MobiSys 2017 PhD Forum Back to top

[Workshop Website]

The PhD Forum is a friendly workshop offering a 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 excellent opportunity for students to network as well as to practice presenting their research clearly and concisely. This workshop 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, but no closer than 6 months away from finishing their dissertation.

Submissions should consist of the following:

An extended abstract of the student's dissertation research (up to 2 pages) including a brief discussion of motivation, challenges, related work, initial results, and references. Applicants should clearly identify their contributions to the field of mobile systems. Also, it is recommended to clearly delineate the student's prior work and cite them; this will help the reviewers and the panel to make better judgment of technical contributions and provide more useful suggestions.

A short biographical sketch (1 page max) describing the applicant’s affiliations and research activities. This should include the date that the student expects to complete his/her dissertation.

The submission format to be used should be the same format as the MobiSys conference. Abstracts MUST be no more than two (2) pages, all inclusive.

Submissions will be handled via email. Send your PDF abstract in an email with to mobisys2017.phdforum@gmail.com.

Important Dates (tentative)

Submission deadline: April 19, 2017
Notification deadline: TBD
Camera-ready deadline: April 26, 2017
Forum Date: June 19, 2017

WPA-17: 4th Workshop on Physical Analytics Back to top

[Workshop Website]

The 4th Workshop on Physical Analytics (WPA '17), collocated with MobiSys 2017, solicits submissions broadly related to technologies, experiments and practical applications that center on the capture and understanding of the physical behavior of individuals, groups, and crowds in the physical world. Activities that people perform in the physical world— e.g., travelling to places (commuting to/from work using public or private transport), dwelling and engaging in various activities at various locations (e.g., exercising in the gym, eating at restaurants and food courts), interacting with various physical objects and artefacts (e.g., touching or picking up products at a retail store, or browsing through books and magazines at a library), being subject to various audiovisual stimuli (e.g., listening to announcements at transit hubs, watching advertisements on public displays or movies on TV) and interacting with other people (in groups, as part of crowds or one-on-one)—contain a wealth of information about user behavior, preferences, attitudes and interests. Such information is increasingly being proposed for novel services and applications across diverse industries, such as healthcare, telematics and retail. This workshop focuses on exploring how various technologies and capabilities, such as multimedia sensing, localization, wearable computing, activity recognition and privacy, can be harnessed holistically to build workable or plausible solutions that can capture real-world physical behavior of users.

Topics of interest (NOT an exhaustive list):

• Wearable & mobile computing for physical analytics
• BLE, RFID, NFC, cameras, and other infrastructure to support physical analytics
• Indoor localization applied to physical analytics
• Crowdsourcing for physical analytics
• Algorithms for analyzing physical signals, including location, video, and audio
• Privacy requirements, primitives & APIs for physical analytics
• Using online/social analytics to augment physical analytics
• Systems, toolkits and data processing platforms for physical analytics
• Domain-specific Physical analytics (e.g., retail, healthcare, transportation, insurance, etc.)
• Emerging applications of physical analytics
• Authentication & Trust mechanisms for physical analytics

Submission

All submissions must be original work not under review at any other workshop, conference, or journal. While the workshop will accept papers describing completed work as well as work-in-progress, the emphasis is on early discussion of novel and radical ideas (potentially of a controversial nature) rather than detailed description and evaluation of incremental advances. Submissions must be no greater than 6 pages in length and must be a PDF file. Reviews will be single-blind: authors name and affiliation should be included in the submission. Submissions must follow the formatting guidelines at http://www.sigmobile.org/mobisys/2017/submission.php

Please submit your papers through EasyChair: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=wpa17
The deadline for submissions is April 19th, 2017 11:59pm, your time zone.

