UbiComp 2007 will introduce a new instrument to promote and encourage high quality research in the area of UbiComp: The UbiComp Challenge. It is a field test intended to accelerate research, development and applicability of UbiComp technology.

Using an “eating your own dog’s food” approach, the UbiComp2007 Challenge is seeking for submissions of how to implement an audience voting system to finally determine the winner of the “Best Presentation Award” which will be given at UbiComp2007 for the first time. The central requirement is that the proposed solution makes clever and efficient use of UbiComp technology, and can actually be implemented by the proposers before and used at the conference in September 2007.

The conference organizers reserve a grant of up to 2000 EUR to buy necessary equipment claimed and justified by the best proposal.

The challenge call is intentionally underspecified in terms of approaches and technologies to allow for a creative and innovative scientific solution employing all kinds of ubiquitous computing technologies and techniques that are appropriately addressing the problem space.

The challenge offers an excellent way to showcase tangible results of ubiquitous computing research and development to approx. 500 attendees from academia and industry, which is also the amount of people which are expected to use the winner’s system at the same time, so it should scale adequately. We believe that the experiences and findings from developing and running a system of this scale provide valuable results to the UbiComp community.

The UbiComp Challenge committee will carefully review all submissions to identify the most appealing approach, which is still realistic to be implemented in the given timeframe:

• Submission Deadline: Feb 01, 2007
• Notification: Mar 15, 2007
• Conference: Sep 16-19, 2007

We expect submissions in form of an abstract that describes the ubicomp technology being adopted and discusses the novelty and distinguishing ideas, but also provide justification for the feasibility of the approach and cost estimates. The challenge abstract of the best five submissions will be published in the Conference Supplement and should therefore be self-contained. The best submissions are also given the opportunity to showcase their apporaches in the UbiComp demo program.

Submit your proposals as PDF document to challenge(at)ubicomp2007.org

Links:

• http://www.ubicomp2007.org/
• http://www.ubicomp2007.org/calls/#Chall

The UNESCO Digital Art Award 2007 is organized in association with the Sharjah Biennial 8 (4 April – 4 June 2007, Sharjah, United Arab Emirates) on the theme of “STILL LIFE – Art, Ecology and the Politics of Change”.

Young artists are invited to reflect on how urban spaces and city environments could be transformed into creative outlets cultivating artistic innovation and new form of expression. Potential applicants to the award are asked to conceive and design their creative projects that are integral to the theme of sustainable urban development. The total award money is US $10.000, which could be divided and delivered to more than one laureate.

General Guidelines

• Submitted projects should relate to the theme and topics of the award
• The applicants must submit one project through the above-mentioned online YDC application – http://unesco.sjsu.edu/
• The user name and password of the online application would be distributed to the candidates once they have sent their CVs and completed entry forms to the UNESCO DigiArts Team digiarts@unesco.org
• Collaborative participation from more than one artist is highly welcomed
• Young, talented people from under-represented countries are especially encouraged to participate.

Deadlines and submission Materials

Preparatory materials by 31 December 2006:

• CV and biographies of participating artist(s)
• Completed Registration form

Final materials by 16 February 2007:

• Creative projects submitted online http://unesco.sjsu.edu
• Written documentation on the process of building the creative projects with supporting audio-visual materials

Information also available on the UNESCO DigiArts portal: http://www.unesco.org/culture/digiarts/award

Call for Papers: UE+/User Experience Plus, Designing Pleasurable Products and Interfaces 2007.

August 22 – 25, University of Art and Design Helsinki, Finland

“User Experience” has become a key word in design over the last decade. It articulated disappointment with usability research in the 1990s, bringing to the fore designers traditional skill, an ability to create products and interfaces that are a joy to use and, at best, exciting.

In many ways, the concept has been successful. It has become a cornerstone in many leading design programs all over the world. It has generated theoretical discussion. It has rejuvenated philosophical debate in design research. It has found a home not just in research, but also in design education.

However, as all concepts, this notion has been gathering dust over the years. Designers and researchers in many parts of the world have been going beyond user experience. While taking the lesson from what has been learned, they prefer to use more specific concepts, including concepts such like affective interaction, rich interaction, and co-experience.

Designing Pleasurable Products and Interfaces 2007 will welcome contributions that explore these developments. It encourages:

• Conceptual contributions backed up with designs and empirical research.
• New innovative research that builds on user experience, but add t it.
• Methodological papers and designs that extend user experience research.
• Theoretical reflections.

http://designresearch.uiah.fi/dppi07/index.php

Performing places, event mentioned in an earlier IPCity newsletter (https://websites.fraunhofer.de/Ipcity_eu/?p=24), has updated their website (not mentioned in the earlier news item). Check it out: http://www.m-cult.org/performingplaces/

Performing Places brings together artists, researchers and developers whose work touches on the experiential, affective and political aspects of urban and technological life, and who share an interest in inventive artistic and technical practices of the urban environment.

Even though the event is already passed, check out the site later this year since presentations from the Performing Places seminar will be published online in November 2006, as well as the proceedings that will be published online by the end of 2006.

http://www.m-cult.org/performingplaces/publishing.htm

Helsinki Institute for Information Technology (HIIT) is a co-organising partner for the event, as well as an IPCity project partner.

The 3rd International Conference on Enactive Interfaces, promoted by the European Network of Excellence ENACTIVE INTERFACES, will be held in Montpellier (France) on November 20-21, 2006.

The aim of the conference is to encourage the emergence of a multidisciplinary research community in a new field of research and on a new generation of human-computer interfaces called Enactive Interfaces.

