UBICOMP / ISWC 2021
VIRTUAL WORKSHOPS

WellComp 2021: 4th International Workshop on Computing forWell-Being

ORGANIZERS

Tadashi Okoshi, Keio University, Fujisawa, Japan
Jin Nakazawa, Keio University, Fujisawa, Japan
Jeong Gil Ko, Yonsei University, Seoul, Korea
Fahim Kawsar, Nokia Bell Labs, Cambridge, United Kingdom
Susanna Pirttikangas, University of Oulu, Oulu, Finland

WORKSHOP SUMMARY

With the advancements in ubiquitous computing, ubicomp technology has deeply spread into our daily lives, including office work, home and house-keeping, health management, transportation, or even urban living environments. Furthermore, beyond the initial metric of computing, such as “efficiency” and “productivity”, the benefits that people (users) benefit on a well-being perspective based on such ubiquitous technology has been greatly paid attention in the recent years. In our third “WellComp” (Computing for Well-being) workshop, we intensively discuss about the contribution of ubiquitous computing towards users’ well-being that covers physical, mental, and social wellness (and their combinations), from the viewpoints of various different layers of computing. After big success of three previous workshops, with strong international organization members in various ubicomp research domains, WellComp 2021 will bring together researchers and practitioners from the academia and industry to explore versatile topics related to well-being and ubiquitous computing.

Call for Papers

http://WellComp.org/

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EarComp 2021: Second International Workshop on Earable Computing

ORGANIZERS

Fahim Kawsar, Nokia Bell Labs, Cambridge, United Kingdom
Dr. Robert Harle, Computer Science and Technology, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, United Kingdom
Alessandro Montanari, Nokia Bell Labs, Cambridge, United Kingdom
Chulhong Min, Nokia Bell Labs, Cambridge, United Kingdom

WORKSHOP SUMMARY

The objective of the 2nd ACM International Workshop on Earable Computing (EarComp 2021) is to provide an academic forum and bring together researchers, practitioners, and design experts to discuss how sensory earables technologies have and can complement human sensing research. It also aims to provide a launchpad for bold and visionary ideas and serve as a catalyst for advancements in this emerging new Earable Computing research space.

Call for Papers

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6th International Workshop on Mental Health and Well-being: Sensing and Intervention

ORGANIZERS

Varun Mishra, Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire, United States
Akane Sano, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Rice University, Houston, Texas, United States
Sahiti Kunchay, Pennsylvania State University, State College, Pennsylvania, United States
Saeed Abdullah, Information Sciences and Technology, Pennsylvania State University, University Park, Pennsylvania, United States
Professor Jakob E. Bardram, Department of Health Technology, Technical University of Denmark
Elizabeth L. Murnane, Thayer School of Engineering, Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire, United States
Tanzeem Choudhury, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, United States
Mirco Musolesi, Department of Geography, University College London, London, United Kingdom
Giovanna Nunes Vilaza, Copenhagen Center for Health Technology, Danish Technical University DTU, Kongens Lyngby, Denmark
Rajalakshmi Nandakumar, Cornell Tech, New York City, New York, United States
Tauhidur Rahman, College of Information and Computer Sciences, University of Massachusetts Amherst, Amherst, Massachusetts, United States

WORKSHOP SUMMARY

Mental health issues affect a significant portion of the world’s population and can result in debilitating and life-threatening outcomes. To address this increasingly pressing healthcare challenge, there is a need to research novel approaches for early detection and prevention. Toward this, ubiquitous systems can play a central role in revealing and tracking clinically relevant behaviors, contexts, and symptoms. Further, such systems can passively detect relapse onset and enable the opportune delivery of effective intervention strategies. However, despite their clear potential, the uptake of ubiquitous technologies into clinical mental healthcare is slow, and a number of challenges still face the overall efficacy of such technology-based solutions. The goal of this workshop is to bring together researchers interested in identifying, articulating, and addressing such issues and opportunities. Following the success of this workshop for the last five years, we aim to continue facilitating the UbiComp community in developing a holistic approach for sensing and intervention in the context of mental health.

