Submission deadline: June 1st (extended)
Acceptance notification: June 9th
Camera Ready papers due: July 21st
Papers available online: August 4th

Workshop date: September 4th

Aula der Wissenschaft. 

Wollzeile 27a

A-1010 Wien

map: https://goo.gl/maps/rADLzigxCgs

 

Science Cafe – http://www.aula-wien.at/en/aula/science_cafe

Introduction

Today, we are seeing an emergence of devices that incorporate sensing capabilities that go beyond the traditional suite of hardware (e.g., touch sensing or proximity). These devices offer more fine-grained level of contextual information, such as object recognition, and they often vary in their size, portability, embeddability, and form factor. Despite this diversity, the manifestations of these new-generation sensing approaches will inevitably unlock many of the ubiquitous, tangible, mobile, and wearable computing ecosystems that promise to improve people’s lives.
These system are brought together by a variety of technologies, including computer vision, radar (e.g., Google ATAP’s Project Soli), acoustic sensing, fiducial tagging, and in general, IoT devices embedded with computational capabilities. Such systems open up a wide-range of applications spaces and novel forms of interaction. For instance, object-based interactions offer rich, contextual information that can power a wide range of user-centric applications (e.g., factory line optimization and safety, automatic grocery checkout, new forms of tangible interactions). Where, and how these interactions are applied also adds a new dimension to these applications (e.g., if a mobile device can detect which part of your body it is tapped into, it can launch the food app when tapped to your stomach).
Although the last few years have seen an increasing amount of research in this area, knowledge about this subject remains under explored, fragmented, and cuts across a set of related but heterogeneous issues. This workshop brings together researchers and practitioners interested in the challenges posed by “Object Recognition for Input and Mobile Interaction”.

Objective

This workshop aims to bring together active and interested researchers in sensing techniques, particularly those that advance input and interaction using novel capabilities (e.g., object recognition, radar sensing) across a range of modalities (e.g., mobile devices, wearables). This workshop will foster a scholarly environment for sharing approaches and experiences, identifying research and deployment challenges, and envision the next generation of applications that rely on widely deployed sensor systems, paying close attention to not just one, but an ecosystem of touchless, interaction devices.

Challenges

There are many challenges with building the underlying system infrastructures for object recognition for mobile interaction. For example, what are the standards and operating system requirements? How can vision, radar or acoustic sensing or tagging systems which exist in multiple mobile and wearable elements act in a coordinated manner to reliably determine object interaction? What types of software libraries, simulators and IDEs are required for development? How can we ensure inter-device interoperability in the face of heterogeneous device configurations and varying approaches to object recognition?
In addition, there are significant challenges in the design and deployment of these kinds of object based interfaces. For example, what are the implications of interfaces that rely on sensing the movement and type of passive, physical objects? How might multiple points of sensing on, and around the body open up new design considerations? Which elements of the interface are best distributed in outputs? What new interaction techniques are necessary in these environments? What are the performance, comfort, and preference consequences of relying of object-interaction as a mobile interface?

Submissions

We invite short (upto 2 pages) and longer (upto 6 pages) contributions from researchers and practitioners working in the area of object recognition and interaction. Some examples of topics of interest can be found below. Our goal is to have a group who can share approaches and experiences, identify research and deployment challenges, and envision the next generation of applications that rely on object recognition and interaction. Such systems can be embedded in personal, wearable and mobile devices i.e. physically decoupled in different ways yet are virtually coupled due to the interactions they support. We expect researchers who attend the workshop to be working on different views of the problem (e.g., at the interaction technique, application, middleware or hardware level), with a wide range of sensing systems and interaction technologies (e.g., Project Soli, computer vision, alternative hardware, …), and in a wide range of object interaction applications (e.g., education, on-the-go interaction, medicine, smart sensing).

Topics of interest

Broadly speaking this workshop is interested in object recognition work based on computer vision, radar (e.g. Project Soli by the Google ATAP (Advanced Technology and Projects)), acoustic sensing, tagging, smart objects etc. Participants are encouraged to bring their mobile and desktop based systems suitable for object recognition for mobile interaction. The following are example topics of interest but we are not limited to these:

• Understanding the design space and identifying factors that influence user interactions in this space
• Developing evaluation strategies to cope with the complex nature of computer vision or radar-based object interaction
• Ethnography and user studies of tangible and object interaction
• Examples of applications of object interaction
• Social factors that influence the design of suitable interaction techniques for object interaction
• Exploring interaction techniques that facilitate multi-person object interaction
• Novel input mechanisms for single and multi-point sensing systems (eg. in mobile, tablet and wrist worn devices)
• SDK/APIs, IDEs, and hardware platforms for the development of object recognition.

The workshop lasts a full day and is structured to provide maximum time for group discussion and brainstorming. Each participant is familiar with all position papers (which will be made available to them well in advance of the event). The workshop is structured around four sessions (separated by the morning break, lunch and afternoon break). In the first session the participants briefly introduce themselves and engage in a brainstorming session to outline key discussion topics for the two midday sessions. In the second and third sessions the group is divided into sub-groups moderated by the workshop organisers to have focused discussions on some of the key topics identified earlier. In the fourth session the group reconvenes to both summarise the advances identified in the breakout discussions and to identify next steps. Next steps may include plans for a bilateral exchanges, COST action submission, special issue of a Journal or book and planned research collaborations.

Hui-Shyong Yeo, University of St Andrews

Gierad Laput, Carnegie Mellon University

Nicholas Gillian, Google (ATAP)

Aaron Quigley, University of St Andrews