MEDIACITY: notebook

UbiComp in the Urban Frontier workshop at ubicomp 2004

UbiComp in the Urban Frontier is a one day workshop to be held at the 6th Annual Ubiquitous Computing Conference in Nottingham, England. This workshop will be focused on understand how the rapidly emerging fabric of mobile and wireless computing will influence, disrupt, expand, and be integrated into the social patterns existent within our public urban landscapes.

There is little doubt that laptops, PDAs, and mobile phones have enabled computing to become a truly mobile experience. With these new computing devices, we emerge from our office, work, and school into the urban fabric of our cities and towns. We often view these urban areas as in-between spaces obstacles to traverse from one place to another. However, not only do we spend a significant amount of time in such urban landscapes, but these spaces contribute to our own formulation of identity, community, and self. Much of the richness of life transpires within our own urban settings. Similarly, there is a growing body of work within the field of social computing, particularly those involving social networking such as Tribe, Friendster, and Live Journal. At the intersection of mobile and social computing, we seek to provoke discussion aimed at understanding this emerging space of computing within and across our public urban frontiers.

While toting a laptop around a city may seem a like an example of such city computing, the urban frontiers workshop will be more deeply concerned with addressing several sub-themes, including (but not limited to):

* Place What is the meaning of various public places? What cues do we use to interpret place and how will Urban Computing re-inform and alter our perception of various places?
* Community Who are the people we share our city with? How do they influence our urban landscape? Where do we belong in this social space and how do new technologies enable and disrupt feelings of community and belonging?
* Infrastructure How will buildings, subways, sidewalks, parking meters, and other conventional, physical artifacts on the urban landscape be used and re-appropriated by emerging technology tools?
* Traversal What is a path or route through a city using these new urban tools? How will navigation and movement, either throughout an entire city or within a small urban space, be influenced by the introduction of Urban Computing technology?

The timing of the Urban Frontiers workshop is aimed at capturing a unique, synergistic moment expanding urban populations, rapid adoption of Bluetooth mobile devices, and widespread influence of wireless technologies across our urban landscapes. The United Nations has recently reported that 48 percent of the world's population currently live in urban areas and that this number is expected to exceed the 50 percent mark by 2007, thus marking the first time in history that the world will have more urban residents than rural residents. Current studies project Bluetooth-enabled devices to reach 1.4 billion units in 2005 alone. Nearly 400 million new mobile phones are scheduled to be sold worldwide this year alone. WiFi hardware is being deployed at the astonishing rate of one every 4 seconds globally.

We are gathering for an event to expose, deconstruct, and understand the challenges of this newly emerging moment in urban history and its dramatic influence on technology usage and adoption.

2nd International Workshop on Ubiquitous Systems for Supporting Social Interaction and Face-to-Face Communication in Public Spaces

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.

Metapolis and Urban Life workshop at ubicomp 2005


The Metapolis and Urban Life workshop at UbiComp seeks to include a range of practitioners exploring urban projects for which the urban is not merely a palimpsest of our desires but an active participant in their formation. From dynamic architectural skins to composite sky portraits to walking in someone else's shoes to geocaches of urban lore to hybrid games with a global audience, position papers for the Metapolis and Urban Life workshop should transform the “new” technologies of mobile and pervasive computing, ubiquitous networks, smart materials and locative media into experiences that matter.


Scope and Aims

The city has always been a site of cultural, social and physical transformation, on scales from the most personal to the most collective. However, with the rise of the “metapolis” and the issues it brings with it, 24/7 rush hours, the conversion of public space to commercial space, the rise of surveillance, transnational neighborhoods, polyvocal politics and architecture etc. the contemporary city is weighted down. We can no longer technologically or socially be constrained by something planned and canned, like another confectionary spectacle. We dream of something more, something that can respond to our dreams. Something that will transform with us, not just perform change on us, like an operation. The Metapolis requires individual, social and technological interaction.

As the field of wireless and locative technologies matures, this workshop is interested in exploring a more enduring relationship between the physical and cultural multicity and its digital topographies. This workshop asks the question what might an authentic or native digital/physical relationship be? Authentic to whom? How can these be considered within the hybrid space emerging from the interaction between digital and physical practices? This workshop seek to understand alternative trajectories for digital and wireless technologies while building definitions of place and practice in both physical and digital terms, as well investigating their interaction, influence, disruption, expansion and integration with the social and material practices of our public urban spaces.

We desire to explore the meaningful experience of urban life and landscape through a spectrum of sub-themes, and challenge urban practioners to bring ideas to the workshop that engage with this issue through a variety of positions. The workshop is not intended to determine a definitive “position” rather to open new territories and contexts, and set about understanding and developing tools we may need to operate within them.

Workshop attendees will be asked to speculate on the role of wireless and mobile computing technologies and the city in these terms through a brief position statement (10 minutes) at the beginning of the workshop. Over the course of the two day event, we will determine a range of methods and strategies for engagement of the metapolis in these terms by engaging with Tokyo itself.

The following sub-themes are not exhaustive but suggestive of views of the metapolis that may trajectories for further discussion.

Shadow City
What types of lived and practiced neighborhoods exist within the urban landscape? How can they be realized, exposed, and experienced?

Collaborative Challenge
Cities - a crowd of individuals? How can the crowd inspire the individual through collaboration, competition, confrontation? How can this massive audience become active co-conspirators in a collaborative challenge? What change, effect, or experience could only be achieved by a mass movement, a mob, a cooperative crowd? What spaces could be accessed, created or re-imagined by a massively-scaled intervention? How can we stage a series of “new happenings” that may be very brief or extend and develop for years?

Hybrid Histories
Uncovering the past and looking toward future histories. Where has your urban environment been? Where might it go? These histories need not be accurate; we encourage participants to imagine alternate histories based on existing conditions.
Inbetween and nondisciplined spaces Urban environments are largely composed of the “spaces between”. Let us celebrate them. How can we engage with the overlooked, abandoned or disreputable urban spaces: alleys, underpasses, and empty lots? What nondisciplined spaces are specific to Tokyo or your own city? What role do daily rhythms play in the tensions between places, undisciplined spaces and “inbetween places”? How can we stage a series of "new happenings" in the city that may be very brief or extend and develop for years.

