner. | |||
| Digital soapboxes: towards an interaction design agenda for situated civic innovation | | BIBA | Full-Text | 725-728 | |
| Marcus Foth; Leonardo Parra Agudelo; Robin Palleis | |||
| We argue that there are at least two significant issues for interaction designers to consider when creating the next generation of human interfaces for civic and urban engagement: (1) The disconnect between citizens participating in either digital or physical realms has resulted in a neglect of the hybrid role that public place and situated technology can play in contributing to civic innovation. (2) Under the veneer of many social media tools, hardly any meaningful strategies or approaches are found that go beyond awareness raising and allow citizens to do more than clicking a "Like" button. We call for an agenda to design the next generation of "digital soapboxes" that contributes towards a new form of polity helping citizens not only to have a voice but also to appropriate their city in order to take action for change. | |||
| A mobile brain sensing system for recommending third places | | BIBA | Full-Text | 729-732 | |
| Lulwah Al-Barrak; Eiman Kanjo | |||
| Newly available EEG headsets allow us to sense mental states which could be useful in understanding how our brains are affected by the surrounding environments. In this paper, we present a novel recommendation approach that is based on mental states analysis. Mobile EEG headsets are used to detect mental states at different places to understand how they stimulate our brain signals. By analyzing EEG data, we could classify places according to the mental state signature, then we could build a map to guide and recommend therapeutical third places to people that lessen brain fatigue and mental rejuvenation. | |||
| Mobile observatory: an exploratory study of mobile air quality monitoring application | | BIBA | Full-Text | 733-736 | |
| Yongsung Kim; Julien Eberle; Riikka Hanninen; Erol Can Un; Karl Aberer | |||
| We present Mobile Observatory, a mobile air quality monitoring application that provides evaluation of air quality of the city of Zurich, Switzerland. As Mobile Observatory utilizes air quality data gathered by sensors mounted on around 10 trams in Zurich, it is able to provide neighborhood-level air quality information within the city. In this paper, we introduce a mobile air quality monitoring application Mobile Observatory. Also, we describe a user study with 10 participants and show our preliminary results in hopes of yielding insights toward improving civic and urban engagement on air quality. | |||
| Reinforcing co-located communication practices through interactive public displays | | BIBA | Full-Text | 737-740 | |
| Masaki Ogawa; Marko Jurmu; Tomotaka Ito; Takuro Yonezawa; Jin Nakazawa; Kazunori Takashio; Hideyuki Tokuda | |||
| In recent years, the steady emergence of digital communication, especially social media, has increased the "placelessness" of inter-person communication practices, i.e., lessening the need to reside co-located in order to communicate. When these communication practices carry over to co-located settings, they introduce redundancy and potentially even harm the co-located context, since use of personal technologies tends to isolate users from their surroundings. In this position paper, we want to raise awareness on how interactive public displays could alleviate this redundancy and potential isolation. We present a model of reinforcing co-located communications, and illustrate it through example use cases. | |||
| Geovisual interfaces to find suitable urban regions for citizens: a user-centered requirement study | | BIBA | Full-Text | 741-744 | |
| Chandan Kumar; Benjamin Poppinga; Daniel Haeuser; Wilko Heuten; Susanne Boll | |||
| Geographic retrieval and visualization systems are essential to satisfy user's spatial information needs. However, the end users spatial information need is much more diverse and demanding in complex decision making scenarios such as: Persons moving to a new area need information about which place meets their individual demands. To analyze such requirements, we conducted a study with 18 users of different age group, knowledge, and expertise. In this paper we report the study methods, results, analysis and insights to build an end user-friendly geospatial decision support system. | |||
| A mobile phone-based exploratory citizen sensing environment | | BIBA | Full-Text | 745-748 | |
| Shin'ichi Konomi; Tomoyo Sasao; Masatoshi Arikawa; Hideyuki Fujita | |||
| Coping with ill-structured problems in a city involves continuous, opportunistic, and multi-perspective processes, which existing pervasive technologies for citizen participation cannot easily support. Based on two preliminary case studies, we propose Scene Memo, a mobile phone-based exploratory citizen-sensing environment that uses dynamically shared tags to provide social cues and scaffold participants. | |||
| Zone based indoor mobile air pollution monitoring | | BIBA | Full-Text | 749-752 | |
| Noura Alhakbani; Eiman Kanjo | |||
| Pollution is one of the main problems that humans are suffering from. Moreover air pollution is one of the hardest to escape. Although human spend most of their time indoor, most of the previous pollution monitoring studies focused on outdoor air monitoring. In this paper we present a new framework for zone based indoor mobile pollution sensing. Users carry portable pollution sensors along with NFC enabled phones to detect zone (i.e. tag) proximity in a building. NFC here assists in aggregating sensor data for further processing. Our system has been deployed and evaluated through a preliminary user study. | |||
| Accessibility for people who are blind in public transportation systems | | BIBA | Full-Text | 753-756 | |
| Jaime Sánchez; Marcia de Borba Campos; Matías Espinoza; Lotfi B. Merabet | |||
| In order to support access for people who are blind to modes of transportation in the city, it is necessary to design technological tools that allow them to carry out activities safely, autonomously, and functionally. In this context, three mobile orientation and mobility support systems were designed for people who are blind to aid in their effective navigation using various modes of transportation in the city of Santiago, Chile. This work presents the most significant implications of the use of these systems. | |||
| Designing for smart cities: connecting and binding citizens to urban spaces through a new wearable interactive system | | BIBA | Full-Text | 757-760 | |
| Assunta Matassa; Amon Rapp; Rossana Simeoni | |||
| In this paper we present a wearable interactive system that has the aim to strengthen the bond between individuals and urban spaces, leveraging the personal memories of the citizens. | |||
| Tending a virtual garden: exploring connectivity between cities | | BIBA | Full-Text | 761-764 | |
| Minna Pakanen; Anna Maria Polli; Stella Lee; Joseph Lindley; Jorge Goncalves | |||
| This paper introduces a new experience-driven design concept to public spaces, such as bus stops, to strengthen connections between cities and their citizens. With the prototype described here we are provoking inquiry into whether the "technology" that is a bus stop, with high tech augmentations can engender civic engagement and more interconnected cities. Our preliminary user studies showed that people, while waiting for the bus, do not interact with each other, and as such are "alone together". Our concept is to connect people in the city, and also between two different cities by utilizing their waiting time. "Virtual Garden" creates the experience of "being connected" by providing users with the possibility to "grow" a collaborative garden using a smartphone and natural gestures as the control interaction. Lo-fi prototypes were used to gather user feedback which informed the design of the 'Virtual Garden'. | |||
| HomeSys 2013: workshop on design, technology, systems and applications for the home | | BIBA | Full-Text | 765-768 | |
| A. J. Bernheim Brush; James Scott; Sarah Mennicken | |||
| HomeSys 2013 will be an inspiring, interactive, cross-disciplinary workshop for anyone conducting research into technology in homes. This includes anyone building novel systems, applications, or devices for the home, or studying existing or novel technology use in domestic settings, or anyone else with an interest in the intersection between technology and the home. Attendance at the workshop will not be limited, anyone may register and attend. To ensure any interactive and enjoyable exchange of ideas during the workshop, we have 4 contribution types: Visionary Presentations, Reflective Presentations, Videos and Posters. To encourage interactivity and discussion, the workshop will have plenary sessions for visionary and reflective presentations, in addition to posters and videos, a keynote, discussant-led panels and a breakout session. | |||
| On managed services lanes and their use in home networks | | BIBA | Full-Text | 769-776 | |
| Frank den Hartog; Pieter Nooren; Archi Delphinanto; Erik Fledderus | |||
| Home networks show an increasing level of heterogeneity regarding the devices connected, network technologies used, and services supported. Heterogeneity inhibits quality assurance for new services, such as online gaming, energy management, and health care. This paper focuses on the role that the concept of Managed Services Lanes (MSLs) plays in Dutch smart-city initiatives to solve these issues. MSLs provide third-party service providers quality guarantees without infringing network neutrality. Our preliminary experiments with extending MSLs into the home network indicate that end users indeed have a better quality of experience for the supported Neighborhood TV service than without MSLs. We also show that extension of MSLs into the home network requires advanced home networking monitoring technologies including dynamic home network traffic models. Our research provides evidence that such models will be very different from the standard Internet models. | |||
| The digital bookshelf: decorating with collections of digital books | | BIBA | Full-Text | 777-784 | |
| Ilhan Aslan; Martin Murer; Florian Primessnig; Christiane Moser; Manfred Tscheligi | |||
| We describe the Digital Bookshelf (a projector and camera based system) that similar to a physical bookshelf is designed to present a set of books for decorating and self-expression purposes. Digital books in the bookshelf are presented based on meta information (e.g. by price, rating and cover color) to highlight adjacencies and to create a meaningful and aesthetic view. The system makes use of research in serendipity and multivariate statistics to allow the user to browse along flexible paths of adjacent books in a large collection of books. It allows the user to experience how subsets of books create different visual expressions and atmospheres when placed in the bookshelf. | |||
| The smart home controller on your wrist | | BIBA | Full-Text | 785-792 | |
| Luigi De Russis; Dario Bonino; Fulvio Corno | |||
| This paper addresses human-home interaction mediated by everyday objects, with a particular focus on wrist watches. Everyday wrist-worn devices are turned into flexible home access points by exploiting a modular architecture independent from the underlying home automation system, and from the specific watch device, provided that the necessary capabilities are available. A first working prototype based on a cost-effective consumer watch is presented, and experimental results confirm the viability of the approach. | |||
| Taking smart space users into the development loop: an architecture for community based software development for smart spaces | | BIBA | Full-Text | 793-800 | |
| Marc-Oliver Pahl; Georg Carle | |||
| Smart spaces need driver services to connect accessed hardware and orchestration services to realize scenarios. There is a problem of scale in software development for smart spaces because it is done by few. It is also problematic that those few decide about what is supported and developed. We propose to provide users with tools for community based development of driver and orchestration services. We analyze the requirements for a middleware framework to allow distributed development. We present necessary extensions that promote community based development: (1) a repository for interface definitions, (2) App Store and App Manager, and (3) multi-dimensional ratings. Finally we present how smart space software development can be facilitated using our Distributed Smart Space Orchestration System (DS2OS). | |||
| homeBLOX: introducing process-driven home automation | | BIBA | Full-Text | 801-808 | |
| Michael Rietzler; Julia Greim; Marcel Walch; Florian Schaub; Björn Wiedersheim; Michael Weber | |||
| Home automation promises more convenience for residential living. We propose process-driven home automation as an approach to reduce the difficulty of specifying automation tasks without restricting users in terms of customizability and complexity of supported scenarios. Our graph-based user interface abstracts from the complexity of process specification, while created sequences are automatically translated into BPEL code for execution. Our homeBLOX architecture extends a process engine with the capabilities to communicate with heterogeneous smart devices, integrate virtual devices, and support different home automation protocols. We report on initial user tests with our automation interface and demonstrate the customizability and expressiveness of our system based on realized example use cases. | |||
| Exploring the hidden impacts of HomeSys: energy and emissions of home sensing and automation | | BIBA | Full-Text | 809-814 | |
| Oliver Bates; Mike Hazas | |||
| Home sensing and automation systems are rarely discussed with reference to their direct energy demand, much less other environmental impacts such as greenhouse gas (GhG) emissions arising from their manufacture and transport. It is imperative that designers of such systems understand the impacts of the technologies they introduce, particularly where intended to save energy and promote sustainability. Using four case studies drawn from recent Ubicomp and HCI literature, this reflective paper quantifies the direct energy and estimates the embodied emissions arising from specific installations of home sensing. We contextualise this by comparing with typical impacts arising from existing ICT devices commonly found in the home, and highlight a number of ways in which designers can reduce the impacts of the systems they introduce into the home. | |||
