SIGMOBILE FY'10 Annual Report

July 2009 - June 2010
Submitted by: Roy Want, SIGMOBILE Chair

Introduction

The current elected officers in SIGMOBILE's Executive Committee are:

• Chair: Dr. Roy Want (Intel, US);
• Vice Chair: Prof. Robert Steele (University of Sydney, Australia);
• Secretary: Prof. Ramesh Govindan (University of Southern California, US); and
• Treasurer: Prof. Lili Qiu (University of Texas at Austin, US).

Committee Appointed Positions

• Editor-in-Chief (EIC) for SIGMOBILE's journal/newsletter for our members (Mobile Computing and Communications Review or MC2R), Prof. Suman Banerjee (Univ. of Wisconsin, Madison, USA)
• Information Director Prof. Robert Steele (University of Sydney, Australia),
• Workshop Coordinator Prof. Ahmed Helmy (University of Florida, Gainesville, USA),
• Digital Library Coordinator: Dr. Guanling Chen (University of Massachusetts Lowell, USA).

Sponsorship for the Mobile Computing Research Community

• CRAWDAD: a Community Resource for Archiving Wireless Data At Dartmouth, is an archive of wireless-network traces that aims to help researchers to bridge the gap between research and the real-world use of wireless networks. Data captured from live wireless networks, when available, provide researchers with important information about how users, applications, and devices use networks under real-world conditions.

  CRAWDAD has rapidly become the most important wireless-network data resource for the world's research community. As of June 2010, CRAWDAD has over 2,000 users from institutions in 72 countries, using 60 data sets and 23 tools contributed by over a hundred researchers. Hundreds of papers have been written about CRAWDAD data sets, many in the leading venues of the field, including MobiCom, MobiSys, MobiHoc, SIGCOMM, INFOCOM, and SenSys.

  Tristan Henderson and David Kotz launched CRAWDAD in 2005 with support from the NSF CRI program, and continue to operate it today with support from SIGMOBILE and Intel. This support provides for staff and students who recruit new data sets, respond to user inquiries, develop new tools, and to process new data sets as researchers contribute them. In the past year they added five new data sets and three new tools, revamped the bibliography to support user contributions, and started developing tools that will enable self-service creation of the metadata of new data sets. In the coming year they hope to add many new data sets (including new data collected from the Dartmouth campus network), and to roll out the self-service metadata tools. New ideas and suggestions from the community are always welcome.

• N2Women: Networking-Networking Women is a discipline-specific community for researchers in the communications and networking research fields. The main goal of N^2 Women is to foster connections among the under-represented women in computer networking and related research fields. N^2 Women allows women to connect with other women who share the same research interests, who attend the same conferences, who face the same career hurdles, and who experience the same obstacles. The first meeting was held at the ACM International Symposium on Mobile Ad Hoc Networking and Computing (MobiHoc) on May 24th, 2006 in Florence, Italy. Since May 2006, 43 other N^2 Women meetings have been held at various ACM and IEEE research conferences (see the list under Events on the N^2 Women website). An email list has been created for the N^2 Women group, N2Women@acm.org, to facilitate further networking. N² Women is an ACM SIGMOBILE program that is also supported by the IEEE Communications Society, Microsoft Research and HP Labs and currently has over 390 members.

  The goal of N^2 Women is to provide opportunities for the under-represented women in our field to meet, network, and discuss issues of concern. This enables mentoring of the younger members of our community (and even the more senior members!). It also provides an opportunity for the younger members of the community (e.g., graduate students) to learn about the careers and research of successful women. We have heard from many students how inspirational this can be, and our hope is that this encourages even more women to pursue research careers.

• SIGMOBILE has also provided financial support to the Illinois Wireless Summer School, organized by the University of Illinois. The first event was on 3-7^th August, 2009 with 190 attendees. The primary target audience for this summer school in wireless networking is graduate and undergraduate students from all universities, and it is also open to faculty and to researchers from industry and government organizations. The topics covered include antennas, physical layer issues, wireless networking protocols, wireless security, and wireless standards. Greater than 50% of the support came from NSF, and the rest from SIGMOBILE, Qualcomm, Microsoft Research, NEC Labs, and Rockwell Collins.

