SIGMOBILE FY'12 Annual Report 

July 2011 – July 2012
Submitted by: Roy Want, SIGMOBILE Chair

 

 

 

 

Introduction

In 2012 mobile computing continues to be one of the fastest growing and exciting areas of computer science. Engaging with the mobile industry and mobile academic research community, SIGMOBILE is the ACM Special Interest Group on the Mobility of Systems, Users, Data, and Computing. Its scope includes all aspects of mobile computing and communications, such as mobile systems and applications, wireless networking protocols and algorithms, and mobile information access and management. SIGMOBILE has healthy finances, is well respected, and supports successful conferences, workshops, and publications. These are all valuable services for its members and the community, resulting in a strong, vibrant SIG, with significant membership. In Fall 2011, SIGMOBILE underwent its four-year viability review, and passed successfully allowing it to continue for another 4 years.

 

The current elected officers in SIGMOBILE’s Executive Committee are:

• Chair: Dr. Roy Want (Google Inc, USA);
• Vice Chair: Prof. Robert Steele (University of Sydney, Australia);
• Secretary: Prof. Ramesh Govindan (University of Southern California, USA); and
• Treasurer: Prof. Lili Qiu (University of Texas at Austin, USA).

This is the third year the Executive Committee has served since the 2009 elections, and includes the Past Chair, Prof. David B. Johnson (Rice University, USA).

Committee Appointed Positions

SIGMOBILE’s leadership has four committee appointed positions:

·         Editor-in-Chief (EIC) for SIGMOBILE's journal/newsletter for our members (Mobile Computing and Communications Review or MC2R), Prof. Suman Banerjee  (Univ. of Wisconsin, Madison, USA)

·         Information Director Prof. Robert Steele (University of Sydney, Australia),

·         Digital Library Coordinator:  Dr. Guanling Chen (University of Massachusetts Lowell, USA),

·         Outstanding Contribution Award Committee Chair: Edward W. Knightly (Rice University, USA)

 

 

ACM Mobility Tech Pack: Released December 2011

 

In early 2011, at the request of the ACM publishing group we started working on a Mobility Tech Pack with a view to making it available by 2012. ACM Tech Packs are “innovative learning packages by subject experts for serious computing professionals”, basically an annotated reading list of the most useful papers for students or professionals wanting to enter the field, or refresh their knowledge about the latest significant publications in the area.  We are pleased to announce that in December 2011 the Mobility Tech Pack was released on the ACM website and can be found at http://techpack.acm.org/mobility/. In January 2012, additional supporting materials were added, providing a podcast interview, with transcript, given by the SIGMOBILE Chair, and collateral materials such as notable mobile websites, blogs, videos and other related mobile computing references.

 

 

ACM’s New Learning Webinar Series

SIGMOBILE helped to launch ACM’s new Learning Webinar series, when on January 26, 2012, David B. Johnson, SIGMOBILE’s Past Chair, served as the moderator for the pilot webinar in the series.  This webinar, entitled “The Cloud in Your Hands: Marriage of Cloud Computing with Smart Devices,” was presented by Arjmand Samuel and Danny Dalal of Microsoft Research.  Designed for IT managers and developers, this session provided an introduction to the new world of cloud-enabled mobile computing.  There were more than 4700 registrations for this pilot webinar, 816 live attendees, and over 956 on-demand attendees.  The ACM Learning Webinars are provided as a part of ACM’s Learning Center.

 

New SIGMOBILE RockStar Award

 

The SIGMOBILE RockStar award recognizes an individual who has made recent outstanding research or product contributions to the field of mobile computing during the early part of his or her career.

Award Criterion: The SIGMOBILE RockStar Award recognizes one or more recent technical contribution(s) made in the early part of a mobile computing researcher's career, resulting in notable influence on our field. Early career for an individual is defined as within 10 years of receiving their highest university degree, while being younger than 40 years of age at the time of the nomination.

Selection is based on the impact of the candidate's work in creating promising new ideas, paradigms, and tools, related to mobile computing.  Depth, impact, and novelty of the individual's contributions will be key criteria upon which the RockStar Award Committee (RAC) will evaluate the nominees.

Nomination Process: Following an open call for nominations, nominations should be addressed to the chair of the RockStar Awards Committee. The nominator should solicit recommendations from colleagues in the field who are most familiar with the nominee's achievements.

Each nomination should consist of the following items:

1.     Name, phone number, and email address of the person making the nomination.

2.     Curriculum vitae of the nominee, including name, phone number and email address.

3.     A brief citation, no more than 150 words long.

4.     A statement, no more than 500 words long, on why the candidate deserves the award.

5.     Minimum of three and maximum of five supporting letters from individuals who endorse the nomination. The recommender should identify the rationale for the nomination and by what means they know of the nominee's work. Endorsement letters may be sent in the form of emails and should not be more than 400 words.

The nominations will be reviewed by the RockStar selection committee:

·         Self-nominations will not be accepted.

·         The nominee need not be a member of SIGMOBILE, but the nominator must be a member of SIGMOBILE

·         Officers of SIGMOBILE and members of the RAC are not eligible for this award.

·         The nominator and endorsers may not serve on the selection committee.

·         Nominations that did not result in an award can be resubmitted and updated in later years.

·         Previous recipients are not eligible for future nominations.

 

Selection Committee: The RockStar Award Committee will have 9 members, including winners from the past 5 years, a RAC Chair and three senior community leaders appointed by the RAC Chair. The RAC Chair will be appointed, or reappointed, by the ACM SIGMOBILE Chair as appropriate to maintain a healthy functioning of the RockStar award process.  In the first few years of the award the SIGMOBILE Executive Committee will fill in the role of past winners.  On reaching steady state, each member will serve a 3-year term.

