Thursday, March 21, 2013

Welcome to UbiMI'13!

Thanks to the rapid development of mobile technologies, smartphones allow people to be reachable anywhere and anytime. In addition to the benefits for end users, researchers and developers can also benefit from the powerful devices that participants potentially carry on a daily basis. This mini-track workshop brings together researchers with an interest on using mobile devices as instruments to collect data and conduct mobile user studies, with a focus on understanding human-behavior, routines and gathering context.

Recruiting a large number of participants for user studies in HCI has been challenging (i.e., participation compensation, location and time differences, etc.). Techniques such as surveys and questionnaires for data collection have taken a new form in recent years, where “in the field” has been replaced with “online”; and automated logging devices have augmented diaries, video recorders and cameras (e.g., Microsoft’s SenseCam, Nokia’s LifeBlog). This shift represents a new trend in research methods, whereby mobile devices are used to collect data on participants and their behaviors.

In this workshop, we bring together