SIGMOBILE Conferences and Workshops

• MobiCom: The Annual International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking, covers all areas of mobile computing and mobile and wireless networking at the link layer and above. MobiCom has been held every year since 1995.
• MobiHoc: The ACM International Symposium on Mobile Ad Hoc Networking and Computing, addresses the challenges emerging from wireless ad hoc networking and computing, with the focus being on issues at and above the MAC layer. MobiHoc has been held every year since 2000.
• MobiSys: The International Conference on Mobile Systems, Applications, and Services, addresses broad systems research issues in mobile computing and mobile networking, particularly valuing the practical experience gained from designing, building, and using mobile systems, applications, and services. MobiSys has been held every year since 2003.
• SenSys: The ACM Conference on Embedded Networked Sensor Systems, focuses on systems issues in the emerging area of embedded, networked sensors, spanning multiple disciplines, including wireless communication, networking, operating systems, architecture, low-power circuits, distributed algorithms, data processing, scheduling, sensors, energy harvesting, and signal processing. SenSys has been held every year since 2003.
• Ubicomp: The International Conference on Ubiquitous Computing, addresses the interdisciplinary field of ubiquitous computing, which utilizes and integrates pervasive, wireless, embedded, wearable and/or mobile technologies to bridge the gaps between the digital and physical worlds. Ubicomp has been held every year since 1999, and SIGMOBILE began sponsoring it in 2009.

The MobiCom 2009 technical program featured two keynote talks, one by Jeannette M. Wing Assistant Director of the Computer and Information Science and Engineering Directorate, National Science Foundation, entitled "Frontiers in Research and Education in Computing: A View from the National Science Foundation"; and a second by Moon-Ki Choi , President Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute, entitled "Mobile Communication in Korea". The MobiCom 2009 program also included two days of workshops.

The workshops, on September 21st and 25th, together featured 5 full-day workshops:

• CoRoNet 2009: The ACM International Workshop on Cognitive Radio Networks
• MICNET 2009: The ACM International Workshop on Mobile Internet Through Cellular Networks
• WiNTECH 2009: The Fourth ACM International Workshop on Wireless Network Testbeds, Experimental Evaluation and Characterization
• CHANTS 2009: The Fourth ACM Workshop on Challenged Networks
• VANET 2009: The Sixth ACM International Workshop on VehiculAr Inter-NETworking

MobiCom 2010 will be held September 20-24, 2010, in Chicago, Illinois, USA; and co-located with ACM MobiHoc 2010 (MobiHoc'09 May 2009 was summarized in last year's annual report).

MobiSys 2010, the 8th International Conference on Mobile Systems, Applications, and Services, was held June 15-18th, 2010, in San Francisco, California, USA and in-cooperation with SIGOPS. Sujata Banerjee (HP Labs, USA) served as the General Chair, and Prof. S. Keshav (University of Waterloo, Canada) and Alec Wolman (Microsoft Research Redmond, USA) served as the Program Co-Chairs.

The MobiSys 2010 technical program featured a keynote talk by Prof. Rosalind W. Picard entitled "Mobile Emotional Intelligence." Rosalind is a founder and director of the Affective Computing Research Group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Media Laboratory, co-director of the Things That Think Consortium, the largest industrial sponsorship organization at the lab, and leader of the new and growing Autism Communication Technology Initiative at MIT.

On June 17^th (day 2), the SIGMOBILE 2009 Outstanding Contributions Award (OCA), the most prestigious SIGMOBILE technical award, was presented to Prof Deborah Estrin. She had not been able to attend MobiCom'09 in Beijing and the Executive Committee had postponed the presentation to MobiSys'10. She also gave a plenary talk entitled, "Participatory Sensing: Applications and Architecture". Deborah Estrin (Ph.D., MIT, 1985; B.S., UC Berkeley, 1980) is a Professor of Computer Science at UCLA and Founding Director of the NSF-funded Center for Embedded Networked Sensing (CENS). Estrin's current work focuses on participatory sensing systems, leveraging the location, image, and user-contributed data streams increasingly available globally from mobile SmartPhones. Projects include Participatory Sensing campaigns for civic engagement, and privacy-aware self-monitoring applications for health and wellness. Estrin's recognitions include: Anita Borg Institute's Women of Vision Award for Innovation and election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Engineering.