Recognition: The award will be presented annually at one of SIGMOBILE’s conferences during the ensuing year following selection of a winning nomination. The RAC reserves the right not to make an award if a suitable candidate has not been found in that year.  An announcement including the citation and bio of the winner will be distributed on SIGMOBILE’s mailing list.  The winner will be invited to deliver a presentation on the topic of his or her choice at a SIGMOBILE event, where he or she will receive a custom-made trophy/plaque, a permanent acknowledgement with citation on SIGMOBILE’s web page, a monetary award of similar value to the OCA (funded by the strong SIGMOBILE fund balance, and will be included in the annual budget planning), and well-deserved bragging rights.

Sponsorship for the Mobile Computing Research Community

In 2011-12, SIGMOBILE has provided sponsorship in the form of financial support for three programs in the mobile computing research community:

·         The Community Resource for Archiving Wireless Data At Dartmouth (CRAWDAD) continues to be a thriving resource for the SIGMOBILE community.  At the end of July 2012 it contains 83 datasets, each containing one or more traces for wireless networks or mobile users; and 23 tools, many of which are designed to help researchers work with these datasets. There were 13 new datasets released since the last report, and there are currently 4 datasets in pipeline for publication. There are over 4,200 users from 88 countries around the world -- 11 new countries since last year's report!  CRAWDAD continues to be increasingly popular, with more than 1,000 new users registering within the past year. Although the primary archive is at Dartmouth, the CRAWDAD site and data are mirrored on servers located in the UK and Australia, to guarantee uninterrupted service and fast downloads to users all around the world.               

CRAWDAD data has supported over 700 papers in the field, and continues to be the go-to place for authors wishing to share data they've collected, or to obtain data they can use for testing their system prototypes and algorithms. SIGMOBILE funding makes it possible for the CRAWDAD project to retain a technical staff person (part time) to add new data sets, maintain the site, and develop new features.               

This year, CRAWDAD's NSF support ended; SIGCOMM has joined SIGMOBILE in keeping CRAWDAD running.       

·         Networking Networking Women (N2 Women) is a discipline-specific community for researchers in the communications and networking research fields. The main goal of N2 Women is to foster connections among the under-represented women in computer networking, and related research fields. N2 Women allows women to connect with other women who share the same research interests, who attend the same conferences, who face the same career hurdles, and who experience the same obstacles. To assist in its networking goals, N2 Women has an email list for the group: N2Women@acm.org; currently there are over 580 members.

 

N2 Women is an ACM SIGMOBILE program that has been financially supported by SIGMOBILE Microsoft Research, HP Labs, NSF, and CRA-W. In the past year, funds from SIGMOBILE were used for the N2 Women Student Fellowship program. A student applies for a Fellowship and, if selected, N2 Women partially covers the student's travel cost (up to $500) to a conference where an N2 Women event will be held. In exchange, the student must help organize the N2 Women meeting. The benefit of engaging in the organization, in addition to the travel funds, is for the student to connect with the organizers of the conference who are, typically, leaders in the research field. The organization also arranges for a senior member of N2 Women to assist/mentor the student in this task.   

During the past year (July 1st 2011 to June 30th, 2012), there have been eight N2 Women Student Fellowships with organized N2 Women events at the following conferences:

 

Ouldooz Baghban Karimi, Simon Fraser University, Canada (SIGCOMM 2011)

Mikie Han, UT Austin (MobiCom 2011)

Soudeh Ghorbani, UIUC (SenSys 2011)

Aakanksha Chowdhery, Stanford University (Globecom 2011)

Yanyang Zhuang, University of Victoria, Canada (Infocom 2012)

Sanorita Dey, University of South Carolina (MobiHoc 2012)

Zahra Ahmadian, Winnie Ye, Melike Erol-Kantarci, Yujin Li (ICC 2012)

Jingyao Zhang, Virginia Tech (SECON 2012)

 

Also thanks to support from SIGMOBILE, N2 Women held the 2nd Networking Networking Women Workshop on March 25, 2012 in conjunction with Infocom in Orlando, Florida. The breakdown of the 65 female attendees was as follows: 47 students (72%), 13 faculty (20%), and 5 researchers from industrial/government labs (8%). Overall, there were 40 institutions represented by the attendees. Participants came from all over the US and from as far away as China, with the following countries represented: United States, Canada, China, Hong Kong, Germany, Italy, Pakistan, and Tunisia.  

In all N2 Women announcements, SIGMOBILE (and other sponsors of N2 Women) are thanked.

Further details of N2 Women are available at: http://committees.comsoc.org/n2women/.

 

·         ACM-W: In 2012, SIGMOBILE continues to sponsor ACM-W (ACM’s Women in Computing organization). “ACM-W's mission is to celebrate, inform and support women in computing, and work with the ACM-W community of computer scientists, educators, employers and policy makers to improve working and learning environments for women.” This is an organization that the Executive Committee (EC) whole-heartedly supports. Women in CS education can request sponsorship for SIGMOBILE conferences, and the EC will provide sponsorship for travel and registration.

