Workshops

HealthNet 2008: The Second International Workshop on Systems and Networking Support for Health Care and Assisted Living Environments

As the world's population grows older, healthcare and high-tech companies are joining forces to provide improved support for elderly people in their homes and in assisted living environments. The overall goal of these initiatives is to improve the quality of life, providing customized support to all people in need of assistance, according to their own specific situation, and in a non-intrusive and respectful way. The inclusion of the high-tech companies into these initiatives provide opportunities to automate the observation and support for elderly and home bound people through the use of sensors, actuators, distributed intelligence, databases, ubiquitous connectivity and friendly adaptive interfaces, all connected mainly via a variety of wireless networking technologies. The ultimate goal is a system that can adapt to the users' needs, helping them get through their daily routine in a way that is effective in providing support where needed without making them feel humiliated by excessive attention. To provide such support, it will be necessary to combine efforts from many areas of computer science, including networking, distributed systems, security, data management, HCI and middleware.

Organizers

General Co-Chairs: Chiara Petrioli, University of Rome, La Sapienza
Gaetano Borriello, University of Washington

TPC Co-Chairs: Robin Kravets, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
Maria Ebling, IBM Research

• Paper submission April 21st, 2008 at 5:00pm EST
• Notification of acceptance: May 4th, 2008
• Camera ready version due: May 8th, 2008

Workshop on Virtualization in Mobile Computing (MobiVirt)

The Workshop on Virtualization in Mobile Computing (MobiVirt) will bring together researchers and practitioners interested in virtual execution environments for mobile applications and systems. The workshop seeks original papers on virtualization at all levels of the mobile hardware and software stack. We are particularly interested in position papers that propose new directions of research, advocate nontraditional approaches to old (or new) ideas, or generate insightful discussion.

Organizers:

Ramón Cáceres (AT&T Labs)
Landon Cox (Duke University)

Important dates:

• Abstract submission deadline: April 14, 2008 at 11:59pm EDT
• Paper submission deadline: April 21, 2008 at 11:59pm EDT
• Notification of acceptance: May 23, 2008
• Final papers due: June 6, 2008

PhD Forum

The PhD Forum will be organized as a poster session for PhD students to present and discuss their dissertation research with people in the field of mobile systems applications and services. This forum will allow PhD students to get feedback on their research in a friendly and supporting environment from their PhD peers, faculty, and industry representatives. Students planning to graduate within 1-2 years or who will have completed their dissertation during the 2007-2008 academic year are eligible to join.

Organizers

Arta Doci (adoci@mines.edu), PhD Candidate, Colorado School of Mines
Alan Marchiori (amarchio@mines.edu), PhD Student, Colorado School of Mines

• Paper Submission Deadline: May 1, 2008
• Notification of Acceptance: May 15, 2008
• Final papers due: May 30, 2008

Tutorials

Thick Mobile Client Programming Technologies: Python for S60 and J2ME

Instructors

Vidya Setlur, Nokia Research Center, Palo Alto, CA
Rich Hankins, Nokia Research Center, Palo Alto, CA

Tutorial Description

The popularity of mobile systems is increasing with the rapid expansion of the mobile electronics market and its migration from text-based applications to richer thick client applications. The usages of mobile APIs for web access, context awareness through GPS and bluetooth, and real-time graphics are becoming more popular for facilitating various mobile-based services, advertising and gaming. This course will introduce attendees to two main mobile programming technologies for easily building such thick client applications - Python for S60 (PyS60) and Java 2 Platform, Micro Edition (J2ME).

Objectives

The tutorial will first introduce PyS60 and J2ME, their respective main APIs, and how to set up a programming environment to develop applications in each of these programming languages. While we will provide an overview of the available modules for PyS60 and J2ME, along with their differences and similarities, we will also describe in more detail some specific application topics. These include location-based services, social networking based web services, and interaction over bluetooth. While describing the mechanics of these demos we will also incorporate topics related to common practical challenges in mobile development, namely how to set up an efficient development environment and how to test and debug code on the device. We will also talk about some common issues unique to mobile development, including power, security and user interfaces. The tutorial consists of lectures, demonstrations and hands-on exercises. The attendees will be lent modern smartphones that they can use during the duration of the tutorial. During the breaks and group exercises, we will help the attendees set up a development environment on their own laptop, so that they can do hands-on exercises with the handset. Therefore it is recommended for attendees to bring a laptop.