| HomeFlow: inferring device usage with network traces | | BIBA | Full-Text | 815-820 | |
| Oliver Bates; Matthew Broadbent | |||
| Previous studies in home energy have taken a service oriented approach to disaggregating direct energy consumption. With a particular focus on media and ICT services in the home, our proposed platform builds upon this work by providing activity oriented data, collected through home network monitoring. This information will be used to build a profile of communication between devices. This includes inter-device communication within the confines of a home environment, and also the use of external resources outside of the home. This provides knowledge of device behaviour and enables profiling of device relationships. Furthermore, monitoring communication to locations outside of the home will enable us to estimate associated indirect energy costs. These are incurred when a user consumes an externally provided service, such as Video-on-Demand. | |||
| Human localization at home using Kinect | | BIBA | Full-Text | 821-828 | |
| Tanushyam Chattopadhyay; Sangheeta Roy | |||
| In this paper authors have presented a method to localize and detect human being from Kinect captured sequence of images. The proposed method takes a sequence of gray (G) scale image and the corresponding depth (D) image as input. The gray scale image and the depth information are captured using two different sensors within the same device, Kinect and the processing are executed in the processor attached with Kinect. The proposed method localizes the human by using their motion along x, y direction and then considers all pixels connected with those pixels and over a 3D plane to accomplish the segmentation with an accuracy of 77%. Experimental results demonstrate that our method is robust against existing method for human localization. | |||
| Communities in the clouds: support for high-rise living | | BIBA | Full-Text | 829-836 | |
| Tom Lodge; Tom Rodden; Richard Mortier | |||
| Research into domestic infrastructures has focused upon a user's understanding and control of in-home networking technologies. It has exposed a range of needs that have either lead to the creation of new tools and services, or have triggered a fundamental re-evaluation of the status quo. We consider a class of domestic environment that has largely been neglected: large scale communal living. Urban high-rises, composed of hundreds of apartments and hundreds or thousands of occupants, expose their residents to a set of problems which impose complex requirements upon supporting technologies. We examine the requirements of high-rise communities, through a set of illustrative scenarios, inspired by forums, social media and literature. We consider how commonly appropriated social media tools fail to address these requirements and we discuss the nature of the services required to better support high-rise communities. | |||
| Always beta: cooperative design in the smart home | | BIBA | Full-Text | 837-844 | |
| Timo Jakobi; Gunnar Stevens | |||
| In Software development, the always beta principle is used to successfully develop innovation based on early and continuous user feedback. In this paper we discuss how this principle could be adapted to the special needs of designing for the Smart Home, where we do not just take care of the software, but also release hardware components. In particular, because of the 'materiality' of the Smart Home one could not just make a beta version available on the web, but an essential part of the development process is also to visit the 'beta' users in their home, to build trust, to face the real world issues and provide assistance to make the Smart Home work for them. After presenting our case study, we will then discuss the challenges we faced and how we dealt with them. | |||
| The furniture of ubiquitous computing | | BIBA | Full-Text | 845-852 | |
| Sho Hashimoto; Toshiyuki Masui | |||
| Although various ubicomp technologies have been proposed for home environments, few people are enjoying such technologies in their daily life, due to the lack of powerful software framework for building flexible applications for home. We are developing simple and powerful ubicomp frameworks which can be used for building furniture-embedded networked devices which fit to home environments. Using our frameworks, many devices can communicate with each other by exchanging data shared on the Web server using standard HTTP. In this paper, we describe the concepts and implementations of the frameworks, and show how sparsely-connected devices can cooperatively be used for various tasks needed in home environments. | |||
| Living++: a platform for assisted living applications | | BIBA | Full-Text | 853-860 | |
| Muhammad Umer Iqbal; Ngewi Fet; Stephan Wagner; Marcus Handte; Pedro José Marrón | |||
| Assisted living systems aim at increasing the independence of persons facing challenges in performing their daily tasks either due to cognitive diseases or aging. In addition, many systems try to help their caregivers in providing effective care to them. However, in order to be useful assisted living systems must be easy to use for the affected persons as well as for their caregivers. Furthermore, to be cost-effective the systems must be inexpensive. In this paper, we discuss our experiences from our assisted living system WebDA and based on the lessons learned we present the Living++ platform which strives to fulfill the mentioned goals. The Living++ platform is built on top of low cost and widely available devices, it provides a familiar TV-based user interface to its users and enables remote monitoring and management through freely available on-line services. | |||
| Towards user identification in the home from appliance usage patterns | | BIBA | Full-Text | 861-868 | |
| Daniel Garnier-Moiroux; Fernando Silveira; Anmol Sheth | |||
| We explore the feasibility of identifying users from the unique patterns they exhibit when interacting with an individual electrical appliance in the home. We evaluate the effectiveness of a supervised learning based approach for user identification from a dataset of appliance usage collected across five users and three kitchen appliances over a period of eight weeks. Our results show that using appliance usage information alone provides a moderate average accuracy of 32% for group sizes of up to five users in the home. However augmenting usage information with hints about user presence can improve accuracy by 15-20%. | |||
| 2nd ACM international workshop on mobile systems for computational social science | | BIB | Full-Text | 875-882 | |
| Nicholas D. Lane; Mirco Musolesi | |||
| An evaluation of method for encouraging participation | | BIBA | Full-Text | 883-890 | |
| Hitoshi Kawasaki; Atsushi Yamamoto; Hisashi Kurasawa; Hiroshi Sato; Motonori Nakamura; Ryuma Kakinuma | |||
| Much attention is being focused on participatory sensing, in which real-world data are collected using personal mobile devices as sensor nodes to sense various conditions of the world we live in. In participatory sensing, there is a problem in that the supply of data is insufficient if users are not motivated to participate in sensing services. We previously proposed Top of Worlds, a method for encouraging user participation by presenting rankings in multidimensional hierarchical sets. In this paper, we describe the development of a ranking system and a real-world evaluation to confirm that Top of Worlds can encourage user participation. | |||
| The price is right?: economic value of location sharing | | BIBA | Full-Text | 891-900 | |
| Omer Barak; Gabriella Cohen; Alla Gazit; Eran Toch | |||
| The popularity of location-based services such as Foursquare has made location sharing a common practice. Commercial companies can use the shared location for marketing purposes and often motivate users to share using discounts or special offers. We examine the reward users demand in such a scenario to try and estimate the value they ascribe to their own location information. Our user study is conducted using a mobile phone application that randomly offers users hypothetical money coupons in exchange for publishing their location. Responses by 25 participants to 481 such offers show that the willingness to share increases with coupon value, yet varies greatly with the location being shared. We use logistic regression to estimate the value above which most users will share their location and find it to be €8/€5.4 ($10.4/$7) for a user's home and work respectively. This work contributes to the growing body of knowledge about the economic aspects of location-based services. | |||
| Understanding customer malling behavior in an urban shopping mall using smartphones | | BIBA | Full-Text | 901-910 | |
| SangJeong Lee; Chulhong Min; Chungkuk Yoo; Junehwa Song | |||
| This paper presents a novel customer malling behavior modeling framework for an urban shopping mall. As an automated computing framework using smartphones, it is designed to provide comprehensive understanding of customer behavior. We prototype the framework in a real-world urban shopping mall. Development consists of three steps; customer data collection, customer trace extraction, and behavior model analysis. We extract customer traces from a collection of 701-hour sensor data from 195 in-situ customers who installed our logging application at Android Market. The practical behavior model is created from the real traces. It has a multi-level structure to provide the holistic understanding of customer behavior from physical movement to service semantics. As far as we know, it is the first work to understand complex customer malling behavior in offline shopping malls. | |||
| Open source smartphone libraries for computational social science | | BIBA | Full-Text | 911-920 | |
| Neal Lathia; Kiran Rachuri; Cecilia Mascolo; George Roussos | |||
| The ubiquity of sensor-rich and computationally powerful smartphones makes them an ideal platform for conducting social and behavioural research. However, building sensor data collection tools remains arduous and challenging: it requires an understanding of the varying sensor programming interfaces as well as the research issues related to building sensor-sampling systems. To alleviate this problem and facilitate the development of social sensing and data collection applications, we are developing a set of open-source smartphone libraries to collect, store and transfer, and query sensor data. Furthermore, we have also developed a library that can trigger notifications based on time or sensor events to assist experience sampling methods. This paper presents these libraries' architecture, initial feedback from developers using it, and a sensing application that we built using them to study daily affect. | |||
| Speech stress assessment using physiological and psychological measures | | BIBA | Full-Text | 921-930 | |
| Ana C. Aguiar; Mariana Kaiseler; Hugo Meinedo; Traian E. Abrudan; Pedro R. Almeida | |||
| Emotional stress is commonly experienced while speaking in public, producing
changes to the various speech productions subsystems, affecting the speech
signal in predictable ways and being easily conveyed to listeners. Speech
stress indicators, however, are typically studied under laboratory settings,
allowing little generalization to real life settings. To bridge this gap, we
propose an interdisciplinary approach to assess speech stress during public
speaking events, based on a platform that records speech simultaneously
annotated with physiological and psychological measures. This approach enables
the collection of a large corpus of annotated speech in ecological settings,
i.e. in objectively stressing situations. We also propose and implement a
methodology to assess listeners evaluation of stress including psychologists,
and overall public.
The platform has been in use for the past 5 months, and we have collected 13 complete samples after the initial iterative development procedure. Preliminary results indicate that the proposed user-friendly platform is an accurate and robust method to collect annotated speech under ecological settings that can be processed to obtain speech stress indicators. The findings will be used primarily in the design of computer and mobile assisted voice coaching applications, but the outreach extends to mobile emotion sensing for individuals and crowds. | |||
| Robust voice activity detection for social sensing | | BIBA | Full-Text | 931-938 | |
| Sebastian Feese; Gerhard Tröster | |||
| The speech modality is a rich source of personal information. As such, speech detection is a fundamental function of many social sensing applications. Simply the amount of speech present in our surroundings can give indications about our socialbility and communication patterns. In this work, we present and evaluate a speech detection approach utilizing dictionary learning and sparse signal representation. Transforming the noisy audio data to the sparse representation with a dictionary learned from clean speech data, we show that speech and non speech can be discriminated even in low signal-to-noise conditions with up to 92% accuracy. In addition to an evaluation with simulated data, we evaluate the algorithm on a real-world data set recorded during firefighting missions. We show, that speech activity of firefighters can be detected with 85% accuracy when using a smartphone that was placed in the firefighting jacket. | |||
| Workshop on personal and pervasive fabrication (PerFab 2013) | | BIBA | Full-Text | 939-944 | |
| Manfred Lau; Christian Weichel; Nicolas Villar | |||
| Recently, technologies for fabricating real-world objects and products that
can be designed and built directly by the end-user have decreased in costs and
are increasingly common. These technologies are expected to have a great impact
on society and the personal fabrication concept has been described as the "new
or third industrial revolution". However, there is a great need to explore many
novel research challenges and issues before the idea of personal fabrication
becomes truly pervasive and applicable to the wider public.