SIGMOBILE Conferences and Workshops

SIGMOBILE currently sponsors or co-sponsors five annual conferences, all recognized as the premier conferences and focus areas within the field:

• MobiCom: The Annual International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking, covers all areas of mobile computing and mobile and wireless networking at the link layer and above. MobiCom has been held every year since 1995.
• MobiHoc: The ACM International Symposium on Mobile Ad Hoc Networking and Computing, addresses the challenges emerging from wireless ad hoc networking and computing, with the focus being on issues at and above the MAC layer. MobiHoc has been held every year since 2000.
• MobiSys: The International Conference on Mobile Systems, Applications, and Services, addresses broad systems research issues in mobile computing and mobile networking, particularly valuing the practical experience gained from designing, building, and using mobile systems, applications, and services. MobiSys has been held every year since 2003.
• SenSys: The ACM Conference on Embedded Networked Sensor Systems, focuses on systems issues in the emerging area of embedded, networked sensors, spanning multiple disciplines, including wireless communication, networking, operating systems, architecture, low-power circuits, distributed algorithms, data processing, scheduling, sensors, energy harvesting, and signal processing. SenSys has been held every year since 2003.
• Ubicomp: The International Conference on Ubiquitous Computing, addresses the interdisciplinary field of ubiquitous computing, which utilizes and integrates pervasive, wireless, embedded, wearable and/or mobile technologies to bridge the gap between the digital and physical worlds. Ubicomp has been held every year since 1999, and SIGMOBILE began sponsoring it in 2009.

MobiCom 2011, the 17th Annual International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking was held at the Mirage Hotel, September 19^th-23rd, 2011, in Las Vegas, Nevada, USA. Parmesh Ramanathan (University of Wisconsin, Madison, USA) served as General Chair, and Thyaga Nandagopal (Bell Laboratories, Alcatel-Lucent, USA) and Brian Levine (University of Massachusetts at Amherst, USA) served as the Program Co-Chairs.

 

The technical program featured two plenary speakers: On the first day Rajit Gadh (Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science at UCLA) presented on the UCLA project “SmartGRID”, and on the last day, Farnam Jahanian (University of Michigan, NSF) presented, “Innovating for Society: Realizing the Promise and Potential of Computing”. The MobiCom 2011 program also included two days of workshops:           

On Monday, September 19th:

• The Third Workshop on Cognitive Wireless Networking (CoRoNet)
• The Third International Workshop on Wireless of the Students, by the Students, and for the Students (S3 2011)
• The Sixth ACM International Workshop on Wireless Network Testbeds, Experimental evaluation and Characterization (WiNTECH 2011)

And Friday, September 23^rd:

• The Sixth Workshop on Challenged Networks (CHANTS 2011) (CFP)

·         The Eight ACM International Workshop on Vehicular Inter-NETworking (VANET 2011)

 

MobiCom 2012 will be held August 22^nd-26th, at the Hilton Hotel, Istanbul, Turkey.

 

*****

MobiHoc 2011, the 12^th International Symposium on Mobile Ad Hoc Networking was held in Paris, France from May 16-19^th, 2011. The MobiHoc 2011 General Chair was Philippe Jacquet, INRIA Paris-Rocquencourt, France), and the Program Co-Chairs were: Konstantina (Dina) Papagiannaki (Intel Labs Pittsburgh, USA), Devavrat Shah, (MIT, USA).

 

The technical program featured an opening keynote talk, “Sense and Sensibility for Mobile Networks” by Prof. Hari Balakrishnan, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and on the second day Prof. Jean Walrand (UC Berkeley), presented “Distributed Wireless Protocols: A Review”. The MobiHoc 2011 program also included a day of workshops, and tutorials:             

There were two international workshops on Monday, May 16th:

·         Tactical Mobile Ad Hoc Networking

·         Pervasive Wireless Healthcare

Accompanied by two Tutorials:

·         (AM) “Random Matrix Theory for Wireless Communication”, by Merouane Debbah

·         (PM) “Designing Ad Hoc Networking with Application Constraints”, by Christophe Guettier.

MobiHoc 2012 is reported below; when it changed its annual event from Sept 2010, to May 2011 it pushed both events (2011 & 2012) into the July 2011-2012 report.

*****

MobiHoc 2012, the 13^th International Symposium on Mobile Ad Hoc Networking was held Hilton Head Island, South Carolina, USA from June 11-14^th, 2012. The MobiHoc 2012 General Chair was Asis Nasipuri (North Carolina at Charlotte); and the Program Co-Chairs were Yih-Chun Hu (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign), and Sanjay Shakkottai (University of Texas at Austin, USA).

The conference provided two keynotes: On day one, Prof. Edward Knightly presented a keynote: “Urban-Scale Wireless Networks in Unlicensed sub-GHz Bands”; and on day two, Prof. Nitin Viadya presented on the topic of “Resilient Distributed Consensus”.

The MobiHoc Program featured four workshops on Monday, June 11^th:

·         W1: Airborne Networks and Communications Emerging

·         W2: Emerging Name-Oriented Mobile Networking Design: Architecture, Algorithms, and Applications.

·         W3: The 2^nd Int. Workshop on Pervasive Wireless Healthcare

·         W4: 1^st Int. Workshop on Sensor-Enhanced Safety and Security in Public Spaces (SESP 2012)

One Wednesday June 13^th, a Networking Networking Women (N2Women) meeting was held as a Luncheon.

The MobiHoc 2013 conference is currently being planned, but at this time no details are available.

*****

MobiSys 2012, the 10th International Conference on Mobile Systems, Applications, and Services, was held June 25^th – 29^th, 2012, in Low Wood Bay, The Lake District, United Kingdom, in-cooperation with SIGOPS. Prof. Nigel Davies (Lancaster University, UK) served as the General Chair, and Prof. Srinivasan Seshan (Carnegie Mellon University, USA) and Prof. Lin Zhong (Rice University, USA) served as the Program Co-Chairs.

The MobiSys 2011 technical program began with a keynote talk by Dr. Paul Jones, who is the National Heath Service (NHS) Chief Technology Officer and is responsible for the Technology Office in the Department of Health Informatics Directorate, and presented “Mobile Health Challenges”. Paul described the challenges of introducing mobile technology into one of the largest organizations in the world,  with an annual budget of 110 billion pounds (taxation funded).

