Call for Participation Workshop on Location-Awareness and Community Deadline: June 20, 2005 ECSCW 2005 9th European Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work September 18-22, 2005, Paris, France http://www.haifa.il.ibm.com/conferences/laac05/ --------------------------------------------------------------------- INTRODUCTION Several real-world tracking and positioning technologies, such as GPS, 802.11, Bluetooth and RFID tags, have become mature enough to be widely adopted and employed in systems linking information and communication to geographic places and people. The challenge is to better understand what can be presented to users in a useful and unobtrusive way. There are many examples of different approaches to this challenge. Key examples include systems that associate digital text to physical places enabling users to leave others, or themselves, relevant notes, recommendations and reminders. Several systems leverage location for mobile tour guides or to map users' activities or position. Location is also used to enhance remote awareness of others and to infer availability for communication. A major challenge with location-based systems is how to automatically learn and identify a user's position. Low-level sensor data must be filtered and abstracted to a meaningful granularity (e.g., GPS coordinates to "heading to the gym", or wireless LAN signals to "room 636"). GOALS and OBJECTIVES Many challenges remain to effectively leverage location awareness to support community. These problems span the social and the technical fields—tensions between privacy control and awareness, from raw data to effectively processed meaningful inferences. Thus, there is a wide range of areas for fruitful discussion. These include, but are not limited to, the following areas. Algorithmic: - Automatically learning and identifying a user's location in a meaningful way - Methods for labeling locations and sharing descriptions - Rich representation of locations; composed of geometric, social, and temporal properties Conceptual: - Place shape behaviour: how people describe places, whether their descriptions are relevant to others - How place types relate to people's desire for place-related awareness and communication with others - What information people are willing to share about themselves to enable place-related communication and awareness - Which lessons learned from online communities are applicable to non-virtual communities, particularly referring to identity and privacy Interaction Techniques / User Interface Design: - Models to ensure people's privacy in presence enabled systems - UIs for managing complex privacy information and preferences, particularly on mobile devices - Designs and implementations of mobile location-aware community information systems - Scalable visualizations of people- and place-centered systems - Creative location-relevant content WORKSHOP ORGANIZATION This will be a one-day workshop. Rather than just presentations on the position papers, we would like it to be interactive. The accepted papers will be distributed to the participants in advance. We hope to involve participants in a pre-workshop activity that will help everyone think about common data from their own diverse perspectives. During the day, we will have short, five-minute presentations for each participant to highlight the core ideas in their paper and how they relate to the workshop topic. The main part of the day will involve a design exercise, in mixed groups based on expertise. In this exercise, participants will work on different aspects of a specific scenario, revolving around our three main themes: Algorithmic, Conceptual, and Interaction Techniques/UI Design. The last part of the workshop will be dedicated to re-writing a "solution" for the scenario, using comments, observations, and technologies from all the participants. If people are willing, participants could all go out to dinner the previous night in order to get to know each other before the workshop. We expect about ten participants, but this could expand if more submissions are received. PARTICIPATION Participants will be selected on the basis of position papers submitted prior to the workshop. Proposals should be no longer than six pages in the ECSCW conference format and can address any one of our three themes (Algorithmic, Conceptual, Interaction Techniques/UI Design) individually, or any combination of them. Papers should be clear regarding which elements are conceptual or theoretical and what has been implemented/verified. Where relevant, details should be given about the type of community (e.g., work, leisure), and important contextual factors and social interactions supported. Position papers should explain how the author’s work relates to the workshop theme. We are particularly interested in seeing perspectives at a variety of levels, ranging from meta views to micro-scale analyses. Submissions should be sent to nmarmas@il.ibm.com by June 20, 2005. Position papers will be reviewed by the workshop organizers and notification of acceptance will be given by the first week of July. We encourage a wide range of participants from diverse backgrounds. ORGANIZING COMMITTEE Natalia Marmasse, IBM Research Lab in Haifa Vladimir Soroka, IBM Research Lab in Haifa Quentin (Gad) Jones, New Jersey Institute of Technology Christine Halverson, IBM T.J. Watson Research Lab