The MobiSys program also featured 3 workshops and a PhD Forum on Tuesday, June 15th:

• NSDR 2010: 4th ACM Workshop on Networked Systems for Developing Regions
• HotPlanet 2010: The 2nd ACM International Workshop on Hot Topics in Planet Scale Measurement
• MCS 2010: The 1st International Workshop on Mobile Cloud Computing & Services: Social Networks and Beyond
• PhD Forum on Mobile Systems, Applications, and Services

MobiSys 2011 is being planned for June 2011 on the East Coast, USA; and will likely be in Washington.

SenSys 2009, the 7th ACM Conference on Embedded Networked Sensor Systems, was held November 4-6, 2009, in Berkeley, California, USA. Prof. David Culler (University of California, Berkeley, USA) served as the General Chair, and Jie Liu (Microsoft Research, USA) and Matt Welsh (Harvard University, USA) served as the Program Co-Chairs. SenSys is co-sponsored by SIGMOBILE and SIGCOMM (30% each); and SIGARCH, SIGOPS, SIGMETRICS, and SIGBED (10% each) and the NSF.

The SenSys 2009 technical program featured a keynote talk by Bill Weihl (Google, CA, USA) on "The power of Energy Information". The program also included three full-day workshops on November 3^rd.

• BuildSys'09: The First ACM Workshop on Embedded Sensing Systems for Energy Efficiency in Buildings
• WISP Summit'09: First workshop on Wirelessly Powered Sensor Networks and Computational RFID
• WUWNet'09: The Fourth ACM International Workshop on Underwater Networks

SenSys 2010 will be held November 3-5^th, 2010, in Zurich Switzerland.

Ubicomp 2009, the 11th International Conference on Ubiquitous Computing was held September 29^th - October 3rd, 2009, in Orlando, Florida, USA, and co-sponsored with SIGCHI. Sumi Helal (University of Florida, USA) served as the General Chair, and Hans Gellersen (University of Lancaster) and Sunny Consolvo (Intel Labs, USA) served as the Program Co-Chairs.

Two keynote presentations were made on the first and last day: 1) "Poor Man's Ubicomp", by Dr Henry Tirri, Sr. Vice President, head of Nokia Research Center Nokia; and 2) "Honest Signals from Reality Mining", Prof. Alex (Sandy) Pentland, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Ubicomp'09 also supported a Doctoral Colloquium on Tuesday, 29^th September, and six all-day workshops on Wednesday 30^th September:

• MELT'09: The 2^nd International Workshop on Mobile Entity Localization and Tracking in a GPS-less Environment.
• Globicomp: Taking Ubiquitous Computing Beyond Developed Worlds
• DIPSO'09: The 3^rd International Workshop on Design and Interaction Principles for Smart Objects
• Hybrid Design Practice(HDP): Situating UbiComp's Interdisciplinary
• Architectural Robotics: An Emerging Case of Ubiquitous Computing in the Built Environment
• PerEd'09: Workshop on Pervasive Computing Education

HotMobile 2010, the 11th Workshop on Mobile Computing Systems and Applications, was held February 22-23, 2010, in Annapolis, Maryland, USA. Angela Dalton (JHU Applied Physics Lab, USA) served as the General Chair, and Roy Want (Intel Labs, USA) served as the Program Chair. The HotMobile 2010 technical program featured a keynote talk by Dr. Allison Druin entitled, "The Future Users You May Not Be Thinking About: From older adults to children, from the developing world to the streets of Chicago". Allison is the Director of the Human-Computer Interaction Lab (HCIL) and an Associate Professor in the University of Maryland (USA) College of Information Studies. Since 1998, she has led interdisciplinary research teams of computer scientists' educational researchers, librarians, artists, and children to create new educational technologies for learning.