The MobiSys program also featured 4 workshops and a PhD Forum on Monday, June 25^th, and a fifth workshop on Friday, June 29^th:

·   W1: VANET 2012 - The 9th International Workshop on VehiculAr Inter-NETworking, Systems, and Applications

·   W2: HotPlanet 2012: The 4th International Workshop on Hot Topics in Planet Scale Measurement

·   W3: 1^st ACM Workshop on Mobile systems for Computational Social Science

·   W4: MCS 2012: The 3rd International Workshop on Mobile Cloud Computing & Services

·   PhD Forum on Mobile Systems, Applications, and Services

·   W5: Next generation mobile computing for dynamic personalized travel planning

MobiSys 2013 is being planned for June 2013 in the Taipei, Taiwan. The General Co-Chairs will be Prof. Hao Hua Chu and Prof. Polly Huang both from the National Taiwan University, Taiwan, and Program Co-chairs: Dr. Feng Zhao (Microsoft Research, China) and Prof. Romit Roy Choudhury (Duke University, USA)

*****

SenSys 2011, the 9th ACM Conference on Embedded Networked Sensor Systems, was held November 1-4, 2011, in Seattle, Washington, USA. Jie Liu (Microsoft Research, USA) served as the General Chair, and Philip Levis (Stanford University, USA), Kay Romer (University of Luebeck, Germany) served as the Program Co-Chairs. SenSys is co-sponsored by SIGMOBILE and SIGCOMM (30% each); and SIGARCH, SIGOPS, SIGMETRICS, and SIGBED (10% each) and the NSF.

A keynote presentation by Michel M. Maharbiz (EECS, UC Berkeley, USA) was given on the opening day “Cyborg beetles: building interfaces between the synthetic and the multicellular".

There were three workshops and a Doctoral Colloquium held on Monday, 1^st November.

• W1: BuildSys'11: The 3rd ACM Workshop on Embedded Sensing Systems for Energy Efficiency in Buildings
• W2: PhoneSense’11: The 2nd International Workshop on Sensing Applications on Mobile Phones
• W3: mHealthSys: International Workshop on Mobile Systems, Applications, and Services for Healthcare
• Doctoral Colloquium 2011: a forum to provide a friendly, supportive, and constructive atmosphere where PhD students can present their research-in-progress for an open discussion, guided by a panel of experienced researchers and practitioners.

In addition, the SenSys 2011 program included an N2 Women Event on Wednesday, November 2nd.

SenSys 2012 will be held November 6-9^th, 2012, in Toronto Canada. General Chair: Rasit Eskicioglu (University of Manitoba); Program Co-Chairs: Andrew T. Campbell (Dartmouth College)
Koen Langendoen (Delft University of Technology).

*****

Ubicomp 2011, the 13th International Conference on Ubiquitous Computing was held September 17^th-21st, 2011, in Beijing, China, and co-sponsored with SIGCHI. James Landay (University of Washington, USA & Microsoft Research Asia, China), and Yuanchun Shi (Tsinghua University, China), served as the General Co-Chairs. Don Patterson (University of California Irvine, USA), Yvonne Rogers (University College London, UK), and Xing Xie (Microsoft Research Asia, China) served as the Program Co-Chairs.

A keynote presentation launched the conference:  Jan Chipchase (Executive Creative Director of Global Insights at Frog design) presented “Uberrima Fides”.  Jan used the keynote to explore the impact of technologies past, present and future and outline the skills required to build the next generation of tech.

Ubicomp’11 also supported a Doctoral Colloquium (Saturday, 17^th September) along with 12 all-day workshops on Sunday, 18^th September (note W7 & W8 were cancelled in the list below):

• W01: 2^nd Int. Workshop on Ubiquitous Crowdsourcing: Towards a Platform for Crowd Computing
• W02: Mobile Sensing: Challenges, Opportunities and Future Directions
• W03: Workshop on 'Research in the Large'; Using App Stores, Wide Distribution Channels & Big Data in UbiComp Research
• W04: The 1st International Workshop on Mobile Location-Based Service (MLBS)
• W05: Int. Workshop on Networking and Object Memories for the Internet of Things (NOMe-IoT 2011)
• W06: Casemans 2011: The 5th Int. Workshop on Context-Awareness for Self-Managing Systems
• W09: The 1st International Symposium on Social and Community Intelligence (SCI-11)
• W10: PETMEI 2011: 1st International Workshop on Pervasive Eye Tracking and Mobile Eye-Based Interaction
• W11: The Role of Design in UbiComp Research and Practice
• W12: International Workshop on Situation, Activity and Goal Awareness (SAGAware2011)
• W13: Ubiquitous Affective Awareness and Intelligent Interaction
• W14: Trajectory Data Mining and Analysis

Ubicomp 2012 will be held in Pittsburg, Pennsylvania, USA, on September 5^th-8^th 2012. The General Chair is Anind K. Dey (Carnegie Mellon University, USA), and the Program Co-Chairs are Hao-Hua Chu (National Taiwan University, Taiwan), and Gillian Hayes (University of California, Irvine, USA)

*****

In addition to the conferences and co-located workshops above, SIGMOBILE also sponsors the HotMobile workshop (previously known as WMCSA) as a stand-alone event, not co-located with a conference. The HotMobile workshop series focuses on mobile applications, systems, and environments, as well as their underlying state-of-the-art technologies, in a small workshop format that makes it ideal for presenting and discussing new directions or controversial approaches. The Executive Committee encourages the MobiCom Program Committee meeting be collocated with HotMobile to ensure a representative selection of senior researchers attend the event. This workshop was previously sponsored each year by the IEEE Computer Society, but has been sponsored instead by ACM SIGMOBILE since HotMobile 2008.