PerFab is a workshop for providing a forum to bring together researchers from various disciplines working in this area. We intend to identify, explore and contribute to the research challenges that will allow personal fabrication to be pervasive. We will invite paper submissions to our workshop, review the submissions with a peer review process, and include the accepted papers in the ACM Digital Library. The long-term goal is to gather a community of researchers and establish this workshop as a leading forum for research dissemination in the area. | |||
| Wordpress of objects: addressing layman participation in a post-industrial society | | BIBA | Full-Text | 945-950 | |
| Guido Hermans | |||
| In this paper a perspective on layman participation in the design of everyday products is presented. The development of digital fabrication technologies such as 3D printing enables an increasing involvement of the layman in appropriating the performance of objects to their own needs and desires. The question is how professional designers as well as laymen deal with openness in product design. An analogy is made with the content management system Wordpress to discuss how could be dealt with openness in a toolkit that addresses multiple skill levels of its users. | |||
| From sketches to CAM models: perceiving pockets and steps in single-view wireframe sketches of polyhedral shapes | | BIBA | Full-Text | 951-958 | |
| Raquel Plumed; Pedro Company; Peter A. C. Varley; Ralph R. Martin | |||
| We propose the direct production of 3D CSG models from sketches as a way of relieving the user from having to input detailed 3D CAD models. This shortens the CAD/CAM process and simplifies it, allowing non-expert end-users to produce their own designs. Early detection of features in the 2D sketch is a critical step. This paper discusses a general strategy for solving this problem, and then describes our approach for detecting steps and pockets in a 2D line-drawing obtained after vectorising the sketch captured by an input device. | |||
| 3D effects box for bridging 3D scan and 3D print | | BIB | Full-Text | 959-962 | |
| Hiroya Tanaka; Yusuke Tominaka; Atsushi Masumori; Taisuke Oshima; Keita Sekijima; Youka Watanabe | |||
| PeTRE: workshop on pervasive technologies in retail environments | | BIBA | Full-Text | 963-968 | |
| Markus Löchtefeld; Petteri Nurmi; Florian Michahelles; Carsten Magerkurth; Patrik Floréen; Antonio Krüger | |||
| The main goal of this workshop is to explore how pervasive technologies can be integrated into today's brick and mortar retail environments to enhance the overall retail experience. Therefore we want to bring together researchers and industry partners to explore not only customer orientated technologies and services but also how those technologies can be used to increase the effectiveness and productivity and with that enhance the retailers profits. | |||
| Wi-Fi fingerprinting through active learning using smartphones | | BIBA | Full-Text | 969-976 | |
| Le T. Nguyen; Joy Zhang | |||
| Indoor positioning is one of the key components enabling retail-related services such as location-based product recommendations or in-store navigation. In the recent years, active research has shown that indoor positioning systems based on Wi-Fi fingerprints can achieve a high positioning accuracy. However, the main barrier of broad adoption is the labor-intensive process of collecting labeled fingerprints. In this work, we propose an approach for reducing the amount of labeled data instances required for training a Wi-Fi fingerprint model. The reduction of the labeling effort is achieved by leveraging dead reckoning and an active learning-based approach for selecting data instances for labeling. We demonstrate through experiments that we can construct a Wi-Fi fingerprint database with significantly less labels while achieving a high positioning accuracy. | |||
| ProFi: design and evaluation of a product finder in a supermarket scenario | | BIBA | Full-Text | 977-984 | |
| Ming Li; Katrin Arning; Luisa Bremen; Oliver Sack; Martina Ziefle; Leif Kobbelt | |||
| This paper presents the design and evaluation of ProFi, a PROduct FInding assistant in a supermarket scenario. We explore the idea of micro-navigation in supermarkets and aim at enhancing visual search processes in front of a shelf. In order to assess the concept, a prototype is built combining visual recognition techniques with an Augmented Reality interface. Two AR patterns (circle and spotlight) are designed to highlight target products. The prototype is formally evaluated in a controlled environment. Quantitative and qualitative data is collected to evaluate the usability and user preference. The results show that ProFi significantly improves the users' product finding performance, especially when using the circle pattern, and that ProFi is well accepted by users. | |||
| TrackLab: an innovative system for location sensing, customer flow analysis and persuasive information presentation | | BIBA | Full-Text | 985-990 | |
| Andrew Spink; Ben Locke; Nico Van der Aa; Lucas Noldus | |||
| TrackLab is a new tool for measurement, recognition and analysis of spatial behavior. Although a number of software packages have been developed which can, for instance, acquire tracking data or analyze that data, there is currently no one system which supports the entire workflow. TrackLab supports import from a wide variety of input formats, both real-time and offline. Furthermore a plug-in module is being developed which gives tracking data from a group of up to ten people on the basis of video images (that is, with no need for tags or similar). Once the location data is in the TrackLab software it can be visualized in a variety of ways and a statistical analysis report is generated. The analysis variables are based on established parameters for quantification of behavior based on location. The analysis helps you to gain insight into the spatial behavior of customers. For real-time applications of the system, the analysis variables can be used to control external software, for example presentation of information on a display when a person has followed a particular path through the shop. | |||
| Enriching shopping experiences with pervasive displays and smart things | | BIBA | Full-Text | 991-998 | |
| Salvatore Longo; Ernö Kovacs; Jörn Franke; Miquel Martin | |||
| Brick and Mortar stores have been facing unrelenting competition from online retailers. An enhanced shopping experience is often perceived as a decisive factor in regaining market share, aiming at novel multi-channel online and offline sales strategies. Technologies aimed at this goal, promote interaction, personalization and reaction measurement based on Internet of Things and networked display technologies. There exist, however, a plethora of standards and application platforms which constitute a considerable barrier for integrators both in terms of time and man power. This paper proposes an integrated approach for cost-effective development of innovative in-shop-experience applications leveraging the Internet of Things, HTML5 and Pervasive Display Networks. | |||
| Towards the counter free store: requirements for mobile sales assistants | | BIBA | Full-Text | 999-1006 | |
| Thomas Meneweger; David Wilfinger; Ilhan Aslan; Doris Zachhuber; Manfred Tscheligi | |||
| Ubiquitous assistants in retail environments can be useful not only for customers but also for salespersons by supporting their work. Providing product and customer information anywhere in the store, is the first step on realizing the vision of the counter free store. To ensure both, usefulness and acceptance of ubiquitous sales assistants, this paper describes in a first step user requirements towards mobile assistants generated in two focus groups with customers and salespersons. We present the identified requirements (e.g., aspects of sales processes, spatial situations, tool mediated cooperation, and information transparency) and discuss how ubiquitous technology should support the high situatedness of the sales situation. | |||
| A plugin framework to control electronic shelf labels | | BIBA | Full-Text | 1007-1014 | |
| Gerrit Kahl | |||
| Nowadays, more and more electronic displays are integrated into modern supermarkets in order to display advertisement or to act as price tags referred to as electronic shelf labels (ESL). Due to the low power consumption, wireless accessibility and appropriate resolution, these displays represent an alternative to state-of-the-art paper printed price labels. Nevertheless, there are several types of displays regarding size, resolution and communication channel. In this paper, we present a framework to automatically generate display content for different display types. Besides the connection to the displays, the framework also includes the possibility to generate the content to be displayed based on application plugins. The plugin approach facilitates both the integration of new display types and the creation of new applications. We explain the prototypical implementation of several plugins as well as the application at an instrumented shopping environment. | |||
| Augmented reality-based advertising strategies for paper leaflets | | BIBA | Full-Text | 1015-1022 | |
| Markus Löchtefeld; Matthias Böhmer; Florian Daiber; Sven Gehring | |||
| While shopping websites provide rich customer support through their adaptiveness, static paper-based leaflets are still one of the most important advertising mechanisms for retailers even in todays digital world. With their physical qualities, they create a higher emotional connection and with that more positive memories for brands and retailers. In this paper, we investigate two concepts for Augmented Reality advertising for such leaflets to bridge the digital divide. One of them is following a Guerrilla marketing approach, which allows users to easily compare products of different retailers. The second concept investigates different strategies for visualizing cross-selling recommendations inside the leaflets. We report on initial user feedback and discuss ideas for future work in the field of Augmented Reality advertising. | |||
| Cricking: customer-product interaction in retail using pervasive technologies | | BIBA | Full-Text | 1023-1028 | |
| Rafael Pous; Joan Melià-Seguí; Anna Carreras; Marc Morenza-Cinos; Zulqarnain Rashid | |||
| The popularization of eCommerce has led to effective customer shopping experiences. Pervasive computing could bring the benefits of eCommerce to brick and mortar stores, merging both online and physical worlds into a unique system. We define crick as the extension of the (c)lick and b(rick) concept, by means of pervasive technologies. In this paper, we summarize our work-in-progress research on using pervasive Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) to sense human-product interaction. These cricks can be performed through diverse interfaces in the retail domain, and automatically receive feedback in different manners. We believe that integrating RFID and other pervasive technologies in retail stores is the next step to obtain comprehensive customer's user models and preferences. Retail management improvement, or personal and collaborative recommendations, are envisioned to be successful applications of cricking. | |||
| Enhancing the shopping experience through RFID in an actual retail store | | BIBA | Full-Text | 1029-1036 | |
| Joan Melià-Seguí; Rafael Pous; Anna Carreras; Marc Morenza-Cinos; Raúl Parada; Zeinab Liaghat; Ramir De Porrata-Doria | |||
| Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) offers an extraordinary opportunity to enhance the shopping experience of customers in a retail store. There are two types of possible enhancements: increasing the efficiency of traditional processes, or offering new use cases at the store. RFID offers a great opportunity in both cases. RFID can be used to improve the availability of products, reducing stock outs, to streamline the check-out process, reducing the lines, or to substitute the typical Electronic Article Surveillance (EAS) "horse gates" by hidden antennas, freeing the entrance to the store from intimidating barriers. Besides these operational improvements, RFID can also be used to offer shoppers new and enticing functionalities, such as a "magic mirror" to virtually try garments on, or an interactive screen in the fitting room that displays information and offers functionalities related to the particular garments brought in by the customer. This paper describes an actual installation in an apparel retail store in Barcelona, and presents some of the initial conclusions after several months of operation with real customers. | |||
| STORE VIEW: pervasive RFID & indoor navigation based retail inventory management | | BIBA | Full-Text | 1037-1042 | |
| Anna Carreras; Marc Morenza-Cinos; Rafael Pous; Joan Melià-Seguí; Kamruddin Nur; Joan Oliver; Ramir De Porrata-Doria | |||
| Today's retail consumers' general behavior consists of doing the research for products preferably online while purchasing them offline. Users would like to access stores' inventories before going to the shop. This paper first identifies the challenges that need to be addressed to navigate within a store and its inventory anytime and anywhere without being physically there. Then, it analyzes the existing approaches for inventory management based on Radio Frequency Identification (RFID). And finally, it proposes a solution based on robots. We believe that this proposal is an important contribution to fill the gap between online and offline worlds in the context of retail. | |||
| A supermarket stress map | | BIBA | Full-Text | 1043-1046 | |
| Nour El Mawass; Eiman Kanjo | |||
| People choose their favorite supermarket based on many factors including how the place is designed and organized. Customers generally perceive their shopping experience in an aggregated way, which leaves little room for supermarkets managers to understand what triggers negative feelings. Moreover, adapting the supermarket design to clients' needs is crucial to retain current customers. Accommodating facilities make shoppers feel pleased. In this paper we show the design and initial deployment of a pervasive system that registers location-stamped stress levels of supermarket customers during their shopping. The system aims to discover stress hot spots in a supermarket, which will help managers locate and solve design and store management deficiencies. | |||
| Healthy shopping: a longitudinal study of a mobile app to encourage a balanced diet | | BIBA | Full-Text | 1047-1054 | |
| Jon Bird; Daniel Fozzati; Daniel Harrison; Paul Marshall | |||
| An imbalanced diet is the primary cause of the majority of non-communicable diseases. In particular, obesity rates are increasing in both the developed and developing world and this disease has been described as a pandemic by the World Health Organization. Many governments provide dietary guidelines, for example, recommended weekly amounts of different food types, but the increasing incidence of obesity shows that these campaigns have not been successful. We developed a mobile app that shows supermarket shoppers the nutritional balance of their shopping trolley. A two-month study demonstrated that the app led to significant changes in participants' shopping habits and an improvement in the nutritional balance of their diets. | |||
| PUCAA: 1st international workshop on pervasive urban crowdsensing architecture and applications | | BIBA | Full-Text | 1055-1062 | |
| Zhixian Yan; Nilanjan Banerjee; Dipanjan Chakraborty; Archan Misra; Mani Srivastava; Sumit Mittal | |||
| Recently, as the community and businesses have begun to realize the power of
jointly harnessing nomadic mobile sensing and selective infrastructure-based
ambient sensing, we are beginning to see the emergence of a class of "urban
crowdsensing" platforms that perform pervasive sensing in a more coordinated
fashion. Such combined sensing opens up the possibilities for new exciting
applications in a variety of urban spaces.
