Pervasive Image Capture and Sharing

This year’s UbiSys workshop focused on four interrelated themes: common abstractions, new and emerging middleware and software engineering approaches, widescale interdomain deployment, and techniques and benchmarks for effective evaluation of ubicomp systems. Owing to the workshop’s large size (47 participants), the day started with a “one-minute madness” where each participant had a minute to state his or her position on these issues. It then continued with a mix of two paper sessions and three panel discussions. During the discussions, several key issues emerged. One subject of lively debate was the possibility of a common set of ubicomp abstractions and of the community adopting a toolkit or platform to facilitate research. Many felt this would help address a second issue that participants frequently raised— namely, evaluation and benchmarking of ubicomp systems research. A key aspect of this issue, described as “magic in ubicomp systems,” was that many researchers failed to adequately explain their assumptions and relied on some future “magic” to help justify their approach. An equally important issue was the community’s poor record in addressing resilience and reliability. Many participants perceived this problem as a stumbling block to real-world deployment of ubicomp technologies. As an antidote to this problem, many participants agreed with the suggestion that ubisys researchers should increasingly strive to reuse their own work and reduce reinvention and replication within the community. The metatheme that evolved during the day was the need for better coordination among the community. This theme was particularly evident in the last panel, which focused on common scenarios to aid evaluation and on the need to develop a community-supported set of grand challenges. More details, including an online paper archive, are at www.magic.ubc. ca/ubisys. ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■