HotMobile 2012, the 13th International Workshop on Mobile Computing Systems and Applications, was held February 28-29th, San Diego, California, USA. Prof. Gaetano Borriello (University of Washington, USA) served as the General Chair, and Rajesh Krishna Balan (Singapore Management University, SG) served as the Program Chair. The HotMobile 2012 technical program featured a keynote by Mr. Robert Gilmore (Vice President, Engineering, QUALCOMM, Inc) entitled, “Your Life on a Smartphone”.

HotMobile 2012 also included a Doctoral Consortium mixed in with the sessions on the first day, providing feedback on students' current research and guidance on future research directions, offering each student comments and fresh perspectives on their work from faculty and students outside their own institution, and promoting the development of a supportive community of scholars and a spirit of collaborative research. The MobiSys 2012 program committee meeting was held the day following HotMobile to encourage participating senior researchers to attend HotMobile, widen the discussions, and support the Doctoral Consortium.

HotMobile 2013 will be held February 26-27^th, 2013, in Jekyll Island, Georgia, USA.  The General Chair is Sharad Agarwal (Microsoft Research, USA), and the Program Chair is Alexander Varshavasky (AT&T Labs, USA).

*****
SIGMOBILE also sponsored the following high-value events over the last year. These are annual decisions and sponsorship one year does not guarantee support in a following year. If the standard remains high, SIGMOBILE is likely to continue with its support.

·         MobiOpp 2012: The 3^rd Int. Workshop on Mobile Opportunistic Networking (ACM MobiOpp 2012), Zurich Switzerland, 15-16 March 2012.

·         FOMC 2011: The Seventh International Workshop on Foundations of Mobile Computing, June 9^th, 2011, San Jose, USA

·         WUWNet 2011: The Fifth ACM International Workshop on Underwater Networks, December 1^st-2^nd      2011, Seattle, Washington, USA.

Each year, SIGMOBILE is also "in-cooperation" with a number of different events sponsored by other organizations. Events offered "in-cooperation with" SIGMOBILE allow its members to register at the same discounted rate as for members of other sponsoring organizations for the event, providing a significant savings to SIGMOBILE members. During this past year (July 2011 through June 2012), SIGMOBILE was in-cooperation with the following events:

·         MobileHCI 2011: 13th International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction with Mobile Devices and Services. August 30^th – September 2nd, 2011 in Stockholm, Sweden.

·         Wireless Health 2011, October 10-13^th, 2011; UC San Diego Campus, La Jolla, CA, USA.

·         MobiHeld 2011: 3^rd ACM Workshop on Networking, Systems and Applications on Mobile Handhelds, Oct 23^rd, 2011, Cascais, Portugal.

·         ACWR’11, First International Conference on Wireless Technologies for Humanitarian Relief, December 19-21^st, 2011, Amrita University Campus, India.

·         COMSNETS’12: The 4^th International Conference on COMmunication Systems and NETworkS: The Chancery Pavilion Hotel, Bangalore, India, January 3^rd-7thth, 2012

·         WiSec’12:  The 5^th ACM Conference on Wireless Security: Tucson, Arizona, USA, April 16-18^th, 2012

·         ISWC 2012: The Sixteenth Annual International Symposium on Wearable Computers: Newcastle, UK, June 18-22^nd, 2012

In-cooperation commitments are also in place for MobileHCI 2012, San Francisco, USA, September, 21^st-24^th, 2012, DySPAN 2012, Bellevue, WA, USA, October, 16^th-19^th, 2012, Wireless Health Oct 23^rd-25^th, San Diego, California, USA, 2012 and COMSNETS 2013, Bangalore, India, January 7^th-10^th.

SIGMOBILE continues to be fortunate to receive strong support for its conferences and workshops in the period July 2011-2012, from leading-edge companies and organizations from around the world. This last year, the organizations that have contributed to SIGMOBILE conferences and workshops, helping to ensure their success, include:

Alcatel-Lucent, APL, Aquasent, AT&T Research, Autodesk, Disney Research, EDF, ETH Zurich, Euro-NF, Google Inc, Hitachi, HP Labs, HTC, IBM Research, IGRS, LIX, Microsoft Research (MSR), National Science Foundation of China, NEC, Nokia, NSF, Office of Naval Research (ONR), Opzoon, , SAFRAN, Shanda Innovations, Institute TELECOM SudParis, Intel Labs, Telezone, Technicolor, Teledyne Benthos, Toyota Technology Center USA, Tsinghua University Qualcomm, University of Cambridge, Vivick.

As always, SIGMOBILE is sincerely grateful for all contributions.

SIGMOBILE Publications

In addition to the proceedings for each of the conferences and workshops that SIGMOBILE sponsors, SIGMOBILE also publishes a peer-reviewed, quarterly journal/newsletter for SIGMOBILE members, Mobile Computing and Communications Review (MC2R). Others may also subscribe to MC2R, and MC2R is available in the ACM Digital Library.

The Editor-in-Chief for MC2R is Prof. Suman Banerjee (University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA). The current Area Editors for MC2R are Dr. Sharad Agarwal (Microsoft Research, USA), Prof. Aditya Akella (University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA), Prof. Christian Bettstetter (University of Klagenfurt, Germany), Prof. Srdjan Capkun (ETH, Zurich, Switzerland), Prof. Augustin Chaintreau (Columbia University, USA),  Prof. Eylem Ekici (Ohio State University, USA), Dr. Michelle Gong (Intel, USA) , Prof. Marco Gruteser (Rutgers University, USA), Prof. Prashant Krishnamurthy (University of Pittsburgh, USA), Prof. Panos Papadimitratos (EPFL, Switzerland), Prof. Andreas Terzis (Johns Hopkins University, USA), Prof. Moustafa Youssef (Egypt-Japan University of Science and Technology, Egypt), and Prof. Lin Zhong (Rice University, USA).