Driven by these trends, PUCAA is an annual workshop that seeks to bring together researchers and practitioners working in the areas of urban and crowd-driven sensing. The workshop provides a forum for the researchers to discuss large/innovative crowdsensing architectures, systems and platforms and their experiences on developing crowdsensing applications impacting urban lifestyles in a variety of areas such as personal & public healthcare, retail & commerce, transportation, public safety, crowd management, and utility services. | |||
| Decentralised approach for a reusable crowdsourcing platform utilising standard web servers | | BIBA | Full-Text | 1063-1074 | |
| Tenshi Hara; Thomas Springer; Gerd Bombach; Alexander Schill | |||
| Crowdsourcing has gained increasing interest during the last years as means for solving complex tasks with the help of a flexible group of contributors. The crowd can contribute with collecting data in the field, completing map information or votes for ideas or products. Even though the participation of large numbers of users with heterogeneous devices in crowdsourcing is a highly recurrent task, generic infrastructures for crowdsourcing can be hardly found. Especially the management of users, mobile devices and contributed data has to be repetitively implemented in new projects. To ease the development of crowdsourcing applications, in this paper we propose a generic platform for crowdsourcing supporting diverse crowdsourcing scenarios, the ability to handle large numbers of users and the involvement of heterogeneous mobile devices. The evaluation is based on scalability and performance experiments in order to demonstrate the feasibility of our approach. | |||
| effSense: energy-efficient and cost-effective data uploading in mobile crowdsensing | | BIBA | Full-Text | 1075-1086 | |
| Leye Wang; Daqing Zhang; Haoyi Xiong | |||
| Energy consumption and mobile data cost are two key factors affecting users' willingness to participate in crowdsensing tasks. While data-plan users are mostly concerned about the energy consumption, non-data-plan users are more sensitive to data transmission cost incurred. Traditional ways of data collection in mobile crowdsensing often go to two extremes: either uploading the sensed data online in real-time or fully offline after the whole sensing task is finished. In this paper, we propose effSense -- a novel energy-efficient and cost-effective data uploading framework leveraging the delay-tolerant mechanisms. Specifically, effSense reduces the data cost of non-data-plan users by maximally offloading the data to Bluetooth/WiFi gateways or data-plan users encountered to relay the data to the server; it reduces energy consumption of data-plan users by uploading data in parallel with a call or using less-energy demand networks (e.g. Bluetooth). By leveraging the prediction of critical events such as user's future calls or encounters, effSense selects the optimal uploading scheme for both types of users. Our evaluation with MIT Reality Mining and Nodobo datasets show that effSense can save 55%~65% energy and 45%~50% data cost for the two types of users, respectively, compared with the traditional uploading schemes. | |||
| On heterogeneity in mobile sensing applications aiming at representative data collection | | BIBA | Full-Text | 1087-1098 | |
| Henrik Blunck; Niels Olof Bouvin; Tobias Franke; Kaj Grønbæk; Mikkel B. Kjaergaard; Paul Lukowicz; Markus Wüstenberg | |||
| Gathering representative data using mobile sensing to answer research questions is becoming increasingly popular, driven by growing ubiquity and sensing capabilities of mobile devices. However, there are pitfalls along this path, which introduce heterogeneity in the gathered data, and which are rooted in the diversity of the involved device platforms, hardware, software versions and participants. Thus, we, as a research community, need to establish good practices and methodologies for addressing this issue in order to help ensure that, e.g., scientific results and policy changes based on collective, mobile sensed data are valid. In this paper, we aim to inform researchers and developers about mobile sensing data heterogeneity and ways to combat it. We do so via distilling a vocabulary of underlying causes, and via describing their effects on mobile sensing -- building on experiences from three projects within citizen science, crowd awareness and trajectory tracking. | |||
| Publish/subscribe middleware for energy-efficient mobile crowdsensing | | BIBA | Full-Text | 1099-1110 | |
| Ivana Podnar Zarko; Aleksandar Antonic; Krešimir Pripuzic | |||
| In this paper we focus on mobile crowdsensing applications for community sensing where sensors and mobile devices jointly collect and share data of interest to observe and measure phenomena over a larger geographic area. Such applications, e.g., environmental monitoring or crowdsourced traffic monitoring, involve numerous individuals that on the one hand continuously contribute sensed data to application servers, and on the other hand consume the information of interest to observe a phenomenon typically in their close vicinity. Energy-efficient and context-aware orchestration of the sensing process with data transmission from sensors through mobile devices into the cloud, as well as from the cloud to mobile devices such that information of interest is served to users in real-time, is essential for such applications, primarily due to battery limitations of both mobile devices and wearable sensors. In addition, the latency of data propagation represents their key quality measure from the user's perspective. Publish/subscribe middleware offers the mechanisms to deal with those challenges: It enables selective real-time acquisition and filtering of sensor data on mobile devices, efficient continuous processing of large data volumes within the cloud, and near real-time delivery of notifications to mobile devices. This paper presents our implementation of a publish/subscribe middleware system which is tailored to the requirements of mobile and resource-constrained environments with a goal to reduce the overall energy consumption in such environments, and proposes a general architecture for mobile crowdsensing applications. We demonstrate the usability of both the architecture and middleware through our application for air quality monitoring, and discuss the energy footprint of the proposed solution. | |||
| CrowdMeter: an emulation platform for performance evaluation of crowd-sensing applications | | BIBA | Full-Text | 1111-1122 | |
| Manoj R. Rege; Vlado Handziski; Adam Wolisz | |||
| In this paper we introduce CrowdMeter, an emulation platform for predicting performance of large-scale crowd-sensing applications. CrowdMeter architecture follows natural decomposition of the application under evaluation and provides features for emulation of mobile devices and access network links. It leverages virtualization and cloud-based infrastructure-as-service resources to offer necessary scaling. We instantiate CrowdMeter architecture using off-the-shelf components and public-cloud resources, and perform a preliminary evaluation of its emulation fidelity focused on the communication services. The results confirm that CrowdMeter can successfully capture important aspects of real-world performance of different wireless access links. They also illustrate the ease-of-use and the scalability of the platform in terms of number of emulated mobile devices. | |||
| Locating emergencies in a campus using wi-fi access point association data | | BIBA | Full-Text | 1123-1134 | |
| Asma Ahmad Farhan; Athanasios Bamis; Bing Wang | |||
| Despite much progress in emergency management, effective techniques for real-time tracking of emergency events are still lacking. We envision a promising direction to achieve real-time emergency tracking is through widely adopted smartphones. In this paper, we explore the first step in achieving this goal, namely, locating emergency in real time using smartphones. Our main contribution is a novel approach that locates emergencies by analyzing AP (access point) association events collected from a campus Wi-Fi network. It is motivated by the observation that human behavior and mobility pattern are significantly altered in the face of emergency, which is reflected in how their smartphones associate with the APs in the network. More specifically, our approach locates emergency by discovering APs with abnormal association patterns using Extreme Value Theory (EVT). Preliminary evaluation using real data collected from a university campus network demonstrates the effectiveness of our approach. | |||
| BlueEye: a system for proximity detection using bluetooth on mobile phones | | BIBA | Full-Text | 1135-1142 | |
| Avik Ghose; Chirabrata Bhaumik; Tapas Chakravarty | |||
| Interesting applications of crowdsensing include measurement of crowdedness at public places and evaluating the extent of social interactions between people, at large gatherings. These require enabling the accurate estimation of proximity between two or more people. Since mobile phones have emerged as the most ubiquitous sensing and computing platform, carried by almost all people close to their body, it is logical to use the same for proximity detection. Further, in order to motivate people to use such application, it is necessary to estimate distances accurately, using only short blocks of sampled signal strengths. In this paper the authors present a mobile based proximity detection system, codenamed BlueEye which is based on Bluetooth. To achieve better distance estimates, BlueEye proposes a new form of path loss model which takes into account the relative orientation of mobile phones. The results show enhanced distance estimates when the separation between devices is less than 8 feet. | |||
| A model-based back-end for air quality data management | | BIBA | Full-Text | 1143-1150 | |
| Erol Can Un; Julien Eberle; Yongsung Kim; Karl Aberer | |||
| In this paper we present a hybrid model for real-time query processing over data stream collected by mobile air quality sensors. First, we introduce a novel indexing scheme for representing air quality and use it for generating and evaluating a static model over a yearly dataset. Then, this model is combined with a dynamic nearest-neighbor approach for real-time updates, and implemented into the Global Sensor Network (GSN) middleware, with added support for model queries. | |||
| Combining smart phone and infrastructure sensors to improve security in enterprise settings | | BIBA | Full-Text | 1151-1158 | |
| Palanivel Kodeswaran; Dipanjan Chakraborty; Parikshit Sharma; Sougata Mukherjea; Anupam Joshi | |||
| There is an increasing trend among employees to bring in their own personal device to work, thereby making the enterprise more vulnerable to security attacks such as data leakage from phones. Additionally, users are increasingly running phone apps in a mixed-mode i.e. both for enterprise and personal commitments. For example, phone cameras and microphones are used to record business meetings, often resulting in the case that both employers and employees become unaware of the existence of business data on the phone at a later point in time. The lack of employer control over personal devices raises enterprise data leakage threats, when an employee's phone is lost or stolen. In this paper we describe a system that leverages sensors available on the phone as well as on the enterprise infrastructure to identify business data resident on the phone for further secure handling. Office spaces have traditionally been instrumented with badge swipe readers, cameras, wifi access points etc. that can be used to provide passive sensory data about employees. For example, badge swipes can be used provide approximate location information of an employee where as calendar entries provide information about their schedule and activities. We propose a distributed architecture that leverages the context of the user for speculatively identifying enterprise data from personal data. The basic idea is to understand whether a user is engaged in enterprise or personal work by inferring her context from a combination of phone and infrastructure sensors. The contextual attributes in our system, such as location, can be sourced from a plurality of sensors on the phone as well as on the infrastructure. We exploit this diversity and propose a cost optimized distributed rule execution framework that chooses the optimal set of predicates to sense on the phone as well as on the infrastructure to reduce sensing cost. Furthermore, the framework also chooses the appropriate site for rule evaluation, either on the infrastructure or phone, to optimize for network transfer cost incurred due to shipping of sensed predicates between the two sites. Combined together, the above two optimizations reduce the battery drain caused due to context inferencing on the phone. | |||
| FLEAD: online frequency likelihood estimation anomaly detection for mobile sensing | | BIBA | Full-Text | 1159-1166 | |
| Viet Duc Le; Hans Scholten; Paul Havinga | |||
| With the rise of smartphone platforms, adaptive sensing becomes an predominant key to overcome intricate constraints such as smartphone's capabilities and dynamic data. One way to do this is estimating the event probability based on anomaly detection to invoke heavy processes, such as switching on more sensors or retrieving information. However, most conventional anomaly detection methods are power hungry and computation consuming. This paper proposes a new online anomaly detection algorithm by capturing the likelihood of frequency histogram given features extracted from a stream of measurements from sensors of multiple smartphones. The algorithm then estimates the mixed density probability of anomalies. By doing so, the algorithm is lightweight and energy efficient, which underpins large scale mobile sensing applications. Experimental results run on Android phones are consistent with our theoretical analysis. | |||
| ConferenceSense: monitoring of public events using phone sensors | | BIBA | Full-Text | 1167-1174 | |
| Vigneshwaran Subbaraju; Amit Kumar; Vikrant Nandakumar; Sonali Batra; Salil Kanhere; Pradipta De; Vinayak Naik; Dipanjan Chakraborty; Archan Misra | |||
| We explore the use of a participatory sensing paradigm, where data generated from individual smartphones is used to extract and understand collective properties of temporary public gatherings and events (e.g., concerts & conferences). We focus on the use of this paradigm at a technical conference, and describe the design, implementation and deployment of ConferenceSense, an application that uses multiple sensor and human-generated inputs from attendees' smartphones to infer context, such as the start time of a session or the degree of interaction during a tea break. Based on data collected from multiple attendees at a 3-day conference, we explore how ConferenceSense can be used for monitoring and collecting event statistics, and describe challenges and open questions. | |||
| A generic platform for ubiquitous and subjective data | | BIBA | Full-Text | 1175-1182 | |
| Martin Becker; Juergen Mueller; Andreas Hotho; Gerd Stumme | |||
