UbiComp 2005 Workshop Schedule Ubiquitous computing in next generation conference rooms: interweaving rich media, mobile devices, and smart environments

Organizers: Contact: Maribeth Back, back@fxpal.com Maribeth Back Patrick Chiu FXPAL (Fuji Xerox Palo Alto Lab) Palo Alto, CA USA Jun Miyazaki Kazunori Horikiri Fuji Xerox Tokyo, Japan Mark W. Newman PARC Palo Alto, CA, USA Naohito Okude Keio University SFC Tokyo, Japan Jeffrey Huang Harvard Graduate School of Design Cambridge, MA, USA Presentation slides Dr. Naohito Okude Jonathan Kaplan Masatomi Inagaki/Kazunori Horikiri Maribeth Back Yoshihiro Masuda Takashi Matsumoto Mark W. Newman Claudio Pinhanez Position papers Rafael Ballagas Jan Borchers Brad Johanson Jonathan Kaplan Masatomi Inagaki Shahram Izadi Saadi Lahlou Yoshihiro Masuda Takashi Matsumoto Gerald Morrison Claudio Pinhanez Yoshiro Sugano Yutaka Matsuo

Designing the technologies, applications, and physical spaces for next-generation conference rooms Next-generation conference rooms are often designed to anticipate the onslaught of new rich media presentation and ideation systems. Throughout the past couple of decades, many researchers have attempted to reinvent the conference room, aiming at shared online or visual/virtual spaces, smart tables or walls, media support and tele-conferencing systems of varying complexity. Current research in high-end room systems often features a multiplicity of thin, bright display screens (both large and small), along with interactive whiteboards, robotic cameras, and smart remote conferencing systems. Added into the mix one can find a variety of meeting capture and metadata management systems, automatic or not, focused on capturing different aspects of meetings in different media: to the Web, to one's PDA or phone, or to a company database. Smart spaces and interactive furniture design projects have shown systems embedded in tables, podiums, walls, chairs and even floors and lighting. Exploiting the capabilities of all these technologies in one room, however, is a daunting task. For example, faced with three or more display screens, all but a few presenters are likely to opt for simply replicating the same image on all of them. Even more daunting is the design challenge: how to choose which capabilities are vital to particular tasks, or for a particular room, or are well suited to a particular culture. In this workshop we'll explore how the design of next-generation conference rooms can be informed by the most recent research in rich media, context-aware mobile systems, ubiquitous displays, and interactive physical environments. How should conference room systems reflect the rapidly changing expectations around personal devices and smart spaces? What kinds of systems are needed to support meetings in technologically complex environments? How can design of conference room spaces and technologies account for differing social and cultural practices around meetings? What requirements are imposed by security and privacy issues in public spaces? What aspects of meeting capture and access technologies have proven to be useful, and how should a smart environment enable them? What intersections exist with other research areas such as digital libraries? Conference room research has been and remains a focal point for some of the most interesting and applied work in ubiquitous computing. What lessons can we take from the research to date as we move forward? We are confident that a lively and useful discussion will be engendered by bringing directions from recent ubicomp research in games, multimedia applications, and social software to ongoing research in conference rooms systems: integrating architecture and tangible media, information design and display, and mobile and computer-mediated communications. Read the entire workshop proposal (PDF).

Selecting participants

Selection of workshop participants and presentations will be based on refereed submissions. Authors are invited to submit a 1-2 page position statement describing their interest, experience or ongoing research in the field, and including a brief biography. Position statements should have only one author, and admission to the workshop will be for that person only.

We will strive to attract diverse viewpoints, including people from different cultures, research areas, and disciplines, while maintaining a cohesive line of inquiry throughout the workshop. We hope to engage people with expertise in rich media, personal devices, smart environments, multimedia communication, ubiquitous display systems, social networks and software as well as in mobile and ubiquitous computing systems; and to draw engineers, researchers, and designers from both industry and academia.

Please send 1-2 page position papers in PDF format to back@fxpal.com. The paper deadline is June 25, 2005.

An additional note: Since this is a workshop about conference rooms and the site of the workshop will be, well, a *conference room*, we would like to explore the possibility of using next-generation technology in workshop itself. Thus, we would like to invite workshop participants to submit proposals describing technologies that can be used to support our interactions during the day-long workshop.

The technology proposals can employ technology that you (the participants) or your institution have developed, and/or they can employ interesting or novel 3rd party software whose use you think would enhance the workshop experience. Please note this is *not* a requirement for participating in the workshop! Just an added opportunity for those with something to share. To propose a technology, please add a 1-2 page addendum to your position paper describing the following:

• the proposed technology and its envisioned benefits
• the maturity and stability of the technology
• ease of setup (and time required)
• the technology required to support it, including network connectivity requirements, client software availability (which platforms?), server requirements, peripherals (displays, etc.) and anything else you can think of

Please note, we have no budget to speak of, so for each of the accepted technology proposals, we will have to work together creatively to figure out how to set up your prototype/experiment/demo/application.