What makes for good application-led research in ubiquitous computing?

To link to this page use:
http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/ubiappwsweb/

The majority of application studies presented at conferences in our field are exemplars of potential applications suggesting directions for further research. But they often contribute little to our understanding of the broader needs of users of ubiquitous systems and the wider potential of the underlying technologies. Nor do they provide a context within which the merits of alternative designs can be effectively assessed. Ubicomp research could benefit from a better-mapped domain for application research with established metrics, methods for the selection, analysis and evaluation of applications and common infrastructures.

The purpose of the workshop is to attempt to reach a consensus on the reasons for these problems and to develop some ideas for remedies. Constructive critiques of a variety of past experiences will be taken as a starting point for the discussion of new approaches to defining, analysing and assessing application-led research projects. The goal of the workshop is to identify the most important issues and if appropriate make recommendations for community action.

Issues

• What is the role and contribution of applications in ubicomp systems and how does application-led research advance our field?
  
  
• What are good metrics for the selection, analysis and evaluation of ubicomp applications?
  
  
• How can we identify potential ubicomp applications within a (new) domain?
  
  
• What would be a good set of exemplar applications that would both encapsulate the fundamental problems of ubicomp and provide benchmarks for improving our solutions?
  
  
• What are good approaches to longer-term iterative design studies in which applications are refined and their scope is expanded?
  
  
• What issues and obstacles hinder the broader impact of application-led research and what actions can be taken to overcome them?

This workshop takes as a premise that the ubicomp research community needs to make more coherent progress; with few exceptions, it is neither systematically building upon what little new knowledge it has derived so far, nor setting specific challenges and benchmarks to guide its progress. "Vision" needs to be replaced with goals. Successful submissions will provide two key contributions: (1) at least one insight into the state, direction or processes of research in some ubicomp application domain; and (2) a suggestion for moving forward -- whether it be, for example, a new methodology to explore or a new set of standards for published results to meet, including recommendations on metrics and methods.

Participation was by invitation only, based on position papers.

All the accepted position papers appear on this site and in the Pervasive 2005 Workshop Proceedings.

Proceedings