Intended Audience

This is an intermediate level tutorial. It is intended for people interested in learning mobile application development. Participants should be comfortable in general programming, while knowledge of Python and Java is a plus.

Audience & Benefits

• For developers and designers: The course will give challenging, fresh perspectives on the goals of and approaches to mobile programming and the associated APIs.
• For industrial and academic researchers: The course will provide provoking questions about the form and function of effective mobile programming practices.
• For students: People engaged in graduate studies in the mobile area will benefit from learning useful tools in developing concept and prototype systems.

Presentation

Interactive lectures, demonstrations and hands-on exercises.

Features and Topics Covered

The tutorial consists of an introduction to PyS60 and J2ME, followed by three core application demonstrations for location-based services, web/social networking and bluetooth interaction. The tutorial concludes with a discussion of general Symbian related issues.

• Introduction to PyS60 and J2ME:
  The first section introduces PyS60 and J2ME as mobile programming languages for thick clients, motivating them as platforms for research and application development. We briefly describe the basic concepts of Python and PyS60, so that no previous experience with the Python programming language is required. We also introduce J2ME, JVM, lifecycle of MIDlets, and Java Specification Requests (JSRs).
• Location-Based Services:
  Location-based services provide mobile device users personalized services tailored to their current location. They open a new market for value-added services such as traffic advisor, restaurant finder or an emergency service. This section will cover a map based application showing points of interest based on the device's current location, implemented both in PyS60 and J2ME. This section focuses on the two location APIs in PyS60: the GPS module and the GSM cell id module. We will show how to obtain a developer certificate that grants access to these restricted modules. In addition we demonstrate a small but fully functional GPS-based map application based on Yahoo Maps. This example also introduces usage of a web service which is the main topic of the next section. For the J2ME part, we will discuss the Location API (JSR 179), a set of generic APIs that can be used for developing location-based services. We will discuss various positioning methods - the mobile phone network (cell ID) and satellites (GPS), along with other parameters that influence the degree of location accuracy needed for an application. We will also cover the concept of "landmarks," which is a user generated device-based database that can be shared among all J2ME applications.
• Web Services:
  The combination of Web services and the mobile handset is often ideal for context-aware applications. PyS60 and J2ME have APIs that make it extremely easy to access Web-based services and make them aware of the user's current physical and social context. A demo will show the user can take photos and upload them instantly to his / her Flickr account using the Flickr Web API. This example also demostrates usage of the camera API. For the PyS60 part, we also introduce common concepts in Web APIs and how related techniques, such as JSON and XML, are used in PyS60. In the latter part of this section we show how to build custom client-server applications, especially focusing on research settings. We show various ways to move data from the handset to the server, from SMS and MMS to raw TCP/IP and HTTP. In this context we will also cover concurrency and asynchronous communication using threads and active objects.
• Bluetooth Interaction:
  In this section, we will show how to use Bluetooth to communicate with various devices, including registering service, device discovery and communication protocols used (RFCOMM, L2CAP and OBEX). We will also show how the same communication mechanism based on Bluetooth RFCOMM may be used to communicate with a PC or with an external GPS. In J2ME, we will introduce bluetooth interaction in the context of a 2 player mobile arcade game. The game API provides classes (e.g. Sprites, Layers, GameCanvas) that enable developers to build rich gaming content for wireless devices. We will also cover various aspects J2ME's bluetooth API (JSR 82) used in conveying the players' game moves between the devices.
• Symbian Platform:
  In this final section we will cover some issues related to the Symbian operating system which has over 60% share of the smartphone market. We introduce platform security and the capability model. We describe different options for mandatory digital signing and cases where self-signing is sufficient. In the latter part of the section we will briefly explain how PyS60 can be freely extended using Symbian C++.

Instructor Background

Vidya Setlur is a research scientist in the User Interfaces Group, at Nokia Research Center, Palo Alto. Her work at Nokia involves researching novel rendering algorithms particularly targeted for mobile computational devices for enhancing visual communication. She has taught several courses at local universities such as San Jose State University and Carnegie Mellon West and academic conferences, regarding the usage of mobile technologies in contextually enhanced mobile applications. Vidya has a PhD in computer graphics from Northwestern University.