HotMobile 2010 also included a Doctoral Consortium, providing feedback on students' current research and guidance on future research directions, offering each student comments and fresh perspectives on their work from faculty and students outside their own institution, and promoting the development of a supportive community of scholars and a spirit of collaborative research.

HotMobile 2011 will be held March 1-2nd, 2011, in Phoenix, Arizona, USA.

SIGMOBILE continues to be fortunate to receive strong support for its conferences and workshops from leading-edge companies and organizations from around the world. This last year, the organizations that have contributed to SIGMOBILE conferences and workshops, helping to ensure their success, include: Intel Labs, Microsoft Research, Nokia, HP labs, Deutsche Telecom Inc R&D Lab USA, Euro-NF, Google Research, IBM, Motorola, NEC Laboratories, Research In Motion, NSF, AT&T Labs Research, IXIA, Samsung, ETRI, NSFC, Arch Rock, Crossbow, MAXFOR Technology, iFIve, Citris, Cooperating Objects Network of Excellence (CONET), Synapsense. SIGMOBILE sincerely thanks each of them for their support.

Each year, SIGMOBILE is also "in-cooperation" with a number of different events sponsored by other organizations. Events offered "in-cooperation with" SIGMOBILE allow SIGMOBILE members to register at the same discounted rate as for members of other sponsoring organizations for the event, providing a significant savings to SIGMOBILE members. During this past year (July 2009 through June 2010), SIGMOBILE was in-cooperation with the following events:

• Mobility'09: The International Conference on Mobile Technology, Applications and Services, Nice, France, 2-4 September, 2009
• MobileHCI'09: 11th International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction with Mobile Devices and Services. September 15-18th, 2009 at the University of Bonn in the city of Bonn in Germany
• MoMM'09: The 7^th International Conference on Advances in Mobile Computing & Multimedia, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, 14-16 December, 2009
• COMSNETS'10: The 2^nd International Conference on COMmunication Systems and NETworkS, Bangalore, India, January 5-9, 2010
• WiSec'10: The 3^rd ACM Conference on Wireless Security, Hoboken, NJ, USA, March 22-24^th 2010

SIGMOBILE Publications

The Editor-in-Chief for MC2R is Prof. Suman Banerjee (University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA). The current Area Editors for MC2R are Prof. Aditya Akella (University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA), Prof. Christian Bettstetter (University of Klagenfurt, Germany), Prof. Srdjan Capkun (ETH, Zurich, Switzerland), Prof. Landon Cox (Duke University, USA), Prof. Eylem Ekici (Ohio State University, USA), Prof. Adrian Friday (Lancaster University, UK), Dr. Michelle Gong (Intel, USA) , Prof. Bhaskar Krishnamachari (University of Southern California, USA), Prof. Prashant Krishnamurthy (University of Pittsburgh, USA), Prof. Panos Papadimitratos (EPFL, Switzerland), Prof. Andreas Terzis (Johns Hopkins University, USA), and Prof. Lin Zhong (Rice University, USA). In addition, MC2R currently has two Feature Editors: Dr. Ian Chakeres (The Boeing Company, USA), reporting on activities in the IETF MANET Working Group, and Prof. James C. Lin (The University of Illinois at Chicago, USA), reporting on health aspects of wireless communication.

MC2R publishes articles that provide a balance between state-of-the-art research and practice, with a thorough pre-publication review of every article by experts in the field. Beyond papers reporting the latest research results in all areas related to SIGMOBILE's scope, MC2R keeps the SIGMOBILE community apprised of relevant happenings in the area, by providing regular features on the status of major international mobile computing and communications standards, such as those from IETF, ITU, ISO, and IEEE. The journal also provides a variety of additional resources, such as bibliographies of recent publications in other journals, paper and book reviews, workshop and conference reports, calls for papers, information on research groups throughout the world, bibliographies and locations of technical reports, and other general news in the field.

MC2R places a strong emphasis on quick publication of interesting completed or work-in-progress technical work; the average turnaround time for papers published in MC2R is about 6 months. Papers in MC2R are selected mainly from an ongoing open call for papers, plus special sections based on conferences and workshops, occasional special topic issues, and some invited papers. The acceptance rate for papers submitted through the open call for papers is quite selective, remaining under about 20%. All aspects of the journal's operation are run entirely by volunteers, including final assembly of each issue.