| In the context of the Internet of Things, an increasing number of platforms like Xively or ThingSpeak are available to manage ubiquitous sensor data. Strict data formats allow interoperability and informative visualizations, supporting the development of custom user applications. Yet, these strict data formats as well as the common device-centric approach limit the flexibility of these platforms: there are no means to incorporate people and their subjective impressions about the collected data. In order to build the Internet of Things and People and ultimately the Internet of Everything, we aim at providing an extendable concept of data which allows to enrich existing data points with any kind of additional information. This enables us to gain semantic and user specific context by attaching subjective data to objective values. For this end we support data ranging from text-based formats like JSON to images and video footage. This paper provides an overview of our architecture including concept, implementation details and present applications. We distinguish our approach from several other systems and describe two sensing applications namely AirProbe and WideNoise that were implemented for our platform. | |||
| PURBA 2013: workshop on pervasive urban applications | | BIBA | Full-Text | 1183-1188 | |
| Francesco Calabrese; Giusy Di Lorenzo; Dominik Dahlem; Santi Phithakkitnukoon; Neal Lathia | |||
| This is the proposal for the Third Workshop on Pervasive Urban Applications (PURBA 2013). The workshop aims to build on the success of the previous workshops organized in conjunction with the Pervasive 2011 and 2012, to continue to disseminate the results of the latest research outcomes and developments of ubiquitous computing technologies in urban areas. An IBM-Best student award will be given at the workshop. | |||
| Gaussian process-based predictive modeling for bus ridership | | BIBA | Full-Text | 1189-1198 | |
| Sourav Bhattacharya; Santi Phithakkitnukoon; Petteri Nurmi; Arto Klami; Marco Veloso; Carlos Bento | |||
| The dynamics of a city are characterized, among others, by the traveling patterns of its dwellers. Accurate knowledge of human mobility patterns would have applications, e.g., in urban design, in the optimization of public transportation operating costs, and in the improvement of public transportation services. The present paper combines a large scale bus transportation dataset with publicly available data sources to predict bus usage. We propose a Gaussian process-based approach for modeling and predicting bus ridership. To validate our approach we perform experiments on data collected from Lisbon, Portugal. The results demonstrate significant improvements in prediction accuracy compared to a probabilistic baseline predictor. | |||
| Characterizing social response to urban earthquakes using cell-phone network data: the 2012 oaxaca earthquake | | BIBA | Full-Text | 1199-1208 | |
| Benyounes Moumni; Vanessa Frias-Martinez; Enrique Frias-Martinez | |||
| The data generated by pervasive infrastructures, and specially cell-phone networks, has been used in the past to improve responses to emergency events such as natural disasters or disease outbreaks. However, very little work has focused on analyzing the social response to an urban earthquake as it takes place. In this paper we present a preliminary study of the social response using the information collected from a cell-phone network during the 2012 Oaxaca earthquake in Mexico. We focus our analysis on four urban environments located between 100-200km away from the epicenter of the earthquake. The social response is analyzed using four different variables: call volume, call duration, social activity and mobility. Initial results indicate a social response characterized by an increase in the number of calls, a decrease in call durations, a moderate increase in the number of people contacted by highly connected citizens and a moderate increase in the mobility. | |||
| Revisiting the generality of the rank-based human mobility model | | BIBA | Full-Text | 1209-1218 | |
| Darshan Santani; Daniel Gatica-Perez | |||
| Location-based social networks, in addition to revealing users' online social network, also informs users' actual movements in the offline physical world. Due to this, they have recently been used in large-scale mobility and urban studies. In this paper, using a rigorous statistical methodology, we have found that a rank-distance distribution, which in recent research has been suggested to be a universal mobility law across cultural, demographic and national boundaries, does not follow a power-law distribution as originally claimed. Using a large-scale dataset obtained from Foursquare in Switzerland and New York City, we have shown that place transitions can be better explained using a log-normal and power-law with exponential cutoff model. Our study suggests that urban mobility patterns are more nuanced than previously reported and that goodness-of-fit tests need to be done in view of the generality of human mobility models. | |||
| Anomalous event detection on large-scale GPS data from mobile phones using hidden Markov model and cloud platform | | BIBA | Full-Text | 1219-1228 | |
| Apichon Witayangkurn; Teerayut Horanont; Yoshihide Sekimoto; Ryosuke Shibasaki | |||
| Anomaly detection is an important issue in various research fields. An uncommon trajectory or gathering of people in a specific area might correspond to a special event such as a festival, traffic accident or natural disaster. In this paper, we aim to develop a system for detecting such anomalous events in grid-based areas. A framework based on a hidden Markov model is proposed to construct a pattern of spatio-temporal movement of people in each grid during each time period. The numbers of GPS points and unique users in each grid were used as features and evaluated. We also introduced the use of local score to improve the accuracy of the event detection. In addition, we utilized Hadoop, a cloud-computing platform, to accelerate the processing speed and allow the handling of large-scale data. We evaluated the system using a dataset of GPS trajectories of 1.5 million individual mobile phone users accumulated over a one-year period, which constitutes approximately 9.2 billion records. | |||
| Exploring relationship between taxi volume and flue gases' concentrations | | BIBA | Full-Text | 1229-1238 | |
| Marco Veloso; Santi Phithakkitnukoon; Carlos Bento | |||
| With the rapid increase in size and population of urban areas, it becomes important to understand urban environmental influencers so that better informed decisions can be made for more sustainable urban environments. Taxis represent one of the urban dynamics from which city planners can gain a better understanding of urban mobility as well as its relationship with other environmental elements. In this work, an analysis of the relationship between flue gases? concentrations (represented by nitrogen dioxide) and taxi volume in Lisbon, Portugal was carried out from which a strong correlation between the two was observed. Based on four months of data, we found that the flue gases' concentrations varied with taxi volume and in particular, taxi volume can be used to estimate the change in flue gases' concentrations of the next hour. | |||
| Mining temporal patterns of transport behaviour for predicting future transport usage | | BIBA | Full-Text | 1239-1248 | |
| Stefan Foell; Gerd Kortuem; Reza Rawassizadeh; Santi Phithakkitnukoon; Marco Veloso; Carlos Bento | |||
| information systems which are centred on the individual transport user. Especially, in dense urban cities where it is hard to oversee complex transport networks that are subject to frequent changes, maintenance and construction works, travellers want to be proactively notified about disruptions and traffic incidents relevant to their future behaviour. In this paper, we show how to mine characteristic patterns of the transport routines of urban bus riders for the design of novel travel information system that have the ability to understand forthcoming travel needs of individual users. We leverage on travel histories collected from automated fare collection system (AFC) to extract features of personal transport usage and study their predictive power to forecast whether people access public transport services on a future day or not. | |||
| 1st workshop on human factors and activity recognition in healthcare, wellness and assisted living: recognise2interact | | BIBA | Full-Text | 1249-1254 | |
| Pierluigi Casale; Steven Houben; Oliver Amft | |||
| Context-aware systems have the potential to revolutionize the way humans interact with information technology. The first workshop on Human Factors and Activity Recognition in Healthcare, Wellness and Assisted Living (Recognise2Interact) aims to enable researchers and practitioners from both, Activity Recognition and Human Computer Interaction to interact and bridge the gap between these two fields. The workshop will provide a comprehensive overview on current technological solutions that benefit from the synergy of activity recognition and human computer interaction with particular focus to Healthcare, Wellness and Assisted living applications. The workshop is supported by the iCareNet network. | |||
| UbiHeld: ubiquitous healthcare monitoring system for elderly and chronic patients | | BIBA | Full-Text | 1255-1264 | |
| Avik Ghose; Priyanka Sinha; Chirabrata Bhaumik; Aniruddha Sinha; Amit Agrawal; Anirban Dutta Choudhury | |||
| Once the person's identity is established, the most important aspects of ubiquitous healthcare monitoring of elderly and chronic patients are location, activity, physiological and psychological parameters. Since smartphones have become the most pervasive computing platform today, it is only a logical extension to use the same in healthcare domain for bringing ubiquity. Besides smartphone, skeleton based activity detection and localization using depth sensor like Kinect make ubiquitous monitoring effective without compromising privacy to a large extent. Finally sensing mental condition is made possible by analysis of the subject's social network feed. This paper presents an end-to-end healthcare monitoring system code named UbiHeld (Ubiquitous Healthcare for Elderly) using the techniques mentioned above and an IoT (Internet of Things) based back-end platform. | |||
| Touch-less interaction with medical images using hand & foot gestures | | BIBA | Full-Text | 1265-1274 | |
| Shahram Jalaliniya; Jeremiah Smith; Miguel Sousa; Lars Büthe; Thomas Pederson | |||
| Sterility restrictions in surgical settings make touch-less interaction an interesting solution for surgeons to interact directly with digital images. The HCI community has already explored several methods for touch-less interaction including those based on camera-based gesture tracking and voice control. In this paper, we present a system for gesture-based interaction with medical images based on a single wristband sensor and capacitive floor sensors, allowing for hand and foot gesture input. The first limited evaluation of the system showed an acceptable level of accuracy for 12 different hand & foot gestures; also users found that our combined hand and foot based gestures are intuitive for providing input. | |||
| MyConverse: recognising and visualising personal conversations using smartphones | | BIBA | Full-Text | 1275-1284 | |
| Mirco Rossi; Oliver Amft; Sebastian Feese; Christian Käslin; Gerhard Tröster | |||
| MyConverse is a personal conversation recogniser and visualiser for smartphones. MyConverse uses the smartphone's microphone to continuously recognise the user's conversations during daily life. While it recognises pre-trained speakers, unknown speakers are detected and subsequently trained for future identification. Based on the recognition, MyConverse visualises user's social interactions on the smartphone. An extensive system parameter evaluation has been done based on a freely available dataset. Additionally, MyConverse was tested in different real-life environments and in a full-day evaluation study. The speaker recognition system reached an identification accuracy of 75% for 24 speakers in meeting room conditions. In other daily life situations MyConverse reached accuracies from 60% to 84%. | |||
| How lonely is your grandma?: detecting the visits to assisted living elderly from wireless sensor network data | | BIBA | Full-Text | 1285-1294 | |
| Ahmed Nait Aicha; Gwenn Englebienne; Ben Kröse | |||
| Existing research on the recognition of Activities of Daily Living (ADL) from simple sensor networks assumes that only a single person is present in the home. In reality, the resident receives visits from family members or professional health care givers. In such cases activity recognition must take into account the presence of multiple persons. Here we investigate the problem of detecting multiple persons in a home environment equipped with a sensor network consisting of 13 binary sensors. We collected data during more than one year in our living labs and used Hidden Markov Model (HMM) for a visitor detection. A cross validation method was used to determine the best set of features from the binary data. Using this set of features the detection rate is approximately 85%. | |||
| When do you light a fire?: capturing tobacco use with situated, wearable sensors | | BIBA | Full-Text | 1295-1304 | |
| Philipp M. Scholl; Nagihan Kücükyildiz; Kristof Van Laerhoven | |||
| An important step towards assessing smoking behavior is to detect and log smoking episodes in an unobtrusive way. Detailed information on an individual's consumption can then be used to highlight potential health risks and behavioral statistics to increase the smoker's awareness, and might be applied in smoking cessation programs. In this paper, we present an evaluation of two different monitoring prototypes which detect a user's smoking behavior, based on augmenting a lighter. Both prototypes capture and record instances when the user smokes, and are sufficiently robust and power efficient to allow deployments of several weeks. A real-world feasibility study with 11 frequently-smoking participants investigates the deployment and adoption of the system, hinting that smokers are generally unaware of their daily smoking patterns, and tend to overestimate their consumption. | |||
| Demo: touch-less interaction with medical images using hand & foot gestures | | BIB | Full-Text | 1305-1306 | |
| Shahram Jalaliniya; Jeremiah Smith; Miguel Sousa; Lars Büthe; Thomas Pederson | |||
| MyConverse in action: monitoring conversations using smartphones | | BIBA | Full-Text | 1307-1308 | |
| Mirco Rossi; Oliver Amft; Sebastian Feese; Christian Käslin; Gerhard Tröster | |||
| This demo presents MyConverse, a personal conversation recogniser and visualiser for Android smartphones. It uses the smartphone's microphone to continuously recognise the user's conversations during his daily life autonomously on the smartphones. MyConverse identifies known speakers in conversations. Unknown speakers are detected and trained for further identification. | |||
| When do you light a fire?: capturing tobacco use with situated wearable sensors | | BIBA | Full-Text | 1309-1310 | |
| Philipp M. Scholl; Nagihan Kücükyildiz; Kristof Van Laerhoven | |||
| The World Health Organization calls tobacco use the single most preventable
cause of premature death, presenting both a personal health risk and an
increased load on public healthcare systems. However, smoking cessation is
often hindered by the low perceivability of health risks and unawareness of
habits in day-to-day life, and effective smoking cessation systems, besides
personal counseling, are still to be improved.