WearSys 2017: Workshop on Wearable Systems and Applications Back to top

[WearSys website]

The ACM Workshop on Wearable Systems and Applications (WearSys) is focused on wearable technologies that can shape mobile computing, systems and applications research. WearSys will provide a venue for presenting current research and technology trends, and debating future research agendas of wearable technology. It will provide a forum for discussing innovative and/or ideas that have potential for significant impact. We solicit papers of six or fewer pages that present preliminary research in prototyping a wearable system, experience in designing a novel wearable technology, or survey of useful tools for designing inter-disciplinary wearable systems and applications. We encourage position papers that propose new directions for research or advocate disruptive design ideas and project applications. We also encourage submissions that can help bootstrap exploration of the wearable design space by the broader mobile systems community. The focus areas include, but not limited to,

• Smart Glass, wearable imaging, projection and low-power displays
• Wearable fashion (Smart watch, wristbands, amulets, body suits)
• Capacitive sensing and On-body communication
• Wearable health and fitness activity tracking
• Ubiquitous Input Devices Novel energy management solutions (e.g. swappable batteries, solar harvesting)
• Context sensitive notification delivery
• Wearable biometrics for payment and authentication
• Haptics and cognitive prosthetics
• Body energy harnessing
• Brain-interfaces Electromyography (EMG) interfaces
• Wearable fashion (e.g. smart jackets, body suits, amulets)
• Novel combinations of 3D printing and Wearables (e.g. integration with custom 3D printed sensors/encl.)
• Wearable infrastructure and toolkits (hardware/software, custom/open source)

Important Dates:

Submission deadline (paper, demo, poster): April 8th, 2017
Notification of acceptance: April 14th, 2017
Camera-ready workshop papers due: April 26th, 2017
Workshop date: June 19th, 2017

1st Workshop on Digital Biomarkers Back to top

[Workshop Website]

A biological marker (biomarker) can be defined by any substance, structure, or process of the body, its actions or products that can influence or predict the incidence of disease, health conditions, effects of treatments, and interventions. Digital biomarkers are the user generated physiological and behavioral measures collected via connected digital devices or wearable and mobile computing systems that can be used to explain, influence or predict the health related outcomes. The digital biomarkers do not include genetic information or data collected through traditional medical instruments. However, design and development of digital tools with novel hardware or software by rethinking and replacing traditional biomarker computing medical instrument is another major thread of digital biomarker research. Examples of digital biomarkers include everything from geo-location and physical activity traces through internal physiological processes like vital signs to chemical makeups of skin, blood and other tissues collected by IoT devices, smartphones, wearables or any other novel computational platforms.

A set accurately and reproducibly measurable digital biomarkers can be used to predict various health conditions, outcomes. These can also be used to generate actionable insights. The rich data collected with the built-in sensors and processing units of our smartphones and wearable devices have already shown a lot of promise for passive and continuous measurement of several health biomarkers which can be used to develop all sorts of new health sensing apps and interventions. However, there are a few major bottlenecks in digital biomarker computation, which include (i) the high level of initial setup cost and difficulty for a long-term data collection from a large population, (ii) the lack of crucial sensors in our existing smartphones, wearables or other digital tools capturing internal states and processes of our body, (iii) various confounding factors compromising the accuracy and reproducibility of the biomarker from the mobile sensor data, (iv) high cost, intrusiveness. The workshop aims to identify a set of solutions to these problems by bringing in key technological innovations from the areas of mobile computing, machine learning, health sciences and medicine.

The 1st Workshop on Digital Biomarkers, collocated with MobiSys 2017 offers a unified forum that brings academics, industry researchers and medical practitioners together and seeks novel, innovative and exciting submissions broadly related to the modeling, testing, and validation of new digital biomarkers for predicting incidence of diseases, health conditions, effects of treatments, and interventions. The workshop aims to facilitate a systematic discussion among experts from different knowledge domains including mobile sensing, systems, machine learning, medicine and health sciences in order to (i) identify new digital biomarkers capturing behavioral health, chronic and degenerative diseases, (ii) identify the key shortcomings of the existing mobile and wearable sensor systems, and research study software platforms (e.g., ResearchKit and ResearchStack) for digital biomarker inference in terms of scalability, customizability, and sensing affordances, (iii) find realistic solutions towards building novel digital biomarker models with sensor data from a variety of mobile systems (e.g., smartphones, wearables, IoT devices, or any novel sensor systems), (iv) identify key data collection, labeling, testing and validation methodologies of the new biomarker models.