Alternate Playgrounds
Rules, play, games, and toys. Let's create new sandboxes in the metapolis. What about games that span a single event or activity within the urban environment? How can we promote playful encounters in our metapolis? Can metapolis come out and play?

Urban Archeology
What can we uncover within the layers of strata of the urbanscape? How will we “dig” within our newly emerging technological metapolis and how will we exhibit its “discoveries”?

Open Traversal
Ebb and flow. Waxing and waning. What's all this hustle bustle about anyway? Where are all these people, goods, and information going and why? What are the rhythms of this metapolis?

Exposed Urban Environments
What are we not seeing, feeling, smelling? What do we not understand about our Urban Environment? More importantly, how does this reconfigure our future?

Operational Metapolis
How is our metapolis at work? At play? How does it function? Is it healthy? Sickly? Tired? Happy? How can we measure its production, health, and mood?

Hacked Metapolis
What are you rebelling against? ... What've you got? Learn the rules of the metapolis then let's break them together and create something deliciously new.

Parasitic Metapolis
Parasite - an organism that grows, feeds, and is sheltered on or in a different organism while contributing nothing to the survival of its host. Is the urban environment our parasite or our host?

Open Source
Open source or open-source software (OSS) is any computer software distributed under a license which allows users to change and/or share the software freely. How can this be transposed onto the infrastructure of the urban environment? What are the source codes of the metapolis and how can they be re-coded?

Alternate Economies
An economic system is a mechanism which deals with the production, distribution and consumption of goods and services in a particular society. The economic system is composed of people, institutions and their relationships as well as the allocation and scarcity of resources. Why not impose a new system of exchange across the urban scape? Complete with new forms of trade, transfers, currency, concepts, modes, utopias, co-ops, gifts, barters, punishments, and rewards.

Town Hall
Take your issue to the people. Isn't it time we held a real town hall meeting? Then call the meeting to order. One of the roles of a town hall is to create a common meeting space for citizens. What is the vision for the new peoples’ “town hall”? How can all citizens be full participants in the new metapolis? What are the barriers to full participation? How can they be overcome? How can all citizens be invited into the town hall?

Community Mapping
An aid which highlights relations between objects, people, situations within that space. How can urban inhabitants map their environment? What will they look like? How will they be shared? What will they provide? Ignore? Remove? Celebrate?

Parallel Metapolis
What are the new sister metapoli? Where are they connected? disconnected? How to they share time and space with each other? Where do they disconnect?

Let's Get Dirty

The workshop is planned to run over two days, with a significant amount of time involving actively engaging the urban environment through “deep exploration” and urban actions. Attendees will give a brief 10 minute presentation on the morning of the first day, stating their interest and trajectory within this topic area, followed by a discussion and strategy session on the issue of digital urbanism as a practice and place in the context of the Metopolis. On the afternoon of the first day and morning of the second day, we will adventure into Tokyo to collect, discover, uncover, map, spy, follow, trace, shadow, etc in an effort to construct a discourse through doing. Participants will get dirty and hands on with the urban environment. On the afternoon of the second day participants will discuss their findings through a series of “visual speculations” assembled from the work in Tokyo, closing with a discussion of projections and speculations.

Goals

Taking the above perspectives as a spring board for discussion and action, this workshop has the following aims:

* To bring together a multi-disciplinary group of practitioners to discus how our future fabric of digital and wireless computing will influence, disrupt, expand, and be integrated into the social patterns existent within our public urban landscapes.
* To elaborate new methods and models in design practice that can accommodate designing technology for urban environments and lifestyles.
* To extend the discourse of locative media and technologies and their relationship to urban space and practices as a maturing dialogue, raising issues that are reflective of this.
* To develop an agenda for future collaborations, research and design in the area of urban computing and identify critical opportunities in this space.

Modern Mobility Scenario workshop at ubicomp 2006


Objective
Designing and learning how to build modern, connected, mobile systems. The Modern Mobile Scenario workshop at UbiComp 2006 is for architects, programmers, artists, planners, designers, students, faculty, researchers and anyone interested in the impact of ubiquitous computing on the intersection between physical, social and information spaces.


Topics

Topics: Rapid Media Prototyping, Message is the Medium, Surveillance, Data Harvesting, Generative systems, Topology of Connections, Texture mapping, Ubiquitous Open Gl structures, Mobile messaging as remote control , Image parsing , Location tracking and mapping,Tagging with data , Ring-tones ,VXML,Serial interfaces to dynamic skins, Bluetooth interfaces, Urban games, Public performance, and Installation

Scope
Consider the following aspects of the superstrucutre of modern life. The social infrastructure, encompasses living (mostly human) beings and their immediate interactions with each other. The physical infrastructure is defined by the constructs supporting supporting the social sphere, which includes material objects, from buildings, to roads, to household appliances. Between the social and physical domains, lies the information infrastructure, which in modern society is responsible for an exceedingly larger share of the interactions between social and physical spaces.

Until recent years, the development of the information space naturally followed the growth of social and physical infrastructures, providing the means of communication where needed or modes of operation where necessary. However, embedded in the information space is the potential for autonomous growth, independent of the social and physical infrastructures, based on developing and deriving internal connections between information. The near-catastrophic growth rate, complexity and sheer magnitude of the information space and its impact on modern life, imposes a shift in focus from the organization of physical space (traditional architecture) and the organization of social space (planning), to the organization of information space.

Technology is no longer the monopoly of developed nations . The decrease of costs of mobile devices and the relative maturity of the technology have made it possible to create access even in the most isolated places .

Why are mobile devices a turning point, and not say, computers or the WWW? Before the rapid spread and ubiquity of mobile technology, a person could only access the information space through a designated portal, be it an office desktop or a laptop in an internet cafe. The physical location and the social constraints of the portal defined, to a large extent, the scenario of interaction with the information space. A mobile device provides access from anywhere at any time. The change of setting is not just a change of convenience, it entirely redefines the terms of use and range of applications, allowing information space structures to have a dramatic influence on social and physical structures, from politics to public spaces.