Call for Papers

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Making Sense of Emotion Sensing: Workshop on Quantifying Human Emotions

ORGANIZERS

Benjamin Tag, School of Computing and Information Systems, University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
Dr Sarah Webber, School of Computing and Information Systems, University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
Dr Greg Wadley, School of Computing and Information Systems, The University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Vic, Australia
Vanessa Bartlett, Faculty of Arts, University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
Jorge Goncalves, School of Computing and Information Systems, University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Australia
Peter Koval, School of Psychological Sciences, The University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Australia
Petr Slovak, Department of Informatics, King’s College London, London, United Kingdom
Associate Professor Wally Smith, School of Computing & Information Systems, The University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
Tom Hollenstein, Department of Psychology, Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario, Canada
Anna L Cox, UCL Interaction Centre, University College London, London, United Kingdom
Vassilis Kostakos, School of Computing and Information Systems, University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia

WORKSHOP SUMMARY

The global pandemic and the uncertainty if and when life will return to normality have motivated a series of studies on human mental health. This research has elicited evidence for increasing numbers of anxiety, depression, and overall impaired mental well-being. But, the global COVID-19 pandemic has also created new opportunities for research into quantifying human emotions: remotely, contact-less, in everyday life. The ubiquitous computing community has long been at the forefront of developing, testing, and building user-facing systems that aim at quantifying human emotion. However, rather than aiming at more accurate sensing algorithms, it is time to critically evaluate whether it is actually possible and in what ways it could be beneficial for technologies to be able to detect user emotions. In this workshop, we bring together experts from the fields of Ubiquitous Computing, Human-Computer Interaction, and psychology to – long-overdue – merge their expertise and ask the fundamental questions: how do we make sense of emotion-sensing, can and should we quantify human emotions?

Call for papers

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Workshop on Reviewable and Auditable Pervasive Systems (WRAPS)

ORGANIZERS

Dr Chris Norval, Department of Computer Science & Technology, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, United Kingdom
Dr Richard Cloete, Department of Computer Science & Technology, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, United Kingdom
Dr Milan Markovic, University of Aberdeen, Aberdeen, United Kingdom
Dr Iman Naja, University of Aberdeen, Aberdeen, United Kingdom
Dr Kristin B. Cornelius, Information Studies, UCLA, Thousand Oaks, California, United States

WORKSHOP SUMMARY

Pervasive systems are increasingly being deployed in new and innovative ways – be it in our homes, vehicles, or public spaces. Such systems have the potential to bring a wide range of benefits, blending advanced functionality with the physical environment. However, these systems also have the potential to drive real-world consequences through decisions, interactions, or actuations, and there is a real risk that their use can lead to harms (physical injuries, financial loss, or even death). These concerns appear ever-more prevalent, as a growing sense of distrust has led to calls for more transparency and accountability surrounding the emerging technologies that increasingly pervade our world.

A range of things can—and often do—go wrong, be they technical failure, user error, or otherwise. As such, means to effectively review, understand, and act upon the inner workings of emerging technologies is becoming increasingly important. Means for reviewing and auditing how these systems are built/developed and used are crucial to the ability to determine the cause of failures, prevent re-occurrences, and/or to identify parties at fault. Yet, despite the wider landscape of societal and legal pressures for record keeping and increased accountability, implementing such transparency measures faces a range of challenges.

This workshop will bring together a range of perspectives into how we can better audit and understand the complex, sociotechnical systems that increasingly affect us (whether directly or indirectly). From tools for data capture and retrieval, technical/ethical/legal challenges, and early ideas on concepts of relevance – we intend to solicit submissions that help further our understanding of how pervasive systems can be built to be reviewable and auditable, helping them to be more transparent, trustworthy, and accountable.

Call for Papers

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9th International Workshop on Human Activity Sensing Corpus and Applications (HASCA)

ORGANIZERS

Dr. Kazuya Murao, Ritsumeikan University, Shiga, Japan
Yu Enokibori, Nagoya University, Nagoya, Japan
Hristijan Gjoreski, Ss. Cyril and Methodius University, Skopje, Macedonia, The Former Yugoslav Republic of
Paula Lago, Kyushu Institute of Technology, Kitakyushu, Fukuoka, Japan
Tsuyoshi Okita, Kyushu Institute of Technology, Kitakyushu city, Japan
Pekka Siirtola, University of Oulu, University of Oulu, Oulu, Finland
Kei Hiroi, Kyoto University, Kyoto, Japan
Dr. Philipp M. Scholl, Augmented Human Lab, Bioengineering , Auckland, New Zealand
Mr Mathias Ciliberto, Wearable Technologies Lab, Sensor Technology Research Centre, University of Sussex, Brighton, East Sussex, United Kingdom
Kenta Urano, Graduate School of Engineering, Nagoya University, Nagoya, Aichi, Japan