SIGMOBILE also publishes a monthly E-Mail Newsletter for its members. This electronic newsletter was started in 2004 and is edited by SIGMOBILE's Information Director, Prof. Robert Steele (University of, Sydney, Australia). The newsletter includes SIGMOBILE announcements, pointers to relevant mainstream news articles of interest to SIGMOBILE members, a calendar of upcoming events of interest to our members, and pointers to developer news for active developers in the area of mobile computing and wireless networking.

As an additional resource for our members and the community, SIGMOBILE maintains an extensive web site at http://www.sigmobile.org, including information about SIGMOBILE and its activities, information about our journal/newsletter MC2R, and information about membership in SIGMOBILE. This web site also contains archived copies of most SIGMOBILE conference web sites, including all previous years of MobiCom, MobiHoc, and MobiSys.

SIGMOBILE Local Chapters

• Nanyang Technological University Student Chapter: This is a Student Chapter of SIGMOBILE, organized within the Nanyang Technological University (NTU) ACM club in Singapore.
• Sydney Professional Chapter: This is a Professional Chapter of SIGMOBILE, organized in Sydney, Australia.
• Taiwan Chapter (NEW in February, 2010): This is a University Based Chapter organized by Institute of Computer Science and Information Engineering, National I-lan University (NIU), Taiwan

We encourage interested groups around the world to form a SIGMOBILE chapter in their local community, school, city, or region. For details about the benefits and procedures for forming a Local SIGMOBILE Chapter, see http://www.sigmobile.org/chapters/.

SIGMOBILE Membership

• The quarterly journal and newsletter Mobile Computing and Communications Review (MC2R), serving both as a newsletter keeping SIGMOBILE members informed, and as a scientific journal publishing high-quality peer-reviewed research papers on mobile computing and wireless and mobile networking.
• A monthly e-mail SIGMOBILE newsletter, including SIGMOBILE announcements, pointers to relevant mainstream news articles of interest to SIGMOBILE members, a calendar of upcoming events of interest to our members, and pointers to developer news for active developers in the area of mobile computing and wireless networking.
• Qualify for the lowest registration rates at conferences and workshops sponsored by SIGMOBILE, and for the many events that are "in cooperation" with SIGMOBILE. SIGMOBILE sponsors five conferences each year (MobiCom, MobiHoc, MobiSys, SenSys, and Ubicomp) and the HotMobile workshop.
• Opportunities to share ideas, learn new results and practices, network with colleagues, and be active in a vibrant community of colleagues in all areas of mobility of systems, users, data, and computing.
• Through the Member Value Plus program, automatically receive a CDROM after each of SIGMOBILE's five conferences, containing the full conference Proceedings.

• Organization and sponsorship of five annual conferences (MobiCom, MobiHoc, MobiSys, SenSys, Ubicomp), and promotion of emerging new areas through sponsorship of numerous workshops each year.
• A range of full-day and half-day tutorials at many SIGMOBILE conferences, offering attendees an easy way to broaden their knowledge.
• Announcements via a moderated email distribution list about events of interest to those in the mobile computing and wireless networking community, such as conference Calls for Papers and Calls for Participation.
• The SIGMOBILE Outstanding Contribution Award, given to recognize an individual who has made a significant and lasting contribution to the research on mobile computing and communications and wireless networking.
• The SIGMOBILE Distinguished Service Award, given to recognize an individual who has made exceptional contributions to ACM SIGMOBILE, its conferences, publications, or its local activities.
• Other awards including Best Paper awards and often also Best Demo or Best Presentation awards at SIGMOBILE conferences and workshops.
• Support for students at SIGMOBILE conferences and workshops, through reduced registration fees, student travel awards for some conferences, student poster sessions, and hosting the ACM Student Research Competition at some conferences.
• Continuing financial support and hosting meetings for the group "Networking Networking Women" (N^2 Women), whose goal is to foster connections among the under-represented women in computer networking and related research fields.
• Financial support for CRAWDAD, the Community Resource for Archiving Wireless Data At Dartmouth, which archives wireless trace data and develops better tools for collecting, anonymizing, and analyzing the data.
• Financial support for the Illinois Wireless Summer School August 3-7, 2009, which provides an opportunity for students interested in wireless systems to learn more and interact with top professionals in the field.
• The SIGMOBILE web site at http://www.sigmobile.org, including a wealth of information for the community, such as complete details on SIGMOBILE conferences and workshops; information on SIGMOBILE membership, chapters, awards, and publications; and a Ph.D. thesis collection.