MC2R publishes articles that provide a balance between state-of-the-art research and practice, with a thorough pre-publication review of every article by experts in the field. Beyond papers reporting the latest research results in all areas related to SIGMOBILE's scope, MC2R keeps the SIGMOBILE community apprised of relevant happenings in the area, by providing regular features on the status of major international mobile computing and communications standards, such as those from IETF, ITU, ISO, and IEEE. The journal also provides a variety of additional resources, such as bibliographies of recent publications in other journals, paper and book reviews, workshop and conference reports, calls for papers, information on research groups throughout the world, bibliographies and locations of technical reports, and other general news in the field.

In addition, MC2R places a strong emphasis on quick publication of interesting completed, or work-in-progress, technical work; the average turnaround time for papers published in MC2R is about 6 months. Papers in MC2R are selected mainly from an ongoing open call for papers, plus special sections based on conferences and workshops, occasional special topic issues, and some invited papers. The acceptance rate for papers submitted through the open call for papers is quite selective, remaining under about 20%.

In the recent issues, the following are some example articles that were published in the different categories described above: (i) interviews (expert testimonies) of leading researchers in our field conducted by graduate students at different universities, (ii) a survey of the ongoing efforts in the IEEE 802.11ac and 802.11ad standards groups, (iii) articles capturing experiences of different research groups in building large-scale wireless test-beds, (iv) report on the student-run S3 workshop held at MobiCom 2011, and (v) a comment on an approach to judge the quality of different publication venues, e.g., conferences, workshops, and journals. In addition, for peer-reviewed articles that have been published in these issues, the editorial team has introduced a mechanism by which a summary of the reviews are included, along with an author response to these reviews is published as a companion to the final manuscript. This allows the publication to capture a greater fraction of the dialogue between the authors and reviewers in realizing the final version of the paper.

All aspects of the journal's operation are run entirely by volunteers, including final assembly of each issue.

SIGMOBILE Newsletter

SIGMOBILE also publishes a monthly E-Mail Newsletter for its members. This electronic newsletter was started in 2004 and is edited by SIGMOBILE's Information Director, Prof. Robert Steele (University of, Sydney, Australia). The newsletter includes SIGMOBILE announcements, pointers to relevant mainstream news articles of interest to SIGMOBILE members, a calendar of upcoming events of interest to our members, and pointers to developer news for active developers in the area of mobile computing and wireless networking.

SIGMOBILE Website

As an additional resource for our members and the community, SIGMOBILE maintains an extensive web site at http://www.sigmobile.org, including information about SIGMOBILE and its activities, information about our journal/newsletter MC2R, and information about membership in SIGMOBILE. This web site also contains archived copies of most SIGMOBILE conference web sites, including all previous years of MobiCom, MobiHoc, and MobiSys.

SIGMOBILE Social Media

During 2011-2012, SIGMOBILE has also furthered its social media presence to support new forms of interactive communication with its community. It has groups on LinkedIn and Facebook and has also created a new SIGMOBILE Twitter feed.

SIGMOBILE Local Chapters

There are currently three Local Chapters of SIGMOBILE chartered with ACM – none were added this year:

• Nanyang Technological University Student Chapter: This is a Student Chapter of SIGMOBILE, organized within the Nanyang Technological University (NTU) ACM club in Singapore.
• Sydney Professional Chapter: This is a Professional Chapter of SIGMOBILE, organized in Sydney, Australia.
• Taiwan Chapter: This is a University Based Chapter organized by Institute of Computer Science and Information Engineering, National I-lan University (NIU), Taiwan

Local Chapters provide a local focus to activities related to the area of SIGMOBILE, including mobile computing and wireless and mobile networking, and continue SIGMOBILE’s work within their local regions.

We encourage interested groups around the world to form a SIGMOBILE chapter in their local community, school, city, or region. For details about the benefits and procedures for forming a Local SIGMOBILE Chapter, see http://www.sigmobile.org/chapters/.

SIGMOBILE Membership

The SIG’s membership was 727 on June 30^th 2012, exactly the same number from the previous year, but with a different distribution of student and professional memberships. The membership has spanned the 700-800 range for last 6 years, and for all time has been in the 437-872 range. SIGMOBILE provides substantial benefits to our members, including:

• The quarterly journal, and newsletter "Mobile Computing and Communications Review" (MC2R), which serves both as a newsletter keeping SIGMOBILE members informed, and as a scientific journal publishing high-quality peer-reviewed research papers on mobile computing and wireless and mobile networking.
• A monthly e-mail SIGMOBILE newsletter, including SIGMOBILE announcements, pointers to relevant mainstream news articles of interest to SIGMOBILE members, a calendar of upcoming events of interest to our members, and pointers to developer news for active developers in the area of mobile computing and wireless networking.
• Announcements via the moderated, members-only email distribution list, keeping you informed of the latest happenings in our field, such as conference Calls for Papers.
• Qualify for the lowest registration rates at conferences and workshops sponsored by SIGMOBILE, and for the many events that are "in cooperation" with SIGMOBILE. SIGMOBILE sponsors five conferences each year (MobiCom, MobiHoc, MobiSys, SenSys, and Ubicomp).
• Opportunities to share ideas, learn of new results and practices, network with colleagues, and be active in a vibrant community of colleagues in all areas of mobility of systems, users, data, and computing.
• Through the Member Value Plus program, automatically receive a CDROM after each of SIGMOBILE's five conferences, containing the full conference Proceedings.