Richard Hankins is a Member of the Research Staff at Nokia Research Center in Palo Alto. His current research focus is on large-scale data management systems for mobile services. Before joining Nokia Research Center in 2006, he was a member of the Micro-architecture Research Lab at Intel, where he investigated future multi-core architectures. Richard has a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Michigan, with a focus on architecture-conscious database systems.

Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks

Vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) can help to increase safety and comfort 'on the road'. As an element for active, i.e., preventive safety, these VANETs can efficiently warn and inform drivers via direct wireless inter- vehicle communications. Thereby, the range of awareness of a driver is extended from current line-of-sight to the radio range of a wireless transceiver. With multi-hop communication, each vehicle can benefit from the locally sensed data of surrounding vehicles or from multi-hop access opportunities. Clearly, sensing, disseminating and retrieving information on the current surrounding shows a potential for improving transport efficiency and comfort. Recently, the promises of wireless communications to support vehicular safety applications have led to several national/international pro jects around the world: Dedicated Short Range Communications (DSRC), Vehicle Safety Communications (VSC), Vehicle Infrastructure Integration (VII) in USA, Car-to-Car Communication Consortium (C2CCC) in Europe, Advanced Safety Vehicle Pro ject (ASV) in Japan or Network on Wheels in Germany, to name a few. All these efforts have as a main goal to improve safety in vehicular environments by the use of wireless communications, but also consider transport efficiency, comfort and environment. In comparison to other communication networks VANETs have unique requirements with respect to applications, types of communication, self-organization and security. In the context just described, the tutorial has two main goals:

• To present a detailed description of the state of the art of VANETs pointing to research, pro jects and standardization efforts that have been done.
• To outline the challenges of the current technologies and to discuss open issues and directions of further research in this field.

Organizers:

Hannes Hartenstein is a full professor at the University of Karlsruhe, Germany. He is also member of the scientific directorate of IBFI Schloss Dagstuhl. Before joining University of Karlsruhe in 2003 he was with NEC Europe Ltd., Network Labs in Heidelberg, Germany. He was NEC's project leader (2001-2003) for the 'FleetNet - Internet on the Road' project partly funded by the German Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF). In the FleetNet project, DaimlerChrysler together with NEC, Siemens, Bosch and others pioneered and explored the feasibility of vehicular ad hoc networks. Hannes is now involved in the 'NOW: Network on Wheels' project, again partly funded by the German BMBF. In the NOW project, DaimlerChrysler, Volkswagen and BMW teamed up to push the development of VANET technology. Hannes was general co-chair of the 2nd ACM International Workshop on Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks that was held in conjunction with ACM Mobicom in Cologne, Germany, September 2005. He was program co-chair of the ACM VANET workshop in 2006 and the IEEE Wireless Vehicular Communication Symposium in 2007. He co-authored more than 80 publications, about 25 devoted to vehicular ad hoc networks. For further information please see http://dsn.tm.uni-karlsruhe.de.

Ken Laberteaux is a Senior Principal Research Engineer for the Toyota Technical Center in Ann Arbor, MI. Ken's research focus is information-rich vehicular safety systems, focusing on architecture and protocol design for vehicle-to-vehicle and vehicle-to-roadside wireless communication. He is one of the founders and two-year (2004, 2005) General Co-Chair of the highly-selective, international Vehicular Adhoc Networks (VANET) workshop. Ken serves as the technical lead for communications of the multi-year, multi-million dollar Vehicle Safety Communications-Applications collaboration pro ject between the US Government and several automotive companies. He also serves as Toyota's technical lead for various ITS standards efforts and multi-company demonstration projects. Before joining Toyota, Ken spent ten years as a researcher at the Tellabs Research Center, a leading North American telecommunications lab. While working full-time at Tellabs, Ken earned his M.S. (1996) and Ph.D. (2000) degrees in Electrical Engineering from the University of Notre Dame, focusing on adaptive control for communications. In 1992, he received his B.S.E. (summa cum laude) in Electrical Engineering from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.