WORKSHOP SUMMARY

The recognition of complex and subtle human behaviors from wearable sensors will enable next-generation human-oriented computing in scenarios of high societal value (e.g., dementia care). This will require large-scale human activity corpuses and much improved methods to recognize activities and the context in which they occur. This workshop deals with the challenges of designing reproducible experimental setups, running large-scale dataset collection campaigns, designing activity and context recognition methods that are robust and adaptive, and evaluating systems in the real world. We wish to reflect on future methods, such as lifelong learning approaches that allow open-ended activity recognition.

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The Forth Workshop on Eyewear Computing. “Augmenting Social Situations and Democratizing Tools”

ORGANIZERS

Kirill Ragozin, Media Design / Geist, Keio University, Yokohama, Kanagawa, Japan
Kai Kunze, KMD, Keio University, Tokyo, Japan
Teresa Hirzle, Institute of Media Informatics, Ulm University, Ulm, Germany
Benjamin Tag, School of Computing and Information Systems, University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
Yuji Uema, JINS Inc., Tokyo, Japan
Enrico Rukzio, University of Ulm, Ulm, Germany
Dr Jamie A Ward, Computing, Goldsmiths University of London, London, United Kingdom

WORKSHOP SUMMARY

Head-worn sensing, especially embedded in augmented and virtual reality (AR/VR) head-mounted displays and smart glasses is currently increasingly moving away from niche applications and small-scale research prototypes to large-scale consumer adoption (e.g. Oculus Quest 2, Hololens 2, J!NS MEME, Bose Frames). As there are more and more commercially available products and unobtrusive affordable research prototypes, we can extend the Eyewear Community to enable large scale in-situ studies as one of the favored research methodologies in Ubiquitous Computing. As there has been a significant progress in sensing technologies, modalities, as well as several large scale dataset recordings, eyewear student competitions and programming seminars.
Significant progress in sensing technologies and modalities have lead to a constant increase of commercially available products and unobtrusive, affordable research prototypes. These recent advances allow to extend the Eyewear Community to enable large scale in-situ studies, as one of the favored research methodologies in Ubiquitous Computing. One manifestation of this can already be observed in large scale dataset recording, eyewear student competitions and programming seminars.

In this workshop we focus on supporting these large-scale uses of eyewear computing, discussing lessons learned from early deployment and how to empower the community with better hardware/software prototyping tools as well as the establishment of open data sets.

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SensiBlend: Sensing Blended Experiences in Professional and Social Contexts

ORGANIZERS

Himanshu Verma, TU Delft, Delft, Netherlands
Marios Constantinides, Nokia Bell Labs, Cambridge, United Kingdom
Miss Sailin Zhong, University of Fribourg, Human-IST, Fribourg, Switzerland
Abdallah El Ali, Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (CWI), Amsterdam, Netherlands
Hamed Alavi, Human-IST, University of Fribourg, Lausanne, Switzerland

WORKSHOP SUMMARY

Unlike traditional workshops, SensiBlend is a living experiment about the future of remote, hybrid, and blended experiences within professional and other social contexts. The interplay of interpersonal relationships with tools and spaces—digital and physical—has been abruptly challenged and fundamentally altered as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. With this meta-workshop, we seek to scrutinize and advance the role and impact of Ubiquitous Computing in the new “blended” social reality, and raise questions relating to the specific attributes of socio-technical experiences in the future organization of interpersonal relationships. How do we better equip people to deal with blended experiences? What dimensions of socio-technical experiences are at stake? To this end, we will utilize the occasion of a virtual UbiComp in combination with novel remote-working tools and participatory sensing with attendees to collectively examine, discuss, and elicit the potential routes of augmenting social practices in a discourse about the future of blended working, socializing, and living.