The core of this workshop consists of appropriating available mobile phone technology and the programming language Max/MSP/Jitter for the needs of a free-form concept, such as an architectural process, interactive structure, performance, installation or a multiplayer game. By deconstructing the virtual "information space" in relationship to its physical "social space" counterpart, attendants will be encouraged to propose ideas that work within a shared context. The workshop will focus on providing the tools and techniques for using mobile phones. The emphasis will be on getting the most out of ubiquitous devices accessible to the general public, rather than specializing in high-end technologies with low level of adoption. Discussions will focus on current topics in mobile telecommunications and their role in influencing and defining cultural, architectural and social trends. Participants will be provided with sample code and modular components for use in their own investigations and application development.

Exurban Noir: Ubicomp 2006 workshop

Summary

Ubiquitous information, communication and technology help create new power geometries and spatial logics, splintering our cities along infrastructural fault lines. Rather than a neatly divided city above and below, or inside and outside, our technologies help use form a far more complex mess of interconnected networks, and the spaces between. Exurban noir is no longer composed simply of material deprivation, the disaffection of poverty and social exclusion, but also the marginalization from the use and configuration of networked infrastructures.

It is in Orange County, the backyard of Disneyland, that we wish to understand not the typical Disneyland view of future technologies but rather the different points of view from the lived experience of the OC. We hope the concepts that emerge reflect the resultant tensions and insecurities of our times, and counter-balance the optimism of digirati of San Francisco, London and Tokyo, or the techno-utopianism of Wired. What is Orange County like for those who aren't affluent 20-somethings? What does navigating Orange County feel like for those often left out of urban technology designs: first generation Vietnamese immigrants, 70 year old grandmothers using canes and living off a fixed income, Latina maids, people who don't own cars, and other outside of the mainstream world of planned communities, art galleries and upscale malls?

Let's Get Dirty

The workshop is planned to run over two days, with a significant amount of time involving actively engaging the exurban environment through "deep exploration" and urban actions.

Attendees will give a brief 10 minute presentation on the morning of the first day, stating their interest and trajectory within this topic area, followed by a discussion and strategy session on the issue of urban noir as a practice. On the afternoon of the first day we will venture out in groups with people native to Orange County who might have alternative views on the city and richer than a tourist view.

On the morning of the second day, we will adventure into our own groups of 4 into and across "The O.C." to collect, discover, uncover, map, spy, follow, trace, etc. in an effort to construct a discourse through doing. Participants will get dirty and hands-on with the urban environment. On the afternoon of the second day participants will discuss their findings through a series of "visual speculations" assembled from their experience of Orange County.

The tangible outcome of the workshop will be a series of designs, scenarios, and/or artifacts that will introduce the UbiComp attendees to the notion of the exurban noir through a composite poster of workshop projects.

Goals of the workshop

The goal of the workshop is not to provide general-purpose holistic solutions to problems within the complex social, cultural, political, and economic ecology of urban life. Rather, we hope to expand the vocabulary of potential urban technologies, enabling a wider range of choices as we form our future urban lifestyles. Our final designs are intended to provoke open ended discussions around urban technologies rather than present "killer apps" or final solutions.

By exploring the exurban noir we hope to initiate a dialog aligned with new urban territories and contexts. By examining the "worst possible" technologies, when participants complete the workshop, they will also have learned to understand how to develop the best possible technologies. Taking the above perspectives as a springboard for discussion and action, this workshop has the following aims:

* To elaborate new methods and models in design practice, like exurban noir, that can be added to the design toolbox to create future urban applications, environments and lifestyles.
* To bring together a multi-disciplinary group of practitioners to discus how our future fabric of digital and wireless computing will influence, disrupt, expand, and be integrated socially, personally, and politically into urban techo-scapes.
* To grapple cognitively and experientially with the exopolis as an urban form.
* To extend the discourse of locative media and technologies and their relationship to urban space and practices as a maturing dialogue, raising issues that are reflective of this. To develop an agenda for future collaborations, research and design in the area of urban computing and identify critical opportunities in this space.

Ubicomp and the City 2006
Summary

This workshop explores ubicomp technologies and design approaches for civic, community and cultural applications on an urban scale.

"...I refer, of course, to those programs, unique in our time, which are complex because of their scope, such as research laboratories, hospitals, and particularly the enormous projects at the scale of city and regional planning… This contrast between the means and the goals of a program is significant. Although the means involved in the program of a rocket to get to the moon, for instance, are almost infinitely complex, the goal is simple and contains few contradictions; although the means involved in the program and structure of buildings are far simpler and less sophisticated technologically than almost any engineering project, the purpose is more complex and often inherently ambiguous." - Robert Venturi, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture

We invite position papers that use specific cities - with all of their complexities and contradictions - as case studies. Authors should focus on mobile communications, wireless sensor technology and other components of ubicomp as key enabling platforms for new experiences in that city. They should take a position with respect to the unique civic responsibilities that might come with ubicomp technologies created for and deployed in public space.

To explore this broad topic in the limited length allowed (3-5 pages), each paper should select one of three focus areas as a starting point:

1. Driver application – A specific, deployable application, for the driver city, described from the point of view of end-user experience.
2. Platforms / services – A set of enabling platforms or services that would catalyze experimentation in the driver city with ubicomp technologies.
3. Infrastructure – Concepts for urban infrastructure in the driver city, which can span all definitions of infrastructure - e.g., networking and telecommunications but also teaching/training, deployed testbeds, etc.

Authors are encouraged to construct a progression from their own first-person understanding of a city they know well to a careful look at its history and current cultural landscape, moving into a provocative and well-reasoned ubicomp application or platform that incorporates the specific nature of their ‘driver’ city. Papers are encouraged to focus on provocative, tractable ideas for specific areas and communities rather than vague visions that would fit any metropolis.

Multidisciplinary papers crossing computer science, electrical engineering, the humanities, arts and social sciences are strongly encouraged.
[edit]
Third Things, Third Places

For this workshop, authors should focus on areas outside of traditional ubicomp applications in productivity and entertainment. Though urban spaces are a central arena for work and leisure, this workshop will consider arts, culture, informal activity and civic participation - a rich third class of applications where traditional task-oriented design is insufficient. Civic engagement, creative expression, family and community life, the cultural contribution of art, science and engineering: these are for what and for whom we maximize our time. In them, efficiency is neither the right metric nor a primary design goal. They relate deeply to our physical context (especially location); they are community-specific; they require new design approaches to be explored here.

