Keynote by Pertti Huuskonen: Ten Views to Context Awareness

Pertti Huuskonen from Nokia presented his keynote at Percom in Mannheim. I worked with Pertti in 1999 on a European Project TEA – creating context-aware phones [1].

After telling us about CERN and some achievements in physics he raised the issue that an essential skill of humans is that they are context-aware. Basically culture is context-awareness – learning how to appropriately behave in life is essential to be accepted. We do this by looking at other people and by learning how how they act and how others react. “Knowing how to behave” we become fit for social life and this questions the notion of intuitive use as it seems that most of it is learned or copied from others.

He gave a nice overview of how we can context-awareness is useful. One very simple example he showed is that people typically create context at the start of a phone call.

One example of a future to come may be ubiquitous spam – where context may be the enabler but also the enabler for blogging adverts. He also showed the potential of context in the large, see Nokoscope. His keynote was refreshing – and as clearly visible he has a good sense of humor ;-)

[1] Schmidt, A., Aidoo, K. A., Takaluoma, A., Tuomela, U., Laerhoven, K. V., and Velde, W. V. 1999. Advanced Interaction in Context. In Proceedings of the 1st international Symposium on Handheld and Ubiquitous Computing (Karlsruhe, Germany, September 27 – 29, 1999). H. Gellersen, Ed. Lecture Notes In Computer Science, vol. 1707. Springer-Verlag, London, 89-101.

>Keynote by Pertti Huuskonen: Ten Views to Context Awareness

>Pertti Huuskonen from Nokia presented his keynote at Percom in Mannheim. I worked with Pertti in 1999 on a European Project TEA – creating context-aware phones [1].

After telling us about CERN and some achievements in physics he raised the issue that an essential skill of humans is that they are context-aware. Basically culture is context-awareness – learning how to appropriately behave in life is essential to be accepted. We do this by looking at other people and by learning how how they act and how others react. “Knowing how to behave” we become fit for social life and this questions the notion of intuitive use as it seems that most of it is learned or copied from others.

He gave a nice overview of how we can context-awareness is useful. One very simple example he showed is that people typically create context at the start of a phone call.

One example of a future to come may be ubiquitous spam – where context may be the enabler but also the enabler for blogging adverts. He also showed the potential of context in the large, see Nokoscope. His keynote was refreshing – and as clearly visible he has a good sense of humor ;-)

[1] Schmidt, A., Aidoo, K. A., Takaluoma, A., Tuomela, U., Laerhoven, K. V., and Velde, W. V. 1999. Advanced Interaction in Context. In Proceedings of the 1st international Symposium on Handheld and Ubiquitous Computing (Karlsruhe, Germany, September 27 – 29, 1999). H. Gellersen, Ed. Lecture Notes In Computer Science, vol. 1707. Springer-Verlag, London, 89-101.

Opening of Percom, Keynote by Kurt Rothermel

About 300 people are at Percom 2010, which is held in the palace in Mannheim – and amazing location! The conference had 233 submission and is truly international (1/3 of the papers come from Europe, 1/3 from America, and 1/3 from Asia/pacific) and highly competitive (acceptance rate of about 12%).

Kurt Rothermel from the University of Stuttgart presented the opening Keynote on Large-scale Context Management. He presented a set of interesting example from Nexus (Collaborative Research Center 627, Spatial World Models for Mobile Context-Aware Applications) that showed the challenge in large scale systems. The size of the problem is can be easily seen when considering that half the population of the planet is using a mobile device and hence needs to be located… Now imagine everyone is contributing sensor data at a rate of one update per minute… For more details on their work see their 2009 percom paper [1]. In his talk he gave also some references to other interesting research platforms in this space: SensorWeb/SensorMap by Microsoft [2] and SensorPlanet by Nokia [3].