Call for Papers

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Wild by Design: Workshop on Designing Ubiquitous Health Monitoring Technologies for Challenging Environments

ORGANIZERS

Diogo Branco, Faculdade de Ciências, Universidade de Lisboa, Lisboa, Portugal
Patrick Carrington, Human-Computer Interaction Institute, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States
Dr Silvia Del Din, Translational and Clinical Research Institute, Newcastle University, Newcastle upon Tyne, United Kingdom
Afsaneh Doryab, School of Engineering and Applied Science, University of Virginia (SSO), Charlottesville, Virginia, United States
Hristijan Gjoreski, Ss. Cyril and Methodius University, Skopje, Macedonia, The Former Yugoslav Republic of
Tiago Guerreiro, University of Lisbon, Lisbon, Portugal
Dr Roisin McNaney, Faculty of Information Technology , Monash University, Melbourne, Australia
Kyle Montague, Northumbria University, Newcastle upon Tyne, Tyne and Wear, United Kingdom
Alisha Pradhan, College of Information Studies, University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland, United States
André Rodrigues, LASIGE, Universidade de Lisboa, Lisboa, Portugal
Julio Vega, Department of Medicine, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States

WORKSHOP SUMMARY

Recent years have shown an emergence of ubiquitous technologies that aim to monitor a person’s health in their day to day. However, albeit focused at a real world setting and technically able, most research is still limited in its real-world coverage, suitability, and adoption. In this workshop, we will focus on the challenges of real world health monitoring deployments to produce forward-looking insights that can shape the way researchers and practitioners think about health monitoring, in platforms and systems that account for the complex environments where they are bound to be used.

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The First Workshop on Multiple Input Modalities and Sensations for VR/AR Interactions (MIMSVAI)

ORGANIZERS

Prof. Chuang-Wen, You Interdisciplinary Program of Technology and Art, National Tsing Hua University, Hsinchu, Taiwan
Yi-Chao Chen, Computer Science and Engineering, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, China
Hsin-Ruey Tsai, National Chengchi University, Taipei, Taiwan
Prof. Bin Sheng, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, Shanghai, China

WORKSHOP SUMMARY

With the advance of VR/AR technology, more and more VR/AR applications are emerging and have been popular among new users. Users interact with both physical or virtual worlds through multiple input modalities and sensations to create an immersive VR/AR experience. However, a lack of robust and intuitive interaction interfaces and realistic sensations hinders users’ experience for achieving a fascinating acceptance in various application areas of VR/AR interactions. This workshop discusses the challenges and applications of designing a higher coherence between different input modalities and sensations to offer more engaging VR/AR experiences, which can create opportunities for the researchers from both UbiComp and VR/AR fields to jointly discuss and brainstorm new directories of designing new input modalities and sensations for VR/AR interactions.

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CPD 2021: The 4th Workshop on Combining Physical and Data-Driven Knowledge in Ubiquitous Computing

ORGANIZERS

Dr. Wenbo Ding, Tsinghua University, Tsinghua-Berkeley Shenzhen Institute, Shenzhen, Guangdong, China
Chenshu Wu, University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland, United States
Dr. Weitao Xu, City University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China

WORKSHOP SUMMARY

In the real-world ubiquitous computing systems, it is difficult to require a significant amount of data to obtain accurate information through pure data-driven methods. The performance of data-driven methods relies on the quantity and ‘quality’ of data. They perform well when a sufficient amount of data is available, which is regarded as ideal conditions. However, in real-world systems, collecting data can be costly or impossible due to practical limitations. On the other hand, it is promising to utilize physical knowledge to alleviate these issues of data limitation. The physical knowledge includes domain knowledge from experts, heuristics from experiences, analytic models of the physical phenomena and etc.
The goal of the workshop is to explore the intersection between (and the combination of) data and physical knowledge. The workshop aims to bring together domain experts that explore the physical understanding of the data, practitioners that develop systems
and the researchers in traditional data-driven domains. The workshop welcomes papers, which focuses on addressing these issues in different applications/domains as well as algorithmic and systematic approaches to applying physical knowledge. Therefore, we further seek to develop a community that systematically analyzes
the data quality regarding inference and evaluates the improvements from physical knowledge. Preliminary and on-going work is welcomed.

Call for Papers

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