This third area of applications is loosely joined with Ray Oldenburg's ideas on the importance of third places - that informal public gathering places are vital parts of community life. See The Great Good Place (Oldenburg, 1991), or the Project for Public Spaces

Engaging The City: Public Interfaces As Civic Intermediary
W1. Engaging The City: Public Interfaces As Civic Intermediary

The premise for this workshop was to bring members of the Human Computer Interaction (HCI) community together with researchers and practitioners from the fields of urban planning, architecture, and design, who are interested in similar issues, in an effort to critically examine the interrelationship of technology and the urban environment.

We strongly believe that we have succeeded in creating a workshop in a format that challenged our participants to step out of their comfort zones and to collaborate with like minds to come up with impressive ideas. We would like to thank all our participants for giving us two days of their time and energy. We hope everyone enjoyed their workshop experience.

In putting together this workshop we tried to design an unusual program. One that would continually challenge our participants and make the experience both educational and memorable. We created a program that provided a limited amount of structure and focus for exploratory activities, allowing participants to come up with radically different concepts that adequately addressed the problem at hand. This website is the archive of the workshop: its process and its results.
Main themes that emerged during the workshop:

This workshop is designed to explore notions of exchange within an urban landscape. In the course of the workshop, we posed a series of questions for our participants:

What relationships do we have with the city?
What do we give and take from it and each other in its embrace?
How is this exchange enacted in and upon the city in everyday life?
And how can technological innovation capture or foster this exchange?

In the course of the workshop, the following themes emerged as responses, both to the questions we posed, and the specifics of the workshop design:

Diversity - we are still homogenous - recognizing it and designing for barriers
Participatory - what would it look like if we were to engage in particular groups and particular situation
Amenable to public dialog in its development process
Framework rather than object/product
Designing systems that are extensible
Focus on walking - the workshop had a walking-fieldwork component
Transitions between places - public/private/open/closed
Boundary areas
Blurred boundaries/clear barriers

Although the workshop ended, we would like to continue this conversation, because we believe it is important to consider these issues in view of an increasing number of technologies appearing in city spaces. City publics vary in their socio-economic status which necessarily dictates that they will vary in which technologies they can/will access and how they will/can use them. At this juncture, we believe that it is instructive and necessary to consider issues of barriers, access, divide, blending, transitions and boundaries as a part of the conversation of information and communciation technologies in the city. We hope that this website and our subsequent work will help foster this conversation both in academic and in practitioner circles and maybe even help combine the two.

from MobileActive , which is a global network of activists and campaigners using mobile phones for civic action and engagement

Could mobile social networks be the next big thing?

It’s widely accepted that social networks are the latest online wonder child. MySpace.com is the fifth most popular website in the world, YouTube.com is the 20th, and Xanga.com is the 38th, according to Alexa.com traffic ratings. But will these communities work away from the computer?

MySpace thinks so. In April the website made a deal with Cingular to offer text message alerts to people whenever a new comment is added to their MySpace page. And Helio, a start up mobile company, has released a phone chock full of MySpace features that allow mobile users to view MySpace profiles and easily post comments and photos to the website from their phone. If this catches on, it could pave the way and even serve as a model for comprehensive mobile and web campaigns. Cell phones are already being effectively used around the world to contact government officials, register voters, and sway voters. Combining the text, photo, video, and voice capabilities of cell phones with a strong online community could make for very powerful, community-focused campaigns.

Cooperative Buildings. Integrating Information, Organizations, and Architecture
Second International Workshop, CoBuild'99, Pittsburgh, PA, USA, October 1-2, 1999, Proceedings
Series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science , Vol. 1670
Streitz, N.A.; Siegel, J.; Hartkopf, V.; Konomi, S. (Eds.)
1999, X, 229 p., Softcover
ISBN: 3-540-66596-X

The Familiar Stranger Project
Anxiety, Comfort, and Play in Public Places

http://berkeley.intel-research.net/paulos/research/familiarstranger/

As humans we live and interact across a wildly diverse set of physical
spaces. We each formulate our own personal meaning of place using a
myriad of observable cues such as public-private, large-small,
daytime-nighttime, loud-quiet, and crowded-empty. Unsurprisingly, it is
the people with which we share such spaces that dominate our perception
of place. Sometimes these people are friends, family and colleagues.
More often, and particularly in public urban spaces we inhabit, the
individuals who affect us are ones that we repeatedly observe and yet do
not directly interact with ­ our Familiar Strangers. This research
project explores our often ignored yet real relationships with Familiar
Strangers. We describe several experiments and studies that lead to a
design for a personal, body-worn, wireless device that extends the
Familiar Stranger relationship while respecting the delicate, yet
important, constraints of our feelings and relationships with strangers
in public places.

Bauhaus Kolleg IV Dot.City

We offer participants in the Bauhaus Kolleg IV Dot.City the opportunity to view the city and the urban sphere from a different angle, and thus to develop new approaches to their own professional careers. We work as an international team on interdisciplinary projects. We ask in the Bauhaus Kolleg IV: how do urban public spheres change through information and communication technology (ICT), and how are they to be designed?

The crisis of public space has been one of the main topics in urban discourse for the last few years. ICT are accused of reinforcing this crisis. They are subject to many clichés: they allegedly destroy local characteristics, depreciate physical space, destroy the sensory of our cities, destroy personal communication, undermine human solidarity etc.

We ask, however: has the public space, which is accessible to anybody at any time without particular reasons or particular privileges, which is transparent and safe for anybody, ever existed? Has not this collective, communicative, democratic space always been a myth? We ask, furthermore: Have not ICT yet undiscovered potentials for generating urban public spheres? The first successful projects using ICT show clearly how little of these potentials has so far been researched and understood.

The increasing penetration of physical urban spaces with digital information spheres, the latter overlapping the former, forces us to reconsider public spheres as medial processes or rather as media. Urban spaces have long become hybrid; they are real both in a physical and in a virtual sense. Who attempts to design them has to broaden their perspective beyond the customary ideas of space. It becomes necessary to also look on increasingly technologically implemented networks, on their structures, on their rules and not least on the interests realized within them. Fields of action for urban designers, architects and planners have become so complex that the task at hand is better described as programming of urban processes than as urban design.