Enactive Interfaces are inspired by a fundamental concept of “interaction” that has not been exploited by other approaches to the design of human-computer interface technologies. Mainly, interfaces have been designed to present information via symbols, or icons.

In the symbolic approach, information is stored as words, mathematical symbols or other symbolic systems, while in the iconic approach information is stored in the form of visual images, such as diagrams and illustrations.

ENACTIVE knowledge is information gained through perception-action interactions with the environment. Examples include information gained by grasping an object, by hefting a stone, or by walking around an obstacle that occludes our view. It is gained through intuitive movements, of which we often are not aware. Enactive knowledge is inherently multimodal, because motor actions alter the stimulation of multiple perceptual systems. Enactive knowledge is essential in tasks such as driving a car, dancing, playing a musical instrument, modelling objects from clay, performing sports, and so on.

Enactive knowledge is neither symbolic nor iconic. It is direct, in the sense that it is natural and intuitive, based on experience and the perceptual consequences of motor acts.

ENACTIVE / 06 will highlight convergences between the concept of Enaction and the sciences of complexity. Biological, cognitive, perceptual or technological systems are complex dynamical systems exhibiting (in)stability properties that are consequential for the agent-environment interaction. The conference will provide new insights, through the prism of ENACTIVE COMPLEXITY, about human interaction with multimodal interfaces.

http://www.enactive2006.org/
HIIT (an IPCity partner) presents a poster in the conference under the title “CoMedia: Integrating context cues into mobile group media for spectators”.

UbiComp 2007 invites original, high-quality research papers in the areas of ubiquitous, mobile, embedded, and handheld computing. The conference provides a forum for original research that enables new capabilities, appropriate security and privacy, improved user experiences, and simplified and powerful development and deployment practices. In addition, we are interested in studies of existing and emerging technologies, everyday use of technologies, and insightful commentary on the state of the field.

Researchers are encouraged to submit papers on the following topics:

• Inferring the state of the user, such as location, activity, intentions, resources, and capabilities in the past, present, and future
• Developing ubicomp systems, including representations, architecture, middleware, resource management, and service discovery
• Embedding computation for new user interfaces, assistive technologies, communication, novel sensors, intelligent environments, wearable computing, and continuous monitoring and actuation
• Building ubicomp systems for health, gaming, socializing, and other applications
• Ensuring user trust through privacy and security
• Understanding ubicomp and its consequences through conceptual models, hard-won experience, user studies, business scenarios, and real deployments

UbiComp has a history of being a very selective conference, and there is no desire to reduce expectations on quality. In an effort to enhance the breadth of the conference, we aim to increase the number of accepted full papers to approximately 40 for this year, which is up from 30 last year and 22 the year before. Presentations will be scheduled in a dualtrack format. The conference will institute a process for nominating and selecting awards for best paper and presentations at the conference.

Submissions will be peer-reviewed by members of the program committee and by selected expert reviewers. Papers will be evaluated on the basis of originality, significance of contribution, technical correctness, overall appeal to the general UbiComp reader, and presentation. Papers submitted must not have been previously published nor currently under review for any publication with an ISBN, ISSN, or DOI number. If submitted work may appear to overlap with the authors’ previous work, the authors should email the PC chairs [2] directly to explain how the new work is different. All reviewers will be instructed to keep submissions confidential, although submissions must be publishable by the cameraready deadline.

Accepted papers will be published in Springer’s Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS), and all submissions should be formatted according to their guidelines [3]. Misformatted submissions, or those longer than 18 pages, are subject to rejection without review. Shorter submissions will not be penalized, and each submission’s length should be appropriate for its content. One author from each accepted paper will be required to attend the conference to present their work.

Paper submissions must be anonymized to facilitate blind review. Authors are encouraged to take care throughout the entire document to minimize references that may reveal the identity of the authors or their institutions. Relevant references to an author’s previous research should not be suppressed but instead referenced in a neutral way. Papers should be submitted as PDF files through PCS at [4].

Important Dates

• 9 March — Paper submissions due (23:59 PST)
• 25 May — Accept/reject notifications
• 29 June — Camera ready papers due
• 16-19 September — UbiComp 2007 in Innsbruck

Program Chairs

John Krumm, Microsoft Research, USA
Gregory Abowd, Georgia Tech, USA
Aruna Seneviratne, NICTA, Australia

Conference Chair

Thomas Strang, University of Innsbruck and German Aerospace Center

A PDF version of this CfP is also available.

[1] http://www.ubicomp2007.org/
[2] pcchairs(at)ubicomp2007.org
[3] http://www.springer.com/east/home/computer/lncs?SGWID=5-164-7-72376-0
[4] https://precisionconference.com/~ubicomp

The annual IEEE and ACM International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality (ISMAR) took place this year in Santa Barbara, CA, USA between Oct 22 and Oct 25. Over 160 participants in the field of Mixed and Augmented Reality participated at this conference. The program included different workshops, tutorials, two keynote presentations and presentations of current research in this field. In addition, over 20 live demos where presented at this venue.

In this context, Graz University of Technology represented the IPCity project with one demonstrator. A first prototype of the AR scout for interactive 3D reconstruction could successfully be presented. Discussions with experts in the field of Augmented and Mixed Reality gave promising feedback and contributed to new ideas for this first prototype.

For more information please visit the following web sites:

• ISMAR 2006: http://www.ismar06.org
• ISMAR Demos: http://www.dirkreiners.com/ISMAR06Demos/

For getting more information about the reconstruction prototype please
visit the following page:

• http://studierstube.icg.tu-graz.ac.at/ipcity/scouting.php