This demo presents the design and implementation of two instrumented lighters that can be used to track a smokers' personal consumption habits. A Gas lighter and a USB lighter which have been outfitted with a micro-controller, storage unit and real-time clock. Both lighters store the day-of-time whenever they are used to light up a cigarette. This information can later be retrieved by the user for personal consumption statistics like most common time-of-day of consumption, total number of smoked cigarettes, daily consumed cigarettes etc. The presented prototypes allow the continuous tracking of smoking behaviour over the course of several days. | |||
| SenCity: uncovering the hidden pulse of a city (workshop) | | BIBA | Full-Text | 1311-1316 | |
| Sarah Gallacher; Vaiva Kalnikaite; Julie McCann; David Prendergast; Jon Bird; Hans-Christian Jetter | |||
| Cities act as hubs designed to accommodate and support millions of inhabitants, nomads and tourists that rely on the city's infrastructure to move around, communicate and flourish as individuals and as a community. This shapes the culture, habits and pulse of a city creating an organic urban landscape often invisible to the naked eye, but traceable digitally. With the proliferation of sensing and pervasive technologies, we should be able to tell the levels of crowdedness of the city, its mood, or how clean it is by sensing and visualising these aspects. However, this poses interesting research and design questions; how would one design a device for tracking and visualising crowdedness on buses, for example. This workshop aims to explore the use of sensing technologies for visually resurfacing some of the hidden dynamics of the city by providing a collaborative and facilitated environment for applied research and creative exploration. This complements other workshops in the "urban" or "cities" theme, such as PURBA (Pervasive Urban Applications), that investigate urban environments from a theoretical perspective. After initial discussions on a joint workshop, the SenCity and PURBA organisers concluded that these workshops were complementary yet different enough to give participants the benefit of taking part in both; gaining the theory from PURBA and collaboratively applying practical research and creative flair at the SenCity workshop to sense, visualise and share the hidden pulse of Zürich. | |||
| Towards healthier urban mobility | | BIBA | Full-Text | 1317-1320 | |
| Dominik Allemann; Martin Raubal | |||
| As a consequence of the increased dissemination of wireless and
location-aware mobile devices, self-monitoring and crowd-sensing has become
increasingly popular in recent years. In parallel, discussions about
sustainability, air pollution and greenhouse gas emissions have also been
intensified.
We propose combining ideas of self-monitoring, crowd-sensing and persuasion towards a real-time city atlas which induces urban dwellers to integrate higher levels of physical activities into their daily mobility needs and to guide their mobility behavior towards a higher degree of sustainability as well as a lower exposure to polluted air. | |||
| Sense of space: mapping physiological emotion response in urban space | | BIBA | Full-Text | 1321-1324 | |
| Luluah Al-Husain; Eiman Kanjo; Alan Chamberlain | |||
| Urban spaces have a great impact on how people feel and behave. There are number of factors that impact our emotional responses to a space. In this paper, we propose an objective way to measure people's emotional reactions in places by monitoring their physiological signals that are related to emotion. By integrating wearable biosensors with mobile phones, we can obtain geo-annotated data relating to emotional states in relation to our spatial surroundings. We are the able to visualize the emotional response data by creating an emotional layer over a geographical map. This can then help us to understand how individuals emotionally perceive urban spaces and help us to illustrate the interdependency between emotions and environmental surroundings. | |||
| The advantages of passive mobile positioning as a type of community sensing for analyzing space-time behaviour of a citizen | | BIB | Full-Text | 1325-1328 | |
| Kaisa Vent | |||
| Creating smart information services for tourists by means of dynamic open data | | BIBA | Full-Text | 1329-1330 | |
| Maarten Groen; Wouter Meys; Mettina Veenstra | |||
| This paper explores the creation of smart information services for tourists using dynamic open data. Research is described, which uses physical sensors at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam to retrieve data about queueing time at that location. This data is added to an open data framework called CitySDK and combined with other open data in the framework. | |||
| Ubicomp'13 sencity workshop: sensing festivals as cities | | BIBA | Full-Text | 1331-1334 | |
| Matthew D. Jarvis; Toby Harris; Laurissa Tokarchuk | |||
| In order to sense the mood of a city, we propose first looking at festivals. In festivals such as Glastonbury or Burning Man we see temporary cities where the inhabitants are engaged afresh with their environment and each other. Our position is that not only are there direct equivalences between larger festivals and cities, but in festivals the phenomena are often exaggerated, and the driving impulses often exploratory. These characteristics well suit research into sensing and intervening in the urban experience. To this end, we have built a corpus of sensor and social media data around a 18,000 attendee music festival and are developing ways of analysing and communicating it. | |||
| Rapid prototyping of semantic applications in smart spaces with a visual rule language | | BIBA | Full-Text | 1335-1338 | |
| Natalia D. Díaz Rodríguez; Johan Lilius; Manuel Pegalajar Cuéllar; Miguel Delgado Calvo-Flores | |||
| One of the major limitations of Ambient Intelligent systems today is the lack of semantic models in human behavior and the environment, so that the system can recognize the specific activity being performed by the users and act accordingly. In this context, we address the general problem of knowledge representation in Smart Spaces. In order to monitor and act over human behavior in intelligent environments, we design a sufficiently simple and flexible visual language to be managed by non-expert users, thus facilitating the programming of the environment. The prototype of the visual language serves to represent rules about human behavior to provide the Smart Space with more usability. These rules can be mapped into SPARQL queries and rule subscriptions. In addition, we add support to represent imprecise and fuzzy knowledge. The proposed general-domain language can help managing resource allocation, assisting people with special needs, in remote monitoring and other domains. | |||
| From crowding detection to community fieldwork: supporting sensing work in context | | BIBA | Full-Text | 1339-1342 | |
| Shin'ichi Konomi; Tomoyo Sasao; Wataru Ohno; Kenta Shoji; Masatoshi Arikawa; Hideyuki Fujita | |||
| We describe our experiences with the prototype crowd sensing environments for supporting crowding detection and community fieldwork, and discuss the need to support sensing work in context. Sensing work is inseparable from the shifting observation modes in the overall inquiry process. | |||
| Informing the design of future transport information services with travel behaviour data | | BIBA | Full-Text | 1343-1346 | |
| Stefan Foell; Reza Rawassizadeh; Gerd Kortuem | |||
| In order to increase the attractiveness of public transport systems, information technology has great potential to add value to their usage. In particular, the availability of digital sources of behavioural transport data opens up new directions for the development of transport information services which are focused on the passengers' engagement in public transport. This will enable novel perceptions of transport services, encompassing aspects of personal transport behaviour -- information related to the transport routines of individual travellers, social transport behaviour -- information which creates an understanding of the collective transport usage of social groups -- and dimensions of quality-of-transport information which include novel measures of travel experiences such as overcrowding. In this paper, we introduce and discuss a design space of how behavioural transport data can shape more user-centric transport information services in order to inform future research activities in this area. | |||
| On the use of participatory sensing to better understand city dynamics | | BIBA | Full-Text | 1347-1350 | |
| Thiago H. Silva; Pedro O. S. Vaz de Melo; Jussara M. Almeida; Antonio A. F. Loureiro | |||
| In this position paper we argue that certain types of social media systems, such as Instagram and Foursquare, can act as valuable source of sensing, providing access to important characteristics of urban locations and urban social behavior. We discuss some of our previous studies and present our thoughts about the future of this field based insights obtained from them. | |||
| Geographical perspective in city sensing | | BIBA | Full-Text | 1351-1354 | |
| Veronika Mooses | |||
| In city sensing there are many methods for capturing people's movements and city crowdedness. Each method has advantages and disadvantages. This paper argues that geographical phenomenon like spatial segregation can have a major influence on the results in fixed sensing therefore a structured location choice is needed. Mobile positioning as a new technology data collection method opens up great possibilities in city sensing. | |||
| Congestrian: monitoring pedestrian traffic and congestion | | BIBA | Full-Text | 1355-1358 | |
| Nicholas K. Taylor; Eliza Papadopoulou; Mei Yii Lim; Patrick Skillen; Fraser R. Blackmun; Howard Williams | |||
| We propose the development and deployment in the wild of a sensor network that will monitor pedestrian traffic rates and congestion. Three types of sensor are envisaged; fixed video cameras, wearable pedometers and GPS devices. The data captured data will facilitate applications such as route planning avoiding congested areas and warning the elderly and infirm of particularly congested areas. Processing of rates of travel and destinations will enable different types of pedestrian to be identified and plotted dynamically such as tourists, shoppers and individuals simply trying to get from A to B quickly. Looking beyond the immediate empirical scope of this workshop, we indicate how such a system could be deployed to take advantage of the benefits afforded by the Personal Smart Space of the EU FP7 PERSIST project and the Community Smart Space of the EU FP7 SOCIETIES project. | |||