SIGMOBILE Awards

The MobiCom 2009 ACM Student Research Competition (SRC) resulted in two candidates for the short list in the SRC Grand Final (2010). This is a great achievement in itself, but were not selected in the competition's final top three placements. We recognize them both for the high standard of their work and as a credit to SIGMOBILE:

• Undergraduate candidate: Ahmed Saeed (MobiCom 09 Second Place)
• Graduate candidate: Dimitrios Koutsonikolas (MobiCom 09 First Place)

At MobiSys 2010, the Best Paper Award was given for "ParkNet: Drive-By Sensing of Road-Side Parking Statistics" by Suhas Mathur, Tong Jin, Nikhil Kasturirangan, Janani Chandrashekharan, Wenzhi Xue, Marco Gruteser, Wade Trappe. Best Poster Award: "Vehicular Networking Using Optical Transceivers" by Aaron Ganick, Matthew Figueroa, Jonathan Lobo, Peter Schimitsch, Travis Rich, Thomas D.C. Little, (Boston University); and Best Demo Award: "Playing Pacman with Sensei-UU: A relocatable testbed with support for mobile nodes" Olof Rensfelt, Joel Samuelsson, Frederik Hermans, Per Gunningberg, Lars-Ake Larzon (Uppsala University).

At HotMobile 2010, the two Best Paper Presentation awards went to 1) Simo Hosio for his presentation of "Supporting Distributed Private and Public User Interface in Urban Environment" by Simo Hosio, Marko Jurmu, Hannu Kukka, Jukka Riekki, and Timo Ojala; and 2) Jonathan Hull for his presentation of "Mobile Image Recognition: Architectures and Tradeoffs" by Jonathan Hull, Xu Liu, Berna Erol, Jarney Graham, and Jorge Moraledai. The Best Poster/Demo Awards was given for "Chameleon: Color Adaptation on OLED Displays" by Mian Dong, and Lin Zhong

Finally, SIGMOBILE is proud to announce that Prof. Deborah Estrin (UCLA, USA) was the recipient of the ACM SIGMOBILE 2009 Outstanding Contributions Award, for significant and lasting contribution to research on mobile computing and communications and wireless networking, presented at MobiSys 2010, June, in San Francisco (see MobiSys'10 conference summary).

Future Challenges

This year our membership figures are near steady on last year. This nevertheless indicates the need to work to maintain existing members and attract new members. One way that we may bolster SIGMOBILE membership in the future is to expand the number of chapters. This year we added one more, a total of three, but this is still a small number, and the potential to expand them internationally to support SIGMOBILE interests holds potential. Another way to build mindshare around SIGMOBILE is to form alliances with other SIGS. This year MobiSys was held in-cooperation with SIGOPS. The SOSP conference has significantly grown in recent years and MobiSys and SIGMOBILE could also benefit from this expansion.

A goal for 2010/11 is to add the Pervasive conference to our current list of five sponsored conferences. Pervasive has traditionally had a close relationship with Ubicomp as it covers a similar research agenda and the program committees, the publication standards, and the attendees are all similar. Pervasive and Ubicomp have also cooperated each year to ensure they are 6 months apart, allowing two equally spaced opportunities per year to publish in these venues. Now Ubicomp is officially a SIGMOBILE sponsored conference, Pervasive is an obvious candidate to bring into the portfolio.

Finally, after 15 years of service as Chair of the Awards Search Committee, Victor Bahl has requested that he pass the torch onto a new champion. Although hard to replace, we will actively look for a new Chair in the coming year.

Summary