[1] Lange, R., Cipriani, N., Geiger, L., Grossmann, M., Weinschrott, H., Brodt, A., Wieland, M., Rizou, S., and Rothermel, K. 2009. Making the World Wide Space happen: New challenges for the Nexus context platform. In Proceedings of the 2009 IEEE international Conference on Pervasive Computing and Communications (March 09 – 13, 2009). PERCOM. IEEE Computer Society, Washington, DC, 1-4. DOI= http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/PERCOM.2009.4912782

[2] Kansal, A., Nath, S., Liu, J., and Zhao, F. 2007. SenseWeb: An Infrastructure for Shared Sensing. IEEE MultiMedia 14, 4 (Oct. 2007), 8-13. DOI= http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/MMUL.2007.82

[3] Abdelzaher, T., Anokwa, Y., Boda, P., Burke, J., Estrin, D., Guibas, L., Kansal, A., Madden, S., and Reich, J. 2007. Mobiscopes for Human Spaces. IEEE Pervasive Computing 6, 2 (Apr. 2007), 20-29. DOI= http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/MPRV.2007.38

>Opening of Percom, Keynote by Kurt Rothermel

>About 300 people are at Percom 2010, which is held in the palace in Mannheim – and amazing location! The conference had 233 submission and is truly international (1/3 of the papers come from Europe, 1/3 from America, and 1/3 from Asia/pacific) and highly competitive (acceptance rate of about 12%).

Kurt Rothermel from the University of Stuttgart presented the opening Keynote on Large-scale Context Management. He presented a set of interesting example from Nexus (Collaborative Research Center 627, Spatial World Models for Mobile Context-Aware Applications) that showed the challenge in large scale systems. The size of the problem is can be easily seen when considering that half the population of the planet is using a mobile device and hence needs to be located… Now imagine everyone is contributing sensor data at a rate of one update per minute… For more details on their work see their 2009 percom paper [1]. In his talk he gave also some references to other interesting research platforms in this space: SensorWeb/SensorMap by Microsoft [2] and SensorPlanet by Nokia [3].

[1] Lange, R., Cipriani, N., Geiger, L., Grossmann, M., Weinschrott, H., Brodt, A., Wieland, M., Rizou, S., and Rothermel, K. 2009. Making the World Wide Space happen: New challenges for the Nexus context platform. In Proceedings of the 2009 IEEE international Conference on Pervasive Computing and Communications (March 09 – 13, 2009). PERCOM. IEEE Computer Society, Washington, DC, 1-4. DOI= http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/PERCOM.2009.4912782

[2] Kansal, A., Nath, S., Liu, J., and Zhao, F. 2007. SenseWeb: An Infrastructure for Shared Sensing. IEEE MultiMedia 14, 4 (Oct. 2007), 8-13. DOI= http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/MMUL.2007.82

[3] Abdelzaher, T., Anokwa, Y., Boda, P., Burke, J., Estrin, D., Guibas, L., Kansal, A., Madden, S., and Reich, J. 2007. Mobiscopes for Human Spaces. IEEE Pervasive Computing 6, 2 (Apr. 2007), 20-29. DOI= http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/MPRV.2007.38

NSF/EU workshop in Mannheim

Mohan Kumar and Marco Conti organized an EU/NSF workshop on Future Directions in Pervasive Computing and Social Networking for Emerging Applications. They managed to get together an interesting set of people and the discussion in the break out session were very enjoyable and I got a number of ideas what really are the challenges to come.

There are the position statements on the web page and at some point the identified grand challenges will be available.

PS: blackboards are still highly effective ;-)

>NSF/EU workshop in Mannheim

>Mohan Kumar and Marco Conti organized an EU/NSF workshop on Future Directions in Pervasive Computing and Social Networking for Emerging Applications. They managed to get together an interesting set of people and the discussion in the break out session were very enjoyable and I got a number of ideas what really are the challenges to come.

There are the position statements on the web page and at some point the identified grand challenges will be available.

PS: blackboards are still highly effective ;-)

CFP: 2nd Int. Conf. on Automotive User Interfaces and Interactive Vehicular Applications

The call for the 2nd International Conference on Automotive User Interfaces and Interactive Vehicular Applications is online – see http://auto-ui.org – AutomotiveUI’10.

The conference will be in Pittsburgh on 11-12 Nov 2010.

Do not miss the submission deadline: 02 July 2010.

The call includes a wide range of topics, including:
  • new concepts for in-car user interfaces
  • multi-modal in-car user interfaces
  • in-car speech user interfaces
  • text input and output while driving
  • multimedia interfaces and in-car entertainment
  • evaluation of in-car user interfaces
  • methods and tools for automotive user interface research
  • development tools and methods for automotive user interfaces
  • automotive user interface frameworks and toolkits
  • detecting and estimating user intentions
  • detecting user distraction and estimating cognitive load
  • user interfaces for assistive functionality
  • biometrics and physiological sensors as a user interface component
  • using sensors and context for interactive experiences in the car
  • user interfaces for information access while driving
  • user interfaces for navigation systems
  • applications and user interfaces for inter-vehicle communication
  • in-car gaming
We enjoyed last years conference in Essen :-) There are several posts online in my blog and we had a conference report in IEEE Pervasive Magazine [1]. Last years proceedings are online in the ACM DL and on the 2009 conference website.