| A middleware framework for urban data management | | BIBA | Full-Text | 1359-1362 | |
| Larissa Romualdo-Suzuki; Anthony Finkelstein; David Gann | |||
| The domain of inquiry of this research is the collection, organization, integration, distribution and consumption of knowledge derived from urban open data, and how it can be best offered to application cities' stakeholders through a software middleware. We argue that the extensive investigation proposed in this research will contribute to a growing body of knowledge about data integration and application in smart cities, and offer opportunities to re-think an integrated urban infrastructure. | |||
| emoTicSpace: when the built environments get emotional... | | BIBA | Full-Text | 1363-1366 | |
| Flora Dilys Salim; Chin Koi Khoo | |||
| What happens if the buildings and urban environments around us can respond to the dynamic changes of the environment and the occupancy patterns? How can a building express its excitement when it gets crowded with people? What happens if the built environment can express its "sick building syndrome", which is caused by poor air quality? If the urban space can feel the changes in the wind conditions, can the space respond and adapt to the passing occupants? How to design responsive and adaptive environments that are expressive, informative, and performative? This research aims to hypothetically visualize how buildings and urban environments can respond to crowd-sensed data, such as movement, air quality, temperature, light, and wind, through a kinetic organic interface embedded in the building or urban fabric. | |||
| Using technology to reveal the politics of the built environment | | BIBA | Full-Text | 1367-1368 | |
| Rose Johnson | |||
| In the UK the majority of people do not vote in local elections. However electoral participation is vital to a democratic society. This paper suggests that technology could be used to embed political information into the built environment so that people can easily see how resources are being used in their area and bring political discussion into cities, towns and villages. | |||
| Living light lab: exploring instant feedback in mediated urban space | | BIBA | Full-Text | 1369-1372 | |
| Moritz Behrens | |||
| In recent years locative media as an artistic approach towards exploring mediated urban spaces has been rising [1]. At the same time gathering of environmental data through sensor networks grows rapidly. Living Light Lab aims to facilitate on artistic and scientific approaches to feed invisible data back into the built environment with the aim to explore how we may visualize and display data in an abstract way. The project currently is in its concept and prototyping stage, therefore we will highlight the challenges we are facing. Further we will report on an initial pilot study which took place at the UCL Building Projection Party in June 2013. | |||
| SOFTec 2013: second workshop on computer mediated social offline interactions | | BIBA | Full-Text | 1373-1380 | |
| Nemanja Memarovic; Vassilis Kostakos; Geraldine Fitzpatrick; Albrecht Schmidt | |||
| In the age of online social networks, instant messaging, and email, social offline interactions seem destined to become an anachronism: as our use of electronic media increases, the number of hours per day that we interact directly with others "in the flesh" declines. Yet for all the power of synchronous and asynchronous remote communication, virtual interactions are hardly an adequate substitute. Recent studies show, e.g., that users of online social networking sites feel lonelier than non-users, and that people who have regular social offline interactions on a weekly basis enjoy a significantly reduction in mortality. Is there a way to have our cake and eat it, too? Can we design technology in such a way that its use comes not at the expense of social offline interaction, but supports it? The goal of this workshop is to examine how we can build technologies that promote offline interactions. | |||
| A pervasive game to promote social offline interaction | | BIBA | Full-Text | 1381-1384 | |
| Maurizio Caon; Elena Mugellini; Omar Abou Khaled | |||
| Human relationships are migrating from the physical world to the virtual world. Pervasive games can be a valuable and enjoyable method to bring people back to the physical world. In this position paper, we present a concept for a pervasive game, which integrates some specific mechanisms aiming at promoting social offline interaction. | |||
| TrainRoulette: promoting situated in-train social interaction between passengers | | BIBA | Full-Text | 1385-1388 | |
| Tiago Camacho; Marcus Foth; Andry Rakotonirainy | |||
| Travelling by public transport is usually regarded as boring and uninteresting. Refraining from talking to the stranger next to you may be due to limitations that are self-imposed and further corroborated by social expectations and cultural norms that govern behaviour in public space. Our design research into passenger interactions on board of urban commuter trains has informed the development of the TrainRoulette prototype -- a mobile app for situated, real-time chats between train passengers. We study the impact of our design intervention on shaping perceptions of the train journey experience. Moreover, we are interested in the implications of such ICT-mediated interactions within train journeys for stimulating social offline interactions and new forms of passenger engagement. | |||
| Linking mobile learning and offline interaction: a case study | | BIBA | Full-Text | 1389-1392 | |
| Inga Saatz | |||
| The use of computer mediated learning has changed the way of learning. To support the collaboration within small ad hoc learning communities, a mobile learning application was enhanced to provide possibilities to share user-generated content. To link the mobile application with the social offline interaction between the learners, the pedagogical scenario of a mobile application was enhanced to offer more possibilities for verbal communication between the learners. Results of a pilot study indicate interferences between computer mediated and face-to-face communication, which leads to a preference of one of the communication channels by the users. | |||
| Utilizing emerging technologies to promote more efficient face-to-face patient-clinician communication | | BIBA | Full-Text | 1393-1396 | |
| Jelena Mirkovic | |||
| In literature there are different projects showing how new information and communications technology (ICT) systems can be used for enhancing communication between and among patients and clinicians over Internet. Besides advantages these systems offer to both patients and clinicians there is also great concern that utilizing new technologies can limit and negatively influence patient-clinician face-to-face communication. This paper underlines these concerns and describes two projects in our research center that promote more effective offline patient-clinician communication. | |||
| A new urban technoscape component: the Smart²Poster | | BIBA | Full-Text | 1397-1400 | |
| Antonella Frisiello; Antonio Lotito; Giovanni Luca Spoto; Vito Macchia; Thomas Bolognesi; Francesco Ruà | |||
| This paper presents the Smart²Poster concept, based on a traditional visual communication tool enhanced by the integration of a proximity technology such as the Near Field Communication (NFC). The concept has been designed and prototyped to study a situated interaction modality, bridging digital information and the surrounding physical world, by means of familiar objects (a poster, a smartphone and/or a TV screen). Two different usage scenarios have driven the design and the implementation of one prototype born to enable offline mediated interactions among public administrations and citizens. | |||
| Exploring design opportunities for social intimacy through everyday objects and practices | | BIBA | Full-Text | 1401-1404 | |
| Hansen Wei; Elisa Giaccardi; Marieke Sonneveld | |||
| This paper describes a design-driven exploration of how social media services can be made tangible through everyday objects and practices. The exploration was focused on the gaps and opportunities of how people experience intimacy in the social media context. We refer to it as social intimacy. | |||
| Sharing bubbles: reflections on offline multi-surface scenarios | | BIBA | Full-Text | 1405-1408 | |
| Stefan Kreitmayer; Robin Laney; Stephen Peake; Yvonne Rogers | |||
| The iPad is typically perceived as a personal device, evoking the image of its owner tapping away -- silently submerged in their private digital bubble. Here we portray iPads in a different light: Face-to-face play in groups, using connected and shared surfaces. Applying the bubble metaphor to multi-user cases, we ask the following questions: (a) How many people can be in one bubble together before it bursts? (b) Can multiple bubbles be connected, nested, etc. and what configurations are beneficial? (c) What design qualities are helpful in keeping beneficial bubble configurations intact and together, rather than bursting or floating away? By contrasting user observations from two multi-iPad scenarios, we illustrate the usefulness of 'bubble dynamics' as a lens for evaluating large offline social applications. We hope to inspire discussion of future use cases, evaluation methods and design recommendations. | |||
| Ubiquitous mobile instrumentation | | BIBA | Full-Text | 1409-1412 | |
| Denzil Ferreira; Christian Koehler; Evangelos Karapanos; Vassilis Kostakos | |||
| Mobile phones allow us to reach people anywhere, at anytime. In addition to the benefits for end users, researchers and developers can also benefit from the powerful devices that participants carry on a daily basis. Collectively, mobile phones form a ubiquitous computer. Ubiquitous Mobile Instrumentation (UbiMI) workshop focuses on using mobile devices as instruments to collect data and conduct mobile user studies, to understand human behavior, routines and gathering users' context. | |||
| Smartphone sensing for distributed swim stroke coaching and research | | BIBA | Full-Text | 1413-1416 | |
| Joe Marshall | |||
| Current methods of swim stroke learning rely on a combination of external
observation by coaches and repetitive drills performed by swimmers. At elite
levels, these may be augmented using complex and expensive augmented pool
environments and video analysis, but these are not available to most
non-professionals.