Topics of interest (NOT an exhaustive list)

• Novel digital biomarkers for predicting the incidence of disease, health conditions, effects of treatments, and interventions.
• Design and implementation of mobile phone and/or embedded systems based computational platforms.
• Integration of multimodal data from different sensor streams for personalized predictive modeling.
• Using existing IoT infrastructure for digital biomarker modeling.
• Improved data collection, labeling, testing and Validation methodologies for digital biomarker modeling.
• Signal processing or machine learning techniques for digital biomarker modeling.
• Developing robust biomarker models that can handle data sparsity and mis-labeling issues.
• Energy and resource efficient implementation of biomarker models.
• Designing and implementing data feedback and visualization for both participants and caregivers.
• Development of smartphone based automated health interventions with digital biomarkers.

Submission Guidelines

All submissions must be original work not under review at any other workshop, conference, or journal. While the workshop will accept papers describing completed work as well as work-in-progress. Submissions must be no greater than 6 pages in length and must be a PDF file. Submissions must follow the formatting guidelines at http://www.sigmobile.org/mobisys/2017/submission.php

Please submit your papers through EasyChair: [The link will be posted soon]

Important Dates

Submission deadline: April 12th, 2017
Notification deadline: April 19th, 2017
Camera-ready workshop papers due: April 26th, 2017
Workshop dates: June 23rd, 2017 (tentative)

Contact If you have any questions, please contact Tauhidur Rahman ( tr266@cornell.edu ), Deborah Estrin ( destrin@cs.cornell.edu ), JP Pollak ( jpp9@cornell.edu ).

DroNet 2017 - 3rd ACM Workshop on Micro Aerial Vehicle Networks, Systems, and Applications Back to top

[DroNet website]

Robot vehicle platforms, often called “drones”, offer exciting new opportunities for mobile computing. While traditional mobile systems respond to device mobility (such as smartphones), drones allow computer systems to actively control device location, allowing them to interact with the physical world in new ways and with new-found scale, efficiency, or precision. The startup cost to experiment with and build real drone applications has dropped dramatically in recent years, also thanks to technological developments driven by the smartphone industry and the rise of the “makers” and DIY movements. Recent popular applications employing drones are 3D-mapping, search and rescue, surveillance, farmland and construction monitoring, delivery of light-weight objects and products, and video production.

DroNet welcomes contributions dealing with all facets of drones as mobile computing platforms, including system aspects, theoretical studies, algorithm and protocol design, as well as requirements, constraints, dependability, and regulations. We are particularly looking for papers reporting on experimental results of deployed systems, summaries of challenges or advancements, measurements, and innovative applications. The primary focus of this workshop will be on civilian applications of drones.

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

• Novel applications of drones
• Drone system design and deployment
• Drone ad-hoc networks
• Micro flying systems
• Aerial communication protocol design
• Drone operating systems
• Programming systems
• MAC and routing protocols for drone fleets
• Theoretical analysis and models for drone networks
• Solutions for sparse and dense fleets of drones
• Spectrum and regulatory issues
• Mission and context-aware solutions
• Drone coordination
• Mobility-aware and 3D communication
• Delay-tolerant networks and ferrying
• Energy-efficient operation and harvesting
• Integration of drones with backend systems
• Drone-based sensor networks
• Positioning and localization
• Swarm movement, coordination, and behavior
• Autonomous flight
• Artificial intelligence techniques for drones
• Vision and object tracking
• Human drone interaction
• Cooperative surveillance, smart cameras and sensors
• Acceptance, security, and privacy aspects
• Experimental results of aerial communication
• Drone testbeds

DroNet invites submission of original work not previously published or under review at another conference or journal. Accepted papers will be published by ACM and considered for the Best Paper Award. A Best Presentation Award will be decided at the workshop. For more information, see http://dronet2017.neslab.it.