We intend within the framework of Bauhaus Kolleg IV: Dot.City to develop an adequate urbanism. Our projects consist of thorough research and analyses within a theoretical framework as well as of practical experiments on site in Dessau, Caracas and elsewhere.

The Curse of Storage by Momus

I've been thinking about the parallel between object storage and information storage -- apartments and computers -- ever since visiting an interesting exhibition at London's Barbican last month.

Future City looks at experiment and utopia in architecture over the last 50 years. I was particularly impressed by a quote from Japanese metabolist architect Kiyonori Kikutake. "A Japanese room is determined by information," Kikutake was quoted as saying, "whereas a Western room relies on objects."

Interaction and presence in urban areas

The project studies interaction and presence in urban environments with an emphasis on social construction of presence. Portable environments and interfaces for mixed reality technology are developed based on the research results in various application areas, such as urban design.

IPCity – Integrated Project on Interaction and Presence in Urban Environments
The research aim of the IPCity project is to investigate analytical and technological approaches to presence in real life settings. Analytically, this includes extending the approaches to presence accounting for the participative and social constitution of presence, the multiplicity and distribution of events in time and space. Technologically, this translates into developing portable environments for on-site configuration, mobile and light-weight mixed reality interfaces with the ambition to weave them into "the fabric of everyday life". Methodologically, this calls for moving "out of the lab" with field trials in real settings, applying a triangulation of disciplines and methods for evaluation. These range from interpretative-ethnographic to quasi-experimental approaches and include cognitive science, social-psychological, and cultural-anthropological disciplines. Application areas of technology are for instance urban design.

This project is partly conducted in Helsinki Institute for Information Technology (HIIT) by User Experience Research Group (UERG) co-lead by Dr. Timo Saari. More information at: www.hiit.fi


from 2006-10-01 to 2010-11-01
Timo Saari; Giulio Jacucci
saari@hkkk.fi; giulio.jacucci at hiit.fi

ERCIM News - Special Issue on Ambient Intelligence

Ambient Intelligence

by Jari Ahola

Defined by the EC Information Scociety Technologies Advisory Group in a vision of the Information Society, Ambient Intelligence emphasises on greater user-friendliness, more efficient services support, user-empowerment, and support for human interactions. In this vision, people will be surrounded by intelligent and intuitive interfaces embedded in everyday objects around us and an environment recognising and responding to the presence of individuals in an invisible way by year 2010.

Since the 1999 IST Programme Advisory Group (ISTAG) vision statement for Framework Programme 5 challenging to create an Ambient Intelligence (AmI) landscape for seamless delivery of services and applications in Europe, it rapidly became widely embedded in the work programme for years 2000-2001. AmI is also recognised as one of the key concepts related to Information Society in the Framework Programme 6 and as we can see from the multitude of articles in this issue, ERCIM members are already well on this track. For a more detailed intro, our first contact with AmI is envisioned in a report by ISTAG (ISTAG. Scenarios for Ambient Intelligence in 2010. Final Report, Feb 2001, EC 2001. Available at: http://www.cordis.lu/ ist/istag.htm) using a set of scenarios depicting different potential futures with four fictitious users.

Ambient Intelligence builds on three recent key technologies: Ubiquitous Computing, Ubiquitous Communication and Intelligent User Interfaces – some of these concepts are barely a decade old and this reflects on the focus of current implementations of AmI (more on this later on). Ubiquitous Computing means integration of microprocessors into everyday objects like furniture, clothing, white goods, toys, even paint. Ubiquitous Communication enables these objects to communicate with each other and the user by means of ad-hoc and wireless networking. An Intelligent User Interface enables the inhabitants of the AmI environment to control and interact with the environment in a natural (voice, gestures) and personalised way (preferences, context).

Making AmI real is no easy task: as it commonly takes place with a new technology, soon after high-flying visions we are demonstrated with the first pieces of hardware for the intelligent environment. However, making a door knob able to compute and communicate does not make it intelligent: the key (and challenge) to really adding wit to the environment lies in the way how the system learns and keeps up to date with the needs of the user by itself. A thinking machine, you might conclude – not quite but close: if you rely on the intelligent environment you expect it to operate correctly every time without tedious training or updates and management. You might be willing to do it once but not constantly even in the case of frequent changes of objects, inhabitants or preferences in the environment. A learning machine, I'll say.

The following articles in this special theme issue showcase the various aspects of AmI research in Europe. In addition to background information on AmI related activities within the ERCIM members we have a number of articles on the infrastructure for AmI environments followed with algorithms adding some of the intelligence required to reach our goal for 2010.

Universal access to ambient intelligence environments: Opportunities and challenges for people with disabilities
In the years ahead, as a result of the increasing demand for ubiquitous and continuous access to information and services, information technologies are expected to evolve toward a new computing paradigm known as ambient intelligence. Ambient intelligence will be characterized by invisible (i.e., embedded) computational power in everyday appliances and other common physical objects, including intelligent mobile and wearable devices. Ambient intelligence will have profound consequences on the type, content, and functionality of emerging products and services, as well as on the way people will interact with them, bringing about multiple new requirements for the development of information technologies. In addressing this challenge, the concept of universal access is critical. This paper discusses the anticipated opportunities and challenges that ambient intelligence will bring about for elderly people and people with disabilities, envisages new scenarios in the use of ambient-intelligence technologies by users with diverse needs and requirements, and identifies some of the critical issues that will have to be addressed.

Where 2.0 Gives the World Meaning

SAN JOSE, California (37°19'58.28"N 121°53'22.00"W ) -- At O'Reilly Media's Where 2.0 conference this week, an odd mix of people gathered and gawked at a tiny spy plane mounted on a display table. Some wore the understated ties of government bureaucrats, others had wrinkled T-shirts with obscure open-source jokes on them, while a third tribe focused on the plane's electronics package with the preternaturally fascinated expressions of academics.

Stephen Morris, whose company MLB sells the 25-pound unmanned vehicles for $50,000 a pop, didn't care who these people were -- as long as they wanted to hear about his drag-and-drop UI for steering the planes, he was going to keep talking. He slid a plane icon onto a map with a mouse. "You send the plane off with instructions to photograph a certain area, and you can get 3-inch-per-pixel images," Morris enthused. "Most of my customers are military and government, but there are commercial applications too."