In this paper, I argue that with the wide range of sensors and outputs on a current smartphone, and existing sports-targeted waterproofing, commodity mobile hardware may allow even un-coached amateur swimmers to access timely feedback on their stroke and to improve their swimming. An early prototype of a swim-sensing system demonstrates the potential of mobiles to sense aspects of the swimming stroke. By using commodity hardware it is open to many potential learners, who may in turn provide high quality data to feed back into the development of swim coaching techniques by sports researchers and practitioners. | |||
| Combination and abstraction of sensors for mobile context-awareness | | BIBA | Full-Text | 1417-1422 | |
| Borja Gamecho; Luis Gardeazabal; Julio Abascal | |||
| In this paper, we describe a context server application for mobile computing. Its main objective is to assist developers to exploit context-aware features in their applications. This approach uses the extraction of new context information using a combination of sensors and proposes a sensing abstraction layer to avoid having to deal with specific hardware. | |||
| What's in the apps for context?: extending a sensor for studying app usage to informing context-awareness | | BIBA | Full-Text | 1423-1426 | |
| Matthias Böhmer; Christian Lander; Antonio Krüger | |||
| Mobile phones became multi-purpose devices supporting their users with large variety of applications for various tasks. Not only the number of available applications is increasing, also the number of applications people are using on their devices is growing, as well as the amount of time people spent on their smartphones daily is getting bigger. In this workshop paper, we briefly describe our past work on understanding mobile application usage. We explain our research tool for measuring mobile application usage, called AppSensor, and discuss possibilities to exploit the information of mobile application usage to inform the reasoning about users' contexts. We contribute our source code to the workshop for a discussion and prototyping of use cases leveraging the information of which application a user is currently using. | |||
| User, device and orientation independent human activity recognition on mobile phones: challenges and a proposal | | BIBA | Full-Text | 1427-1436 | |
| Yunus Emre Ustev; Ozlem Durmaz Incel; Cem Ersoy | |||
| Smart phones equipped with a rich set of sensors are explored as alternative platforms for human activity recognition in the ubiquitous computing domain. However, there exist challenges that should be tackled before the successful acceptance of such systems by the masses. In this paper, we particularly focus on the challenges arising from the differences in user behavior and in the hardware. To investigate the impact of these factors on the recognition accuracy, we performed tests with 20 different users focusing on the recognition of basic locomotion activities using the accelerometer, gyroscope and magnetic field sensors. We investigated the effect of feature types, to represent the raw data, and the use of linear acceleration for user, device and orientation-independent activity recognition. | |||
| CrowdHelp: application for improved emergency response through crowdsourced information | | BIBA | Full-Text | 1437-1446 | |
| Liliya I. Besaleva; Alfred C. Weaver | |||
| Emergency resources are often insufficient to satisfy fully the demands for professional help and supplies after a public disaster. Furthermore, in a mass casualty situation, the emphasis shifts from ensuring the best possible outcome for each individual patient to ensuring the best possible outcome for the greatest number of patients. In the past several years, an ongoing movement among crisis management organizations is the incorporation of ubiquitous Web 2.0 tools into their practices for the improvement of their critical situations response. In unison with this trend and the latest discoveries in crowdsourcing, we have developed a system, called CrowdHelp, for real time patient assessment which uses mobile electronic triaging accomplished via crowdsourced and sensor-detected information. With the use of our system, emergency management professionals receive most of the information they need for preparing themselves to perform a timely and accurate treatment of their patients even before dispatching a response team to the event. | |||
| Evaluation of challenges in human subject studies "in-the-wild" using subjects' personal smartphones | | BIBA | Full-Text | 1447-1456 | |
| Mattia Gustarini; Selim Ickin; Katarzyna Wac | |||
| The experimental setting of Human Mobile Computer Interaction (HCI) studies is moving from the controlled laboratory to the user's daily-life environments, while employing the users' own smartphones. These studies are challenging for both new and expert researchers in human subject studies in the HCI field. Within the last three years, we conducted three different smartphone-based user studies. From these studies, we have derived key challenges that we successfully overcame during their execution. In this paper, we present the outcomes and explain the adopted solutions for the challenges identified in the design, development and execution, and data analysis phases during the user studies. Our goal is to give newcomers and junior researchers a practical view on our conducted studies, and help practitioners to reflect on their own studies and possibly apply the proposed solutions. | |||
| How AdkintunMobile measured the world | | BIBA | Full-Text | 1457-1462 | |
| Javier Bustos-Jiménez; Gabriel Del Canto; Sebastián Pereira; Felipe Lalanne; José Piquer; Gabriel Hourton; Alfredo Cádiz; Victor Ramiro | |||
| On this article we present the Adkintun Mobile Project: using passive monitors to measure the Quality of Service of Chilean Mobile Internet Providers, based on the metrics of antenna coverage and Internet connectivity. We present the main ideas, design decisions, development issues and setbacks of the project. Our contribution is to present to the readers the whole process of a project like this, which is based in volunteering and political decisions. | |||
| Wearable systems for industrial augmented reality applications | | BIBA | Full-Text | 1463-1466 | |
| Christian Buergy; Holger Kenn | |||
| Augmented Reality (AR) is a successful application area of Wearable Computing, especially for professional, industrial settings, in which mobility is an important factor. With the proliferation of mobile technology in the workplace, wearable computing research can offer a valuable contribution to the usability of mobile solutions, such as the use of context information to inform devices and services of the current task and user situation, relieve professionals of tedious and repetitive information entry tasks and increase worker safety in complex and hazardous environments. Wearable AR systems in general are widely utilized in various domains, including architecture, military, tourism, navigation, and entertainment. Such diverse usages impose several challenges on researchers from both areas of Augmented Reality and Wearable Computing, such as interaction, activity and context recognition, wearability, design, and modeling. For the second Workshop on Wearable Systems for Industrial Augmented Reality Applications, we have chosen the motto "How to industrialize wearable AR?" We have invited researchers from the relevant disciplines to present novel works and discuss the applications of state-of-the-art Wearable Computing research to Augmented Reality systems. The workshop will provide an opportunity for directed discussion sessions to identify current issues, research topics, and solution approaches, which lead to the proposal of future research directions. | |||
| Towards a component-based platform for industrial AR | | BIBA | Full-Text | 1467-1470 | |
| Tim Verbelen; Pieter Simoens; Bart Dhoedt | |||
| The roll-out of AR solutions in industrial environments goes beyond technical requirements and involves challenges regarding software deployment, management and maintenance. In this paper we present a lightweight runtime environment for AR applications, using a component-based management platform providing easy deployment, updates and reuse of software components. | |||
| pARnorama: 360 degree interactive video for augmented reality prototyping | | BIBA | Full-Text | 1471-1474 | |
| Matthias Berning; Takuro Yonezawa; Till Riedel; Jin Nakazawa; Michael Beigl; Hide Tokuda | |||
| Designing novel and meaningful interactions in the domain of Augmented Reality (AR) requires an efficient and appropriate methodology. A user centered design process requires the construction and evaluation of several prototypes with increasing technical fidelity. Although the main content of the application can already be conveyed with prerendered video, one of the main interactions in AR -- the user-selected viewpoint -- is only available in a very late stage. We propose the use of panoramic 360° video for scenario based user evaluation, where the user can select his point of view during playback. Initial users report a high degree of immersion in the constructed scenario, even for handheld AR. | |||
| Evaluating customer expectance of mixed reality applications in order picking | | BIBA | Full-Text | 1475-1478 | |
| Markus Ehmann | |||
| The paper evaluates the triggering criteria for a successful implementation of Mixed Reality in order picking from the decision makers point of view. Relevant criteria are derived with the use of semi-structured interviews and analysed inductively and deductively. The final set of parameters is then presented. | |||
| Diffractive and holographic optics as optical combiners in head mounted displays | | BIBA | Full-Text | 1479-1482 | |
| Bernard Kress; Meimei Shin | |||
| We review in this paper the various architectures that have been developed in industry to implement see-through head-mounted display (HMD) optics, especially for the consumer electronics market. We will focus our investigations on holographic and diffractive optics. | |||
| The bumpy road of bringing wearable augmented reality systems to market | | BIBA | Full-Text | 1483-1486 | |
| Christian Buergy; Joerg Seitz | |||
| Wearable Augmented Reality systems are still expensive niche products and not yet widespread. Three main components need to be available for a successful market entry: affordable and user-friendly hardware; reliably and easy to use software and SDKs; and the necessary data structure for exact and informative augmentation. This paper lists some lessons-learned along the road to a wearable AR market. | |||
| WoT 2013: fourth international workshop on the web of things | | BIBA | Full-Text | 1487-1494 | |
| Simon Mayer; Vlad Trifa; Dave Raggett; Dominique Guinard | |||
| We propose a workshop on the topic of the Web of Things, which is about extending the Internet of Things concept beyond the connection of things and considering issues like heterogeneity, scalability, and usability with respect to pervasive computing. The goal of this initiative is to reuse the architectural principles that made the Web successful and apply them to smart devices, thereby making real-world objects first-class citizens of the Web. The approach taken by the Web of Things initiative is to look at the problems and research issues that emerge when considering the interaction of heterogeneous devices within composite applications. Continuing the successful Web of Things workshop series, this workshop aims at further exploring the use of technologies and principles at the core of the Web to provide methods for a seamless integration of physical devices. In particular, our goal is to foster discussion on systems towards a real-time Web of Things and the discovery, search, and composition of services provided by Web-enabled devices. | |||
| CoAP for the web of things: from tiny resource-constrained devices to the web browser | | BIBA | Full-Text | 1495-1504 | |
| Matthias Kovatsch | |||
| The Constrained Application Protocol (CoAP) is a new Web protocol standardized by the IETF. It is not a mere compression of HTTP, but a re-design from scratch following the REST architectural style. Thus, its features are tailored for Internet of Things (IoT) applications and machine-to-machine (M2M) scenarios with highly resource-constrained devices. While this makes CoAP very interesting for the Web of Things (WoT) initiative, it is still detached from the Web world of browsers and intuitive user interaction. We present the first attempts to unite these two worlds, so that everyday objects endowed with tiny, low-cost computing devices can become first class citizens of the Web. Our Copper (Cu) project brings CoAP support to the Web browser and has been out in the wild since late 2010. Thus, we were able to conduct a user study among industry and research developers who know both, Web-based CoAP and earlier proprietary protocols for networked embedded systems. The result shows that industry developers and those with longer experience agree even more that Internet protocols and patterns from the Web ease application development for tiny, resource-constrained devices. | |||
| Semantic metadata to support device interaction in smart environments | | BIBA | Full-Text | 1505-1514 | |
| Simon Mayer; Gianin Basler | |||
| Facilitating the interaction of human users and machines with smart devices is important to drive the successful adoption of the Internet of Things in people's homes and at their workplaces. In this paper, we present a system that helps users control their smart environment, by embedding semantic metadata in the representations of smart things. The system enables users to specify a desirable state of their smart environment and produces a machine-readable description that details which steps are necessary to reach this state, where each step corresponds to a Web request to a smart device. A client application that, for instance, runs on the user's smartphone, then implements these steps to reconfigure the user's smart environment. We report on our experiences when integrating semantic technologies with smart devices and on two use cases from the home and office automation domains that we implemented in our office space. | |||
| A RESTful and decentralised implementation of open objects | | BIBA | Full-Text | 1515-1524 | |
| Paulo Ricca; Kostas Stathis | |||
| We show how to instantiate an existing framework for Open Objects to support a case-study for the Internet of Things. The resulting prototype illustrates the feasibility of the framework for a particular class of applications where physical objects with computational capabilities can collaborate in a decentralised manner. The framework described forms an initial step towards End-User Development on such complex distributed environments. | |||
| Temporally-relaxed conditions for activation of services in the web of things | | BIBA | Full-Text | 1525-1534 | |
| Martin Alexander Neumann; Daniel Hassler; Yong Ding; Till Riedel; Michael Beigl | |||
| We present a language of temporal conditions for detecting concurrent events in embedded Web-enabled devices, and for triggering pervasive services on these systems. Based on the assumption that evaluating conditions on distributed devices is relevant for providing robustness and to foster scalability and web real-time, we discuss the feasibility of in-situ evaluation of the proposed conditions and conduct a performance study. In a smart environments use case, it is illustrated how the language can be used to state activation concerns of services on distributed Web resources. Our proposed architecture integrates the language with the Web of Things to foster simplified development of applications that mash up Web-enabled devices. | |||
| Reconsidering the social web of things: position paper | | BIBA | Full-Text | 1535-1544 | |
| Andrei Ciortea; Olivier Boissier; Antoine Zimmermann; Adina Magda Florea | |||
| The notion of a Social Web of Things (SWoT) appears in recent works at the convergence of the Social Web and the Web of Things. In our vision, a third dimension is needed: pro-activeness. We propose to extend and transform social networks by integrating autonomous and proactive things. In this paper, we discuss the evolution of the Web on several dimensions, leading to our vision for the SWoT. We discuss the challenges that need to be addressed, a possible approach for addressing them and we illustrate the applicability of the SWoT through a motivating scenario. | |||
| Thing broker: a Twitter for things | | BIBA | Full-Text | 1545-1554 | |
| Ricardo Aparecido Perez de Almeida; Michael Blackstock; Rodger Lea; Roberto Calderon; Antonio Francisco do Prado; Helio Crestana Guardia | |||
| In the Web of Things, standard web technologies and protocols are used to represent and communicate with physical and virtual things. One challenge toward this vision is integrating things with different characteristics, protocols, interfaces and constraints while maintaining the simplicity and flexibility required for a variety of applications. In this paper we present the Thing Broker, a core platform for Web of Things that provides RESTFul interfaces to things using a Twitter-based set of abstractions and communication model. We present the key abstractions, a reference implementation and explain how a typical WoT application can be created using Thing Broker. We finish with a preliminary evaluation and draw some lessons from our experiences. | |||
| Offering web-of-things connectivity to building networks | | BIBA | Full-Text | 1555-1564 | |
| Gérôme Bovet; Jean Hennebert | |||
| Building management systems (BMS) are nowadays present in new and renovated buildings, relying on dedicated networks. The presence of various building networks leads to problems of heterogeneity, especially for developing BMS. In this paper, we propose to leverage on the Web-of-Things (WoT) framework, using well-known standard technologies of the Web like HTTP and RESTful APIs for standardizing the access to devices seen from an application point of view. We present the implementation of two gateways using the WoT approach for exposing KNX and EnOcean device capabilities as Web services, allowing a fast integration in existing and new management systems. | |||
| Toward interoperability in a web of things | | BIBA | Full-Text | 1565-1574 | |
| Michael Blackstock; Rodger Lea | |||
| In this position paper we explore the challenges and issues around interoperability in the web of things. A key concern is how to increase interoperability while maintaining a high degree of innovation and exploration in the community. To that end we propose a hub-centric approach toward interoperability consisting of four levels or stages. We are working to validate this approach in the context of a large-scale IoT ecosystem project consisting of eight IoT hubs in different domains where a key requirement is hub-to-hub and hub- application interoperability. | |||