September | 2014

This month saw the International Joint Conference on Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing (UbiComp) held in the unexpectedly sunny Seattle. UbiComp is the premier conference in the field, regularly attracting over 700 participants. RECALL had a strong presence there, with team members organizing a novel Workshop on “Ubiquitous Technologies for Augmenting the Human Mind (WAHM)”. In additional, RECALL team member Evangelos Niforatos presented his work on the Atmos system in the conference’s poster session .

Atmos allows collecting empirical reports about current weather conditions. — Atmos Screenshot

Atmos is a novel approach to weather estimation. It introduces the use of participatory sensing to collect in-situ weather data, both from sensors and human input. Atmos leverages a crowd-sourcing network of mobile devices to generate highly localized information about current and future weather conditions. Participatory sensing involves the utilization of mobile devices to form interactive, collaborative sensor networks that enable users to garner, analyze and share local knowledge. Under this guise, participatory sensing exhibits a unique level of spatio-temporal coverage in observing phenomena of interest in urban spaces. The key idea behind this new paradigm is the enabling of mobile users to collect and share sensed data about their natural settings in large scale, using their mobile devices. Continue reading Atmos: Crowd–sourcing Estimations about Current and Future Weather Conditions →

Dagstuhl, a remote place in the greens of Germany, is a well known destination in the Informatics community. The infamous Dagstuhl seminars provide a platform for researchers for personal interaction and open discussions of results, ideas, sketches and pending challenges. In the week between August, 31st and September, 5th, of this year 28 researchers from various disciplines came together to discuss the topic of “Augmenting the Human Memory — Capture in the Era of Lifelogging”.The seminar organized by Mark Billinghurst, Nigel Davies, Marc Langheinrich and Albrecht Schmidt, explored how technology can fundamentally change the way we interact with human memory. This included the focus on various trends that are currently changing our existing research on capture and playback technologies, privacy and society, as well as existing theories of memory. Continue reading Dagstuhl Seminar on Augmenting Human Memory – Capture and Recall in the Era of Lifelogging →