[Air-l] CFP - Workshop on Location-Awareness and Community

[Quentin (Gad) Jones]

Call for Participation

Workshop on Location-Awareness and Community
Deadline: June 20, 2005

ECSCW 2005
9th European Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work
September 18-22, 2005, Paris, France

http://www.haifa.il.ibm.com/conferences/laac05/
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INTRODUCTION
Several real-world tracking and positioning technologies, such as GPS,
802.11, Bluetooth and RFID tags, have become mature enough to be
widely adopted and employed in systems linking information and
communication to geographic places and people. The challenge is to
better understand what can be presented to users in a useful and
unobtrusive way.

There are many examples of different approaches to this challenge. Key
examples include systems that associate digital text to physical
places enabling users to leave others, or themselves, relevant notes,
recommendations and reminders. Several systems leverage location for
mobile tour guides or to map users' activities or position. Location
is also used to enhance remote awareness of others and to infer
availability for communication. A major challenge with location-based
systems is how to automatically learn and identify a user's position.
Low-level sensor data must be filtered and abstracted to a meaningful
granularity (e.g., GPS coordinates to "heading to the gym", or
wireless LAN signals to "room 636").

GOALS and OBJECTIVES
Many challenges remain to effectively leverage location awareness to
support community. These problems span the social and the technical
fields—tensions between privacy control and awareness, from raw data
to effectively processed meaningful inferences. Thus, there is a wide
range of areas for fruitful discussion. These include, but are not
limited to, the following areas.

Algorithmic:
- Automatically learning and identifying a user's location in a
meaningful way
- Methods for labeling locations and sharing descriptions
- Rich representation of locations; composed of geometric, social, and
temporal properties

Conceptual:
- Place shape behaviour: how people describe places, whether their
descriptions are relevant to others
- How place types relate to people's desire for place-related
awareness and communication with others
- What information people are willing to share about themselves to
enable place-related communication and awareness
- Which lessons learned from online communities are applicable to
non-virtual communities, particularly referring to identity and privacy

Interaction Techniques / User Interface Design:
- Models to ensure people's privacy in presence enabled systems
- UIs for managing complex privacy information and preferences,
particularly on mobile devices
- Designs and implementations of mobile location-aware community
information systems
- Scalable visualizations of people- and place-centered systems
- Creative location-relevant content

WORKSHOP ORGANIZATION
This will be a one-day workshop. Rather than just presentations on the
position papers, we would like it to be interactive. The accepted
papers will be distributed to the participants in advance. We hope to
involve participants in a pre-workshop activity that will help
everyone think about common data from their own diverse perspectives.

During the day, we will have short, five-minute presentations for each
participant to highlight the core ideas in their paper and how they
relate to the workshop topic. The main part of the day will involve a
design exercise, in mixed groups based on expertise. In this exercise,
participants will work on different aspects of a specific scenario,
revolving around our three main themes: Algorithmic, Conceptual, and
Interaction Techniques/UI Design. The last part of the workshop will
be dedicated to re-writing a "solution" for the scenario, using
comments, observations, and technologies from all the participants.

If people are willing, participants could all go out to dinner the
previous night in order to get to know each other before the workshop.

We expect about ten participants, but this could expand if more
submissions are received.


PARTICIPATION
Participants will be selected on the basis of position papers
submitted prior to the workshop. Proposals should be no longer than
six pages in the ECSCW conference format and can address any one of
our three themes (Algorithmic, Conceptual, Interaction Techniques/UI
Design) individually, or any combination of them. Papers should be
clear regarding which elements are conceptual or theoretical and what
has been implemented/verified. Where relevant, details should be given
about the type of community (e.g., work, leisure), and important
contextual factors and social interactions supported. Position papers
should explain how the author’s work relates to the workshop theme. We
are particularly interested in seeing perspectives at a variety of
levels, ranging from meta views to micro-scale analyses.

Submissions should be sent to nmarmas at il.ibm.com by June 20, 2005.
Position papers will be reviewed by the workshop organizers and
notification of acceptance will be given by the first week of July.

We encourage a wide range of participants from diverse backgrounds.

ORGANIZING COMMITTEE
Natalia Marmasse, IBM Research Lab in Haifa
Vladimir Soroka, IBM Research Lab in Haifa
Quentin (Gad) Jones, New Jersey Institute of Technology
Christine Halverson, IBM T.J. Watson Research Lab