Everybody nodded, then made room for a new round of gawkers. At the Where Fair, the nighttime entertainment at the conference, every display was maximally enticing to location geeks. That's what brought this diverse crowd of 800 people together: technologies that produce information about location, whether a spy plane, an API for web-mapping applications like Google Maps, or a geolocation hack that pinpoints people's positions using Bluetooth, Wi-Fi access points or cell-phone towers.

At another table, a web developer named Christopher Schmidt showed off his system for locating himself on a map using nothing more than a tiny Python application on his Nokia phone and a Bluetooth-enabled GPS device. When he's not working for map-sharing site Platial and map-analysis company MetaCarta, Schmidt spends his time wandering around his hometown of Cambridge, Massachusetts, using his custom cell-phone software to unmask the ID numbers on each GSM cell tower he passes. Then he associates that tower ID with a GPS-defined location, and uploads it to his website.

When his electronic surveying is complete, Schmidt will have a system that can tell him where he is at all times -- without GPS -- by triangulating the signals from the newly mapped cell towers.

Calling himself a "neogeographer," Schmidt is part of a generation of coders whose work is inspired by easily obtained map data, as well as the mashups made possible by Google Maps and Microsoft's Virtual Earth.

Undoubtedly, the most interesting map geekery was coming out of a growing group of open-source programmers who've devoted themselves to liberating the tools once used by experts to do geographical analysis. Schuyler Erle, co-author of Mapping Hacks, said the open-source community has focused on all the things you can't do in Google Maps. "We can browse Google Maps, but the look and feel of those maps is fixed," he explained. "We want the flexibility to tell our own stories with maps. What's exciting is the ability to do your own cartography, to put your own labels on and show your own roads."

Erle is part of the Open Source Geospacial Foundation, or OSGeo, and like many of his fellow neogeographers he hangs out informally on an e-mail list called Geowanking. The members of OSGeo run mapping software projects, including the open-source version of Autodesk's MapGuide, and a powerful tool for producing maps with metadata called OpenLayers.

"Most web maps out there give you 'red dot fever,' which means that they're covered in red dots whose meaning is hard to decipher," Erle said. "But with OpenLayers, you can create meaningful symbols on your maps. You can make maps that show demographics or property values or erosion." Other members of OSGeo, sitting nearby, began to chime in and offer ways to use OpenLayers -- civic activists could make maps to explain issues to zoning boards; environmentalists might make maps that show the results of clear-cutting.

University of California at Davis soil science graduate student Dylan Beaudette gave a talk about one way to use an OSGeo tool called the Geographic Resources Analysis Support System, or GRASS. He figured out how to chart paths through the wilderness that include the fewest slopes. "I don't really like to hike hills," he confessed. Using GRASS' elevation-analysis tools, he plotted a trail off the beaten path through a park near his family's cabin -- a path that emulated the way a drop of water would flow. As a result, the trail never went uphill. "I haven't actually walked this trail yet," he conceded. "But I will this summer." By then, Beaudette said, he will also have perfected a method for determining where the most shade was, and will reprogram his trail accordingly.

"We want map-analysis tools to be as ubiquitous as spreadsheets," Erle summed up. "Everybody should be able to do geo-analysis."

Above are some images of the work of Andrea Costa, who is on the MFA Public Art, University of Weimar.
In these projects she explores the hidden 'gardens' in the city, and questions some of the issues of commercialisation of public space.

SOCIAL TECHNOLOGIES SUMMIT
THE FUTURESONIC 2006 AND PLAN CONFERENCE
MANCHESTER UK
20-23 JULY 2006
http://10.futuresonic.com/social_technologies_summit.html

The Social Technologies Summit is presented in association with PLAN - The Pervasive and Locative Arts Network, and features a linked exhibition Off The Map http://10.futuresonic.com/off_the_map.html

Opening event Thursday 20th July, 4.30pm
Conference Friday 21st & Saturday 22nd July, 10am-5pm
Delegate Pass 45 GBP
http://10.futuresonic.com/tickets.html

SUMMIT PARTICIPANTS INCLUDE:

Masaki Fujihata, last.fm, Regine Debatty (www.we-make-money-not-art.com), Steve Coast (openstreetmap.org), Share NYC (http://share.dj/share/), Toshio Iwai (Electroplankton on the Nintendo DS), Matt Webb, Richard Peckham (Galileo/Astrium), Inke Arns, Stephen Kovats, Tom Carden, Atau Tanaka, Jose Luis de Vicente, Stanislav Roudavski, Steve Benford, Rob Van Kranenburg, James Wallbank, Ben Russell, Drew Hemment.

Plus talks and presentations by festival artists including...

Zachary Lieberman, Simon Pope, Michelle Teran, Jen Southern, Pete Gomes, Open Music Archive, Owl Project, Pete Hindle, Sven Koenig, Victor Gama, mimoSa, Bandung Center for New Media Arts, and many more.


SUMMIT STRANDS

An Audience With... Toshio Iwai
Toshio Iwai, one of Japan's leading artists and star game developer at Nintendo, explores the influence of a lifetime immersed in Japan's technology culture, and looks at how it is possible for individual artists to create the kind of projects that previously required a major studio.

Social Arts
Regine Debatty (We Make Money Not Art) and José Luis de Vicente (Art Futura) will look at the arts of social technologies, and also at embryonic philosophies and practices that offer an approach that differs from the European media art orthodoxy.

Collaborative, Creative and Commercial Digital Mapping
A cross section of digital mapping from Masaki Fujihata, who pioneered the use of GPS in stunning, multilayered artworks as far back as 1992, to Richard Peckham, Head of Business Development (Navigation) at Astrium, the leading industrial participant in the Galileo programme (Europe's alternative GPS system), to Steve Coast, whose OpenStreetMap project is challenging entrenched assumptions about how maps are made and who can own them through user-generated, open source digital maps.

Social Technologies Tool Sharing
A quick live sampling survey of what tools the alpha, beta and omega geeks are using, how they use them, and how they make all the pieces fit together. Social technologies wouldn't be much use without users. They are open, connected and intrinsically social. Shared, collaborative technologies once the preserve of hackers in darkened rooms are now a common part of everyday life: Myspace, Wikipedia, Flickr, the internet itself.

