Conference

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.

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.

So it’s my first time at CHI. Pretty amazing so far … Will blog about more later.

I’m in the first poster rotation, starting this afternoon: “Towards inferring language expertise using eye tracking” Drop by my poster if you’re around (or try to spot me, I’m wearing the white “Kai@CHI” Shirt today :)).

Here’s the abstract of our work, as well as the link to the paper.

“We present initial work towards recognizing reading activities. This paper describes our efforts detect the English skill level of a user and infer which words are difficult for them to understand. We present an initial study of 5 students and show our findings regarding the skill level assessment. We explain a method to spot difficult words. Eye tracking is a promising technology to examine and assess a user’s skill level.”