Ph.D. Forum Back to top

The PhD Forum provides a friendly and supportive environment for doctoral students to present and discuss their dissertation research both with their peers and with a panel of experienced researchers from academia and industry. In addition to providing feedback and advice, this forum will provide an opportunity for students to network as well as to practice presenting their research clearly and concisely.

This meeting is best suited to students who are far enough into their PhD to have a concrete dissertation proposal outlining the key challenges they plan to solve as well as the strategies and methodologies that are applicable. Furthermore, participants should not plan to finish their dissertation within 6 months of the forum, as that would leave little time to include advice and suggestions into their work.

$1,000 Google Best Presentation Award will be given to the best presentation at the Ph.D. Forum.

Please visit the PhD Forum 2011 website for more information at http://phdforum.org.

Ph.D. Forum Co-Chairs

Maria Gorlatova, Columbia University
Caleb Phillips, University of Colorado at Boulder

Important Dates

Submission deadline: March, 29, 2012
Notification deadline: April 15, 2012
Camera-ready deadline: May 1, 2012
Workshop: June 25, 2012

Next generation mobile computing for dynamic personalised travel planning Back to top

Both UK and EU transport policy currently recommends using 'blended' measures of often small scale transport initiatives to encourage modal shift away from private car use to more sustainable modes of transport. A key component of current transport policy is to provide individuals with 'smarter choices' which, in combination, will 'nudge' them to adopt more environmentally friendly modes. 'Travel Planning' has been a concept that has emerged from the smarter choices research since the 2004 UK government White Paper. This has also taken the form of 'personalised travel planning' where blended measures are demonstrated to individuals in order to demonstrate the merits of adopting alternative modes of travel.

Mobile apps have the potential to take 'personalised travel planning' to another dimension where context sensitive, real-time information can be provided to the individual traveller, directly from source. Of particular interest impacting on future Government policy is to what extent mobile apps can effect behavioural change and bring about the desired 'nudges' towards sustainable travel.

Workshop Objectives

The workshop aims to bring together academics, researchers and practitioners from the transport policy, management, travel behaviour/modelling disciplines, along with the mobile computing community.

For more information, please visit the workshop web site at: http://www.sixthsensetransport.com/mobisysworkshop

You may find here a copy of the workshop agenda.

Program Co-Chairs

Rajesh Balan, Singapore Management University
Eddie Wilson, University of Southampton
Tom Cherrett, University of Southampton

Important Dates

Vision statement submission deadline: 23rd March 2012
Notification of vision statements for presentation: 23rd April 2012
Workshop: 29th June 2012

VANET 2012 - The Ninth ACM International Workshop on VehiculAr Inter-NETworking, Systems, and Applications Back to top

Wireless vehicular communications has been identified as a key technology for increasing road safety and transport efficiency, and providing Internet access on the move to ensure ubiquitous connectivity. Based on short- and medium-range communication like DSRC or WiFi as well as on long-range cellular systems, vehicular networking will enable safety applications (including collision avoidance and safety warnings), efficiency applications (e.g. real-time traffic congestion and routing information) and other commercial or public authority applications (high-speed tolling, mobile infotainment, and many others).

The Ninth ACM International Workshop on VehiculAr Inter-NETworking, Systems, and Applications (VANET) is pleased to begin an association with ACM MobiSys in 2012, following years of success at ACM MobiCom. With a track record of bringing together key researchers from academia and industry, VANET 2012 will cover a widening range of research topics related to vehicular networking applications, services and systems. The scope includes research on fundamental communication problems, design and implementation of vehicular systems and applications, as well as related topics such as the implications of VANETs on transportation efficiency and safety, liability issues, standardization efforts, and spectrum assignment.

The program combines research papers subject to a highly selective double-blind review process, a thought-provoking keynote address, and a panel discussion of issues at the leading edge of vehicular network deployment.

For more information, please visit the workshop web site at: http://www.uwicore.umh.es/vanet2012/

VANET Co-Chairs

John Kenney, Toyota InfoTechnology Center, USA
Javier Gozalvez Sempere, University Miguel Hernandez de Elche, Spain

Important Dates

HotPlanet 2012 - The 4th ACM International Workshop on Hot Topics in Planet-Scale Measurement Back to top

It is well-known that successfully researching, designing and building new mobile, ad-hoc, mesh and opportunistic networking systems and algorithms requires access to large-scale data on human mobility, encounter, and social network patterns. Unfortunately, the wireless and mobile research communities lack such data, with typical human contact traces consisting of less than 100 nodes. We believe that large-scale datasets are important, not only in communication network design, but also for fundamental study in other academic disciplines, e.g., epidemiology, urban planning, and social science. Complex networks research has flourished since 1989 when the first large Internet (and later WWW) datasets became available. To achieve similar improvements in mobile networking and related fields, large-scale, and ideally planet-scale, datasets must be collected and made available.