In addition, SIGMOBILE provides additional benefits to the broader community served by SIGMOBILE:

• Organization and sponsorship of five annual conferences (MobiCom, MobiHoc, MobiSys, SenSys, and Ubicomp).
• Promotion of emerging new areas through sponsorship of numerous workshops each year.
• An ACM Mobility Tech Pack edited by the SIGMOBILE officers, providing an annotated reading list of the definitive mobile research papers to date; thus enabling somebody new to the field to rapidly come up to speed.
• The SIGMOBILE Outstanding Contribution Award, given to recognize an individual who has made a significant and lasting contribution to the research on mobile computing and communications and wireless networking.
• The SIGMOBILE Distinguished Service Award, given to recognize an individual who has made exceptional contributions to ACM SIGMOBILE, its conferences, publications, or its local activities.
• The SIGMOBILE RockStar Award, recognizes an individual who has made recent outstanding research, or product, contributions to the field of mobile computing during the early part of his, or her, career.
• Best paper awards are given at all five of our sponsored conferences and presented each year.
• Support for students at SIGMOBILE conferences and workshops, through reduced registration fees, student travel awards for some conferences (with NSF support), and student poster sessions.
• The SIGMOBILE web site, including a wealth of information for the community such as complete information on SIGMOBILE conferences and workshops, a Ph.D. thesis collection, paper formatting instructions for authors, reviewer guidelines, and a feedback questionnaire.
• SIGMOBILE also provides financial support for mobile networking community programs such as CRAWDAD (Community Resource for Archiving Wireless Data At Dartmouth) and N² Women (Networking Networking Women).

SIGMOBILE Awards

The SIGMOBILE Best Paper Awards are given to the authors of the best paper from among all papers submitted to the conference that year. Typically the conference Technical Program Committee forms the Selection Committee for this award.

At MobiSys 2012, the Best Paper Award was given to “ACE: Exploiting Correlation for Energy-Efficient and Continuous Context Sensing” By Suman Nath  from Microsoft Research"

At MobiCom 2011, the Best Paper Award was presented for two papers: 1) “E-MiLi: Energy-Minimizing Idle Listening in Wireless Networks”, Xinyu Zhang (University of Michigan-Ann Arbor, USA) and Kang G. Shin (University of Michigan-Ann Arbor, USA); 2) “Detecting Driver Phone Use Leveraging Car Speakers”, Jie Yang (Stevens Institute of Technology, USA), Simon Sdhom (Stevens Institute of Technology, USA), Gayathri Chandrasekaran (Rutgers University, USA), Tam Vu (Stevens Institute of Technology, USA), Hongbo Liu (Stevens Institute of Technology, USA), Nicolae Cecan (Rutgers University, USA), Yingying Chen (Stevens Institute of Technology, USA), Marco Gruteser (Rutgers University, USA), and Richard P. Martin (Rutgers University, USA)

At MobiHoc 2011, the Best Paper Award was given to “EM-MAC: A Dynamic Multichannel Energy-Efficient MAC Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks”, Lei Tang (Rice University), Yanjun Sun (Texas Instruments), Omer Gurewitz (Ben Gurion University), and David B. Johnson (Rice University).

 

At MobiHoc 2012, the Best Paper Award was presented to: “Serendipity: Enabling Remote Computing among Intermittently Connected Mobile Devices”, Cong Shi, Vasileios Lakafosis, Mostafa Ammar, and Ellen Zegura (Georgia Institute of Technology).

At SenSys 2011, the Best Paper Award went to "Aveksha: A Hardware-Software Approach for Non-intrusive Tracing and Profiling of Wireless Embedded Systems", by Matthew Tancreti, Mohammad Sajjad Hossain, Saurabh Bagchi, and Vijay Raghunathan (Purdue University).           

At Ubicomp 2011, the Best Paper Award was given to  two papers: 1) “Nurturing Natural Sensors”, by Stacey Kuznetsov, William Odom, James Pierce, Eric Paulos; and “Haptic Reassurance in the Pitch Black for an Immersive Theatre Experience”, by Janet van der Linden, Yvonne Rogers, Maria Oshodi, Adam Spiers, David McGoran, Rafael Cronin, Paul O’Dowd.

This year SIGMOBILE did not award the OCA, however a candidate has been chosen for the year 2012/13, and will be announced at MobiCom Sept 2012 in Istanbul, Turkey.

ACM Student Research Competition (SRC)

Held at MobiCom 2011, organized by Prof. Bechir Hamdaoui (Oregon State University), and sponsored by Microsoft in collaboration with SIGMOBILE; the following awards were presented to graduates for their research:

Gold (Score: 157): “AirTrack: Locating Non-WiFi Interferers using Commodity WiFi Hardware” by  Ashish Patro, Shravan Rayanchu, and Suman Banerjee (University of Wisconsin Madison)

Silver (score: 133):  “HAWK: An Unmanned Mini Helicopter-based Aerial Wireless Kit for Search, Rescue and Surveillance”, Zhongli Liu, Yinjie Chen, Benyuan Liu and Xinwen Fu (University of Massachusetts Lowell).

Bronze (score: 125): “A Robust Technique for WLAN Device-free Passive Motion Detection”, Ahmed E. Kosba (Alexandria University, Egypt), Ahmed Saeed (Egypt-Japan Univ. of Sc. and Tech., Egypt) and Moustafa Youssef (Egypt-Japan Univ. of Sc. and Tech., Egypt).

