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Call for Participation 

Second International Workshop on Ubiquitous Systems for Supporting
Social Interaction 
and Face-to-Face Communication in Public Spaces 

Nottingham, England. September 7, 2004 
http://www.dynamo-interactive.com/ubicomp04/

This workshop is the second workshop on the subject of ubicomp
technologies for 
supporting social interaction in public spaces. It will be held in
conjunction with the 
Sixth International Conference on Ubiquitous Computing (UbiComp 2004) in

Nottingham, England. The first such workshop was held at Ubicomp 2003 in
Seattle, 
Washington. 

Public spaces, such as conferences, museums, cafes, and workplaces
present new 
opportunities for ubiquitous computing technologies. Such spaces
represent important 
venues for social interaction and the informal exchange of knowledge,
providing a place 
to find others who share common or complementary interests. As
discovered in last 
year's workshop, we have only begun to understand the challenges and
questions 
associated with situating ubicomp technologies within such spaces. 

For example, how do people find others who share their interests and
develop their 
social networks? How can technologies provide richer ways for people to
communicate 
and engage with others? How can the serendipitous exchanges and
interactions that 
often occur within public spaces be supported? How and where does the
interaction 
between people happen? In view of these questions, the proposed workshop
seeks to 
bring together like-minded researchers and practitioners to better
understand the 
design, development and evaluation of ubiquitous systems for supporting
social 
activities and social interaction in public spaces. 

The main subject of the proposed workshop is the development and use of
ubiquitous 
systems to support social interaction in public spaces and at public
events, such as 
museums, conferences, trade shows, etc. Topics relevant to this subject
include:
* Applications: existing commercial and experimental applications, e.g.,
ubiquitous 
systems in museums, at public gatherings, etc. 
* Pattern Recognition: how to learn socially relevant features from raw
sensor data and 
build computational models of the dynamics. 
* User interface: how to provide a simple and intuitive user interface
for novice users to 
a complex system. 
* Presentation: how various types of information acquired by the
ubiquitous system can 
be effectively presented to the end users. 
* Scalability: how to accommodate a large number of simultaneous users
at a potentially 
unlimited number of locations. 
* Deployment: how to package the system so that it can be easily
deployable in an 
environment that is not prepared for such type of applications. 
* Reliability: how to build robust and reliable systems that can
guarantee at least some 
minimal number of services. 
* Privacy: if the system "knows" everything about everybody currently
present in the 
tracked ubiquitous environment, what are the privacy concerns and how
best to address 
them. 
* Security: what happens if the system is defeated and the intruders
gain access to all 
the accumulated knowledge. How to prevent this from happening. 
* Social aspects: how the technology can be used to help forming social
networks and 
how it can be used to study them. 
* Evaluation: how the services provided by a system can be evaluated,
what are the 
evaluation criteria, what does it mean to build a practical and useful
system. 

Submission details 
Participants are asked to submit position papers, no more than 6 pages
in length, 
consisting of the author's vision and/or experience of the design and
usage of 
ubiquitous systems for public spaces. Proposals for demonstrations and
posters are 
welcome. Position papers should be submitted electronically to V.
Kindratenko 
([log in to unmask]) on or before July 26th as a PDF or MS Word file
formatted 
according to the ACM SIG Proceedings Format
(http://www.acm.org/sigs/pubs/
proceed/). Papers will be selected based on their originality, merit and
topical relevance. 
A review panel consisting of the workshop organizers and external
reviewers will be 
assembled to evaluate the submissions. Notification of acceptance will
be sent out by 
August 2nd, 2004. Accepted papers will be included in the workshop's
proceedings. 

Important dates 
Position Paper due date: July 26th 
Notification of Acceptance date: August 2nd 
Camera-ready version due date: August 27th 

Workshop Organizers 
Harry Brignull, University of Sussex
Shahram Izadi, University of Nottingham
Norbert Streitz, Fraunhofer IPSI
Tanzeem Choudhury, Intel Research
Volodymyr Kindratenko NCSA, UIUC

Program Committee 
Margaret Morris, Intel Research 
David Pointer NCSA, UIUC


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