Important Dates

Submission due: April 2nd, 2017, 11:59 PM AOE
Notification of acceptance: April 19nd, 2017
Camera ready due: April 26th, 2017
Workshop date: June 23, 2017

The 2nd MobiSys Women's Workshop Back to top

[MobiSys Women's Workshop website]

Posters are solicited for research related to any aspect of mobile systems, applications and services. All women researchers are welcome to submit their recent work for presentation at the workshop and the main conference. Submitted abstracts will be peer reviewed and the abstracts of accepted posters will be posted on the conference website.

The abstracts will not appear in the conference proceedings, so participants can submit both published papers and work in progress, without worrying about dual submission policies. The main intent of the session is getting the participants to interact and get valuable feedback from the MobiSys community. So all presenters in the Women’s workshop will also get an opportunity to present their posters during the main conference poster session.

Poster submissions must include an extended abstract no longer than one 8.5x11-inch page, including all figures and references. This abstract should be formatted in two columns, single-spaced, with a font no smaller than 10-point. Submissions must be in Adobe PDF format.

Poster submission link is here. Submissions due April 12th.

Apply for travel awards here.

1st International Workshop on Embedded and Mobile Deep LearningBack to top

[Workshop Website]

In recent years, breakthroughs from the field of deep learning have transformed how sensor data (e.g., images, audio, and even accelerometers and GPS) can be interpreted to extract the high-level information needed by bleeding-edge sensor-driven systems like smartphone apps and wearable devices. Today, the state-of-the-art in computational models that, for example, recognize a face, track user emotions, or monitor physical activities are increasingly based on deep learning principles and algorithms. Unfortunately, deep models typically exert severe demands on local device resources and this conventionally limits their adoption within mobile and embedded platforms. As a result, in far too many cases existing systems process sensor data with machine learning methods that have been superseded by deep learning years ago.

Because the robustness and quality of sensory perception and reasoning is so critical to mobile computing, it is critical for this community to begin the careful study of two core technical questions. First, how should deep learning learning principles and algorithms be applied to sensor inference problems that are central to this class of computing? This includes a combination of applications of learning some of which are familiar to other domains (such as the processing image and audio), in addition to those more uniquely tied to wearable and mobile systems (e.g., activity recognition). Second, what is required for current -- and future -- deep learning innovations to be either simplified or efficiently integrated into a variety of mobile resource-constrained systems? At heart, this MobiSys 2017 co-located workshop aims to consider these two broad themes; more specific topics of interest, include, but are not limited to:

• Compression of Deep Model Architectures
• Neural-based Approaches for Modeling User Activities and Behavior
• Quantized and Low-precision Neural Networks (including Binary Networks)
• Mobile Vision supported by Convolutional and Deep Networks
• Optimizing Commodity Processors (GPUs, DSPs etc.) for Deep Models
• Audio Analysis and Understanding through Recurrent and Deep Architectures
• Hardware Accelerators for Deep Neural Networks
• Distributed Deep Model Training Approaches
• Applications of Deep Neural Networks with Real-time Requirements
• Deep Models of Speech and Dialog Interaction or Mobile Devices
• Partitioned Networks for Improved Cloud- and Processor-Offloading
• Operating System Support for Resource Management at Inference-time

Workshop Organizers

Nic Lane -- niclane@cs.ucl.ac.uk
University College London, Senior Lecturer

Pete Warden -- petewarden@google.com
Google, Lead of the TensorFlow Mobile/Embedded team

Submission Guidelines

All submissions must be original research not under review at any other venue. This workshop will solicit full workshop papers, work-in-progress as well as poster/demo abstracts. Maximum submission length is 6 pages, and submission formatting must adhere to the guidelines described here: http://www.sigmobile.org/mobisys/2017/submission.php

Please submit your papers through EasyChair: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=emdl17

Important Dates

Submission deadline: April 19th, 2017
Notification deadline: TBD
Camera-ready workshop papers due: April 26th, 2017
Workshop dates: June 23rd, 2017 (tentative)