Iterative Architecture (Built On An Internet Of Things)
SMS and low grade media have swept all before them over recent years, with games consoles a lonely ghetto for high end visualisation, but there are now some signs of integration with a resurgence of interest in shared 3D virtual worlds such as Second life. Coming from this background Tom Carden and Stanislav Roudavski along with Matt Webb look at how models of behaviour derived from games, anthropology, sensors and mobile devices can feed back into the experience and iterative design of buildings, real and virtual.

Arphids & the Internet Of Things.
RFID is an interesting technology with all kinds of potential uses but it is also a major social issue creating reactions as adverse as those generated by GM food. Germany has been used as a testing ground by the global 'arphid' industry, foreshadowing, it is said, what is in store for the rest of Europe and beyond. A session co-presented by HMKV (Dortmund) will explore industry perspectives as well as strange alliances between fundamentalist Christians and left leaning artist-activists.

Build Your Own City
James Wallbank from Access Space, UK will be joined by representatives from Bandung Center for New Media Arts, Indonesia, and mimoSa, Brazil to explore how urban cultures around the world are being reshaped by social technologies.

Social Music
Social change, it is said, can be seen first in music because it is the most fluid and rapidly changing medium. Atau Tanaka (Sony CSL) introduces new musical forms that have evolved in the mobile age. Join the social music revolution with Last.fm (http://www.last.fm/). Share NYC (http://share.dj/share/ ) come over from New York to present open jam sessions, improvising on each others' signal. And leading figures from the music world reflect on how the industry is being reshaped.

WORKSHOPS: GET SKILLED UP!
Four free artist-led workshops introduce hands-on skills in physical computing, digital video microscopy, game modification, generative sound and live video performance. Developed for Futuresonic by Creative Labs at the University of Huddersfield.

Game modification, 17th-19th July
Physical computing, 18th-19th July
Blender and sound, 19th-21st July
Build your own 8bit synth, 20th-21st July

http://10.futuresonic.com/workshops.html

A three-month long discussion will prepare the Architecture and Situated
Technologies symposium in October 2006.

Contribute or observe the discussion that just started at:
http://mailman.thing.net/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/idc

This symposium is a coproduction between the Center for Virtual Architecture at the University at Buffalo, The Institute for Distributed Creativity, and the Architectural League of New York.

Introduction: Architecture and Situated Technologies
This symposium, organized around the notion of an "encounter," will articulate new research vectors, sites of practice, and working methods for the confluence of architecture, art, and situated technologies.
What opportunities and dilemmas does a world of networked objects and spaces pose for architecture, art, and computing? How might this evolving relation between people and "things" alter the way we occupy, navigate, and inhabit the built environment? What is the status of the material object and the embodied human relationships in a world privileging networked relations between"things"? How do distinctions between space and place change within networked media ecologies? What post-optimal design strategies and tactics might we propose for an age of responsive environments, smart materials, embodied interaction, and participatory networks?
While there is an explosive growth of mobile devices, the social uses of
technologies are not sufficiently studied in terms of architecture. What
distinguishes the emerging urban sociality enabled by the Wireless Internet? How do these dynamics, including (non-)affective giving destabilize rationalized
'use case scenarios'?
These are just a few urgent questions that the symposium will raise.
Through a combination of public and closed segments (workshops, presentations, and panel discussions), the symposium will stage a set of encounters between invited participants, an audience encouraged to participate, and the City of New York.

List facilitators:
http://cva.ap.buffalo.edu
http://distributedcreativity.org
http://www.archleague.org
July: Trebor Scholz
Topics: Networked Public Sphere, Autonomous Uses of Situated Sociable Media
August: Omar Khan
Topics: Performance Paradigms, Responsive Architecture and Artificial Ecologies
September: Mark Shepard
Topics: Locative Media, Tactical Urbanism, Situated Aesthetics

from www.eu-urbanism.de.

EU urbanism

The process of expansion of the European Union has had a huge effect on cities and regions in Eastern Europe.

The “Return to Europe” was associated with historically-founded national concepts of identity, and therefore also signified reaching the “normality” of European nation states. Europeisation also supported, as a cultural code, the reform movement in Eastern Europe before and after the fall of the iron curtain. Affiliation to “Central Europe” also still affects negotiations on specific moral concepts and cultural models. Europeisation, however, is far less a process of reversion than one of the
reorientation of many East German cities in a new geographical context. The
creation of a unified European space takes place over a long term process of adjustment to legal, institutional and economic regulations. In the context of this development, it must be questioned whether and when this model of the “European city” will be extended to Eastern Europe. Despite the proven adaptability of this urban model over centuries, certain characteristics can be ascertained, which define it as: a place for the objectification of history, a place for emancipation and a place for a particular way of living that represents a specific physical design and is regulated by the welfare state (Siebel 2004).

Using the example of selected places and issues in the new Europe, the extent to which these cities are testing grounds for the diversification of the model of the “European city” is to be examined. A second issue is whether, in the face of the fundamental upheaval inherent to the transformation brought about by global structural change, a fundamentally new definition of the concept and substance of the European city must be found.

1) Cultural capitals – places for urban living?

The theme “European cultural capital” is to examine the approach to the historic aspects of a city, since the evaluation of history and local tradition plays a central role in the development of cultural capitals.

Inquiry must, moreover, be directed towards ascertaining which concepts of
urban living and culture take hold here, and to what extent these are integrated with the activities of local parties and the urban civil society.

Within the context of processes in cultural capitals, the aim is not only to try to reinterpret and imagine the history and architecture of each of the cities in a European way; it frequently also includes building and art projects that focus on international or transnational developments. Often, images of a cosmopolitan European metropolis are conceived that are rarely backed up by the urban daily practices of the residents.

Using the examples of the cultural capital 2007 Sibiu/Hermannstadt, and the dual city Görlitz/Zgorzelec, which is still in the process of acceptance as a “cultural capital”, the programme will approach the following questions:
What do “cultural capitals” have to contribute as an instrument of
“Europeisation in the 21st century”? Which concepts and beliefs of European culture and ways of life are communicated in the process? Are programmes in
cultural capitals accompanied by a pressure to homogenise with Europe or,
respectively, to what extent do they contribute to the diversification of a
multi-ethnic European urban culture?

