Ubicomp

With roughly around 1 month to go, we are busy with demo preparations etc.

I hope to see you in Seattle. This year we have again a couple papers outline work from our students. Attached is a list with draft versions of the papers. I will write a bit about each topic in the next coming weeks.

Oh and if you attend please think about stopping by our Workshop on Ubiquitous Technologies for Augmenting the Human Mind.

Implicit Gaze based Annotations to Support Second Language Learning. Okoso, Ayano and Kunze, Kai and Kise, Koichi. Proceedings of UbiComp'14 Adjunct. 2014. Bibtex.

Wearable Computing for Older Adults -Initial Insights into Head-Mounted Display Usage. Kunze, Kai and Henze, Niels and Kise, Koichi. Proceedings of UbiComp'14 Adjunct. 2014. Bibtex.

Memory Specs-An Annotation System on Google Glass using Document Image Retrieval. Tanaka, Katsuma and Kunze, Kai and Iwata, Motoi and Kise, Koichi. Proceedings of UbiComp'14 Adjunct. 2014. Bibtex.

Smarter Eyewear- Using Commercial EOG Glasses for Activity Recognition. Ishimaru, Shoya and Kunze, Kai and Tanaka, Katsuma and Uema, Uji and Kise, Koichi and Inami, Masahiko. Proceedings of UbiComp'14 Adjunct. 2014. Bibtex.

Position Paper: Brain Teasers - Toward Wearable Computing that Engages Our Mind. Ishimaru, Shoya and Kunze, Kai and Kise, Koichi and Inami, Masahiko. Proceedings of UbiComp'14 Adjunct. 2014. Bibtex.

Usually, I’m not such a big fan of conference openings, yet Friedemann Mattern provided a great intro giving an overview about the origins of Pervasive and Ubicom mentioning all important people and showing nice vintage pictures from Hans Gellersen, Alois Ferscha, Marc Langheinrich, Albrecht Schmidt, Kristof Van Laerhoven etc.

Deeply impressed by the organization, social and general talk quality, I was a bit sceptical before the merger of Pervasive / Ubicom and collocating ISWC, yet it was completely unfounded.

We got some great feedback for Kazuma’s and Shoya’s demos. They both did a great job introducing their work about:

• My Reading Life – Towards Utilizing Eyetracking on Unmodified Tablets and Phones
• Annotate Me – Supporting Active Reading using Real-Time Document Image Retrieval On Mobile Devices

We got also a lof of interest and feedback to Andreas Bulling’s and my work about recognizing document types using only eye gaze. By the way, below are the talk slides and the abstract of the paper. ##ISWC Talk Slides##

##Abstract## Reading is a ubiquitous activity that many people even per- form in transit, such as while on the bus or while walking. Tracking reading enables us to gain more insights about ex- pertise level and potential knowledge of users – towards a reading log tracking and improve knowledge acquisition. As a first step towards this vision, in this work we investigate whether different document types can be automatically de- tected from visual behaviour recorded using a mobile eye tracker. We present an initial recognition approach that com- bines special purpose eye movement features as well as ma- chine learning for document type detection. We evaluate our approach in a user study with eight participants and five Japanese document types and achieve a recognition perfor- mance of 74% using user-independent training.

Full paper link: I know what you are reading – Recognition of Document Types Using Mobile Eye Tracking

This year I’m really looking forward to Ubicomp and ISWC, it’s the first time that Ubicomp and Pervasive merged into one conference and it’s the first time the venue sold out with 700 participants.

I cannot wait to chat with old friends and experts (most are both :)).

The field slowly matures. Especially, the wearable research is really pushing towards prime-time. Most prominently, Google Glass is getting a lot of focus also discussing its impacts on privacy. Yet, there is more and more talk about fitness bracelets/trackers and smart watches. I expect that we see more intelligent clothes and activity recognition work in commercial products in the coming years.

By the way, we have 3 poster papers and 2 demos at Ubicomp and a short paper at ISWC.

###Ubicomp Demos and Posters###

• My Reading Life – Towards Utilizing Eyetracking on Unmodified Tablets and Phones
• Annotate Me – Supporting Active Reading using Real-Time Document Image Retrieval On Mobile Devices
• Activity Recognition and Nutrition Monitoring in Every Day Situations with a Textile Capacitive Neckband

###ISWC paper###

• I know what you are reading – Recognition of Document Types Using Mobile Eye Tracking

Drop by at the demo,poster sessions and/or see me my talk on Thursday.

On a side note, Ubicomp really picks great locations. This year it’s Zurich, next year Seattle and the year after it will be in Osaka. Seems I might be staying longer in Japan, than I originally planned ;)