The full call for papers is online at: http://auto-ui.org.

[1] Albrecht Schmidt, Wolfgang Spiessl, Dagmar Kern, “Driving Automotive User Interface Research,” IEEE Pervasive Computing, vol. 9, no. 1, pp. 85-88, Jan.-Mar. 2010, doi:10.1109/MPRV.2010.3.

>CFP: 2nd Int. Conf. on Automotive User Interfaces and Interactive Vehicular Applications

>The call for the 2nd International Conference on Automotive User Interfaces and Interactive Vehicular Applications is online – see http://auto-ui.org – AutomotiveUI’10.

The conference will be in Pittsburgh on 11-12 Nov 2010.

Do not miss the submission deadline: 02 July 2010.

The call includes a wide range of topics, including:
  • new concepts for in-car user interfaces
  • multi-modal in-car user interfaces
  • in-car speech user interfaces
  • text input and output while driving
  • multimedia interfaces and in-car entertainment
  • evaluation of in-car user interfaces
  • methods and tools for automotive user interface research
  • development tools and methods for automotive user interfaces
  • automotive user interface frameworks and toolkits
  • detecting and estimating user intentions
  • detecting user distraction and estimating cognitive load
  • user interfaces for assistive functionality
  • biometrics and physiological sensors as a user interface component
  • using sensors and context for interactive experiences in the car
  • user interfaces for information access while driving
  • user interfaces for navigation systems
  • applications and user interfaces for inter-vehicle communication
  • in-car gaming
We enjoyed last years conference in Essen :-) There are several posts online in my blog and we had a conference report in IEEE Pervasive Magazine [1]. Last years proceedings are online in the ACM DL and on the 2009 conference website.

The full call for papers is online at: http://auto-ui.org.

[1] Albrecht Schmidt, Wolfgang Spiessl, Dagmar Kern, “Driving Automotive User Interface Research,” IEEE Pervasive Computing, vol. 9, no. 1, pp. 85-88, Jan.-Mar. 2010, doi:10.1109/MPRV.2010.3.

Poker surface on youtube – 5000 hits in a day :-)

A video describing the poker surface is available in youtube. It is an implementation of a poker game on a combination of a multi-touch table and mobile phones, for details see [1].



It is amazing how quickly it is picked up. It gained about 5000 views in a single day and it is already features in engadget.com, gizmodo.com, ubergizmo.com and on recombu.com. But as the comments on pokerolymp.com show the real poker players are hard to impress…

This really makes me think how research, publishing, and public perception of research is changing – rapidly…

[1] Shirazi, A. S., Döring, T., Parvahan, P., Ahrens, B., and Schmidt, A. 2009. Poker surface: combining a multi-touch table and mobile phones in interactive card games. In Proceedings of the 11th international Conference on Human-Computer interaction with Mobile Devices and Services (Bonn, Germany, September 15 – 18, 2009). MobileHCI ’09. ACM, New York, NY, 1-2. DOI= http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1613858.1613945

>Poker surface on youtube – 5000 hits in a day :-)

>A video describing the poker surface is available in youtube. It is an implementation of a poker game on a combination of a multi-touch table and mobile phones, for details see [1].



It is amazing how quickly it is picked up. It gained about 5000 views in a single day and it is already features in engadget.com, gizmodo.com, ubergizmo.com and on recombu.com. But as the comments on pokerolymp.com show the real poker players are hard to impress…

This really makes me think how research, publishing, and public perception of research is changing – rapidly…

[1] Shirazi, A. S., Döring, T., Parvahan, P., Ahrens, B., and Schmidt, A. 2009. Poker surface: combining a multi-touch table and mobile phones in interactive card games. In Proceedings of the 11th international Conference on Human-Computer interaction with Mobile Devices and Services (Bonn, Germany, September 15 – 18, 2009). MobileHCI ’09. ACM, New York, NY, 1-2. DOI= http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1613858.1613945