2) EU standardised cities

The second programme will examine the institutional and spatial effects the assimilation of the cities of the new member countries has on the policies of the European Union. Acceding countries, whether already full members or still in negotiation, mean for the process of integration above all a readjustment of society and space, of infrastructure and economy in keeping with the programmes and policies of the EU. Conforming to the economic policies of the EU requires, for example, the privatisation of state property, which in the context of transformation has usually come into the possession of international financers. What is the case for municipal self government when the scope of municipal authorities is becoming more and more limited? Inquiry must, furthermore, examine the European model of governance with regard to collective welfare institutions in Eastern European cities when one condition of integration into the EU was the dismantling of existing welfare state institutions. Another issue is whether other models of the formation of institutions can be detected that first arose within the context of transformation.

In addition, the influence the EU’s large-scale infrastructure programmes has on each of the cities and their spatial reorganisation must be examined: Do they result in suburbanisation processes or in new centralisations? What kinds of spatial differentiations do these bring? The question is, one could say, one of how much spatial fragmentation the “European city” can take.

2nd International Conference on Intelligent Environments
5-6 July 2006, NTUA, Athens, Greece

On the road to the realization of the Ambient Intelligence (AmI) vision, physical space becomes augmented with computation, communication and digital content, thus transcending the limits of direct human perception. An Intelligent Environment consists of a set of technologies, infrastructures, applications and services operating seamlessly across physical environments (e.g. neighbourhood, home, car), thus spanning all the different spheres of everyday life. Their inhabitants, humans and agents, will carry out tasks, most of which will be very similar to those that we do today, only their activities will be very different. The introduction of ICT and its applications in order to support these activities (and improve the efficiency of tasks) will change many of their parameters and properties, especially those related to space and time.

Types of Intelligent Environments range from private to public and from fixed to mobile; some are ephemeral while others are permanent; some change type during their life span. Living in an Intelligent Environment requires a proper balance between a complex diversity of interests and values, some of which apply to traditional environments / spaces, too. The natural way to achieve this is by establishing boundaries; digital boundaries which people tend to accept intuitively. Then, among the most important requirements are to ensure privacy, to enhance interaction, to optimise usage, to manage resources and to apply security. A new definition of relations like “belongs to”, “owns”, “inherits” etc is needed – in all levels: individual, public, legal.

The realisation of inhabitable Intelligent Environments requires the convergence of different prominent disciplines: Information Science, Architecture, Material Engineering, Artificial Intelligence, Sociology and Design. In addition, technical breakthroughs are required in key enabling technology fields, such as, microelectronics (e.g., miniaturisation, power consumption), communication and networking technologies (e.g., broadband and wireless networks), smart materials (e.g., bio-implants) and intelligent agents (e.g., context awareness and ontologies).

This is the second in The Institution of Engineering and Technology series and will provide a leading edge forum for researchers and engineers from across the world to present their latest research and to discuss future directions in this area. The workshop will bring together researchers from both industry and academia from the various disciplines contributing to the area on Intelligent Environments.

Such disciplines include, but are not limited to:

* Computer Science
* Ambient Intelligence
* Knowledge management
* Networking and Communications
* Ubiquitous and Pervasive Computing
* Context aware Computing
* Software Engineering
* Human Computer Interaction
* Engineering, Architecture
* Social sciences
* Domestic and Rehabilitation Robotic systems
* Smart sensors and actuators
* Virtual Environments
* Art and Design

The conference aims to promote a holistic, systemic view of the emerging discipline, help stimulate research and break down barriers between the different disciplines by:

* Showcasing the state of the art in Intelligent Environments research
* Providing a forum for groups and researchers to discuss results, issues and other factors towards IE realisation
* Offering the opportunity to researchers working on IE research to forge collaborations, create constituencies and exchange ideas
* Identifying theoretical barriers and technology limitations
* Exploring how the contribution of different disciplines can create new research directions in IE research
* Identifying best cases and design patterns
* Identifying the social implications of the deployment of IE applications

The IEE International Workshop on Intelligent Environments
University of Essex, Colchester, UK
28-29 June 2005

The international workshop on Intelligent Environments will be held at the University of Essex, Colchester, UK on the 28th and 29th of June 2005. The workshop will provide a leading edge forum for researchers and engineers from across the world to present their latest research and to discuss future directions in this area. The workshop aims to bring together researchers from both industry and academia from the various disciplines contributing to the area on Intelligent Environments which will help to stimulate research and break down barriers between the different disciplines in both industry and academia.

The first day of the workshop will feature keynote presentations from prominent international researchers, from both industry and academia, speaking on a range of disciplines in the Intelligent Environments area.

The second day will feature parallel sessions to present the peer reviewed papers, the papers will be published in the workshop proceedings to be produced by the IEE. At the end of the second day, we will organise a Doctoral colloquium for PhD students.

The workshop will have an exhibit area within the workshop foyer which will be available for industrial companies and research projects demonstrations.

By the end of the first day, we plan to have the formal opening of the Essex Intelligent apartment (iDorm2) which is unique purpose-built test-bed for intelligent environments and pervasive computing experimental work. Delegates will be able to visit the iDorm2 and thereby take away useful practical knowledge on its potential uses for research together with information as to how they might use this facility.

Featured Subjects and Disciplines
The workshop will aim to bring together researchers working in disciplines from a broad spectrum of the Intelligent Environments area. Such disciplines include, but are not limited to:

Intelligence - including learning algorithms, user profiling, personalisation and adaptivity, autonomous intelligence, agent technologies and multi-agents

Pervasive networking - including wired, wireless and ad-hoc networking, discovery mechanisms, software architectures, system integration, prototyping and portable devices

Ubiquitous and pervasive computing

Ambient Intelligence

Human and Social Factors - including security and privacy issues relating to intelligent environments

Human Computer Interfaces

End-User programming

Mobile Communications

Smart devices and smart spaces

Middleware

Mobile/ wireless computing systems and services

Context based and implicit computing

Location based services

Natural user-system interaction - including ambient interfaces, multimodal interaction, innovative interaction styles and concepts and human friendly user interfaces

Domestic and Rehabilitation Robotic systems

Resource management in pervasive computing platforms

Smart sensors and actuators

Applications to homes, work, education, entertainment, healthcare, etc.

Building Technology and Automation

Virtual Environments

Art and Design

Embedded-Internet

Knowledge Representation