SIGMOBILE in the News

Throughout the year some of the our SIGMOBILE publications have been reported in news articles. The list below captures the references the executive committee is aware of, but it may not be comprehensive:

UbiComp 2011

·         “Taxicab data helps ease Traffic”, Sept 29^th, 2011 by John Roach

http://futureoftech.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2011/09/29/8038525-taxicab-data-helps-ease-traffic

MobiCom 2011

·         “Smartphone battery life improves with new invention”, Sept 16^th 2011 by Ysolt Usigan

http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-501465_162-20107301-501465.html

·         “Rutgers engineers design cell phone app to reduce distracted driving” July 30th, 2012 by Carl Blesch.   http://phys.org/news/2012-07-rutgers-cell-app-distracted.html 

HotMobile 2012

·         'Ghost Hunter' game lures players to take pictures for researchers”, March 18^th, 2012.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/46776567/ns/technology_and_science-innovation/t/ghost-hunter-game-lures-players-take-pictures-researchers/

·         “2 HotMobile papers that grabbed us: WalkSafe and SpinLoc”, March 20^th 2012, Bob Brown

http://www.networkworld.com/news/2012/032012-hotmobile-papers-257489.html

MobiSys 2012

·         “No Sleep energy bugs’ drain  smartphone batteries”, June 13, 2012,               http://www.purdue.edu/newsroom/research/2012/120613HuSmartphoneBugs.html

·         “Purdue researchers add ‘wakelock’ cleanup to phone power research” 13^th June 2012 by Richard Chirgwin. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/06/13/fixing_android_no_sleep_bug/

·         “New software bugs drain smartphone batteries while not in use”, 14 June 2012, by ANI
http://in.news.yahoo.com/software-bugs-drain-smartphone-batteries-while-not-055409397.html

·          “Future-Predicting Phones Will Speed Up App Launches”, June 27^th, 2012 by Jamie Condliffe. http://gizmodo.com/5921644/future+predicting-phones-will-speed-up-app-launches

·         “Future-predicting system cuts app loading time”, 27th June 2012 by Paul Marks       

·         http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21428703.800-futurepredicting-system-cuts-app-loading-time.html

·         “Mixed Signals: Smart Phone Sensors Recruited to Deliver Indoor GPS” July 2, 2012, By Larry Greenemeier.   http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=smart-phone-indoor-gps

·         “NQ Mobile(TM) Scientists Reveal Ground-Breaking New Malware Detection Method” 27^th June, 2012, PR Newswire –Asia. http://betanews.com/newswire/2012/06/27/nq-mobiletm-scientists-reveal-ground-breaking-new-malware-detection-method/

·         “Looking for the Elevator? There's an App for that”, June 28^th, 2012.
http://middleeast.tmcnet.com/news/2012/06/28/6403192.htm

·         “Need directions indoors? Soon you’ll be able to ask your phone”, 1^st July 2012, by Kerstin Nordstrom. http://www.newsobserver.com/2012/07/01/2172599/need-directions-indoors-soon-youll.html

MobiCom 2012 (ahead of the August 22^nd Conference)

·         “Flickering lights help smartphones keep time” , 26 July 2012 by Jacob Aron .
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21528745.500-flickering-lights-help-smartphones-keep-time.html

·         “Fluorescent lights keep smartphones from ten-second drifts”, July 28, 2012 by Nancy Owano. http://phys.org/news/2012-07-fluorescent-smartphones-ten-second-drifts.html

Executive Committee Planning

Pervasive Computing Conference               

As reported last year, we had been investigating adding the independent ‘Pervasive’ conference to our existing five sponsored conferences. As it happens, the newly formed Joint Steering Committee (JSC) for the Pervasive and the Ubicomp conferences decided to merge these two events in 2013. Going forward there will be only one ACM Conference under the name ‘Ubicomp’, and sponsored jointly by SIGMOBILE and SIGCHI; the discussion presented last year is now moot.

 

In the future, we may consider approaching the now long running MobileHCI conference as an annual ACM SIGMOBILE sponsored event.

 

SIGMOBILE Workshop Coordinator

 

We have not replaced our previous SIGMOBILE Workshop Coordinator, Ahmed Helmy (University of Florida, Gainesville, USA), a task we reported on our to-do list last year. This is mainly because it is a role that the conference general chairs perform with advice from their steering committee. We have not found it necessary to find a replacement, and unless one arises, may decide not to continue this position.

 

Sponsorship for the Mobile Computing Research Community

 

SIGMOBILE is required to keep a contingency fund balance in case one of our sponsored conferences suffers a loss. In recent years, the fund balance is now above what is required by the SIG Governing Board, and we can consider using some of these monies to support the mobile computing research community.  At MobiSys 2012 we had an impromptu SIGMOBILE meeting to discuss some of options. In the Fall of 2012, we are likely to set up an advisory committee to make informed recommendations to the SIGMOBILE Executive Committee. Initial suggestions for supporting the mobile research community include:

 

·         Student conference sponsorships (especially for developing countries).

·         Research benchmark archive

·         Community software: buy CAD/tools/software licenses for use by the research community.

·         ACM project programmer: shared between SIGMOBILE, SIGOPS, SIGCOMM

·         Floating Research Assistant

·         Award for best PhD

·         Honorariums for Industry Leaders to provide instructional interviews for MC2R.

Summary

Mobile computing is one of the fastest growing subfields within computer science, and as a result SIGMOBILE continues to be a strong, successful, well-supported organization.  Membership is stable, and the SIG’s conferences and workshops are well attended, creating a wealth of publications for the ACM digital library, and its members. Moreover, our financial situation has strengthened further in 2012, a trend for 4 years now, providing the organization with flexibility and options to support additional high-value programs for the research community in the future.