The HotPlanet workshop is designed to discuss the issues around collecting mobility and other wireless network traces at a planet-wide scale. Thus, following three successful editions of the workshop at ACM MobiSys 2009, 2010, and 2011, the fourth HotPlanet workshop will not only challenge the community to collect large-scale human mobility traces but also to propose novel mobility data processing and knowledge discovery techniques.

For more information, please visit the workshop web site at: www.hotplanetconf.net

HotPlanet Co-Chairs

Important Dates

1st ACM Workshop on Mobile systems for Computational Social Science Back to top

For decades, behavioral scientists have struggled to understand the various factors that influence behavior. Observational and self-report methods have shed some light on those factors, but the nature of such methods can elicit responses that are not always completely accurate. Furthermore, such methods usually capture behavior as it occurs in a laboratory as opposed to behavior as it naturally occurs in everyday life. Recent advances in mobile technology provide some extremely powerful tools for overcoming these obstacles. Indeed, mobile phones represent an ideal platform for studying behavior and interactions in real-life contexts. One reason is because mobile phones are ubiquitous: there are billions of mobile phone users and the market has seen unprecedented growth in recent years. Secondly, mobile phones are unobtrusive: because of their ubiquity, users are not generally aware of the presence of mobile phones, unlike behavioral monitoring in laboratories or through purpose-built devices that depend on self-reports. Thirdly, mobile phones are powerful and sensor rich platforms: modern mobile phones have many sensors embedded in them (e.g., accelerometer, Bluetooth, GPS, and magnetometer) that can accurately capture user behavior; they are also equipped with powerful processors, which allow applications to exploit computationally intensive algorithms to run locally on the phones. Finally, given their diffusion, mobile phones allow to build systems at scale, i.e., supporting mobile applications potentially used by millions of people at the same time. Data collected by means of mobile phones can then be used for analysis of human behavior and interactions. There are also many challenges in this area, especially related to the management of personal data and real-time processing of information.

In other words, mobile systems will represent a key foundational component of the emerging discipline of computational social science. The goal of this one-day workshop is to bring together researchers working or interested in mobile systems for social analysis and applications. We wish to build a lively forum to propose and discuss recent advances in designing, implementing and evaluating this emerging class of mobile systems. The workshop will be open to contributions from researchers belonging to different communities (computer science, engineering, social sciences, etc.) tackling these challenging research problems from various complementary perspectives.

For more information, please visit the workshop web site at: http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/conference/mcss2012

Chairs

Cecilia Mascolo, Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge, UK
Mirco Musolesi, School of Computer Science, University of Birmingham, UK
P. Jason Rentfrow, Faculty of Politics, Psychology, Sociology and International Studies, University of Cambridge, UK

Important Dates

Submission deadline: March 31, 2012
Notification deadline: April 22, 2012
Camera-ready deadline: April 29, 2012
Workshop: June 25, 2012

The Third ACM Workshop on Mobile Cloud Computing and Services (MCS) Back to top

Mobile phone applications demand greater resources and improved interactivity for better user experience. Resources in cloud computing platforms such as Amazon EC2, Microsoft Azure, and Google AppEngine are a natural fit to remedy the lack of local resources in mobile devices. Mobile cloud computing refers to an infrastructure where data storage and data processing happen outside of the mobile device enabling a new class of applications previously not possible, e.g. context-aware mobile social networks. With the recent introduction of Apple iCloud and Amazon Silk Split Browser, mobile cloud computing is poised to become a disruptive force in the mobile world.

While prior work on thin client related research is relevant, the availability of cloud computing resources on a pay-as-you-go basis, the advances in virtualization, the emergence of LTE and WiMAX, IEEE 802.11n and 60 GHz, and mobile application programming platforms create a new set of rich problems that require re-thinking old issues with a new lense.

The scope of the MCS workshop will encompass system and networking topics such as mobile social networks, device virtualization, notification services, location services, and scalable mobile cloud computing platforms.

For more information, please visit the workshop web site at: http://mcs12.eecs.umich.edu/Home.html

Chairs

Jitendra Padhye (MSR)
Z. Morley Mao (University of UMichigan)

Important Dates

Paper submission deadline: April 6, 2012 by 11:59 pm ET
Notification of acceptance: April 23, 2012
Final camera-ready paper: May 1, 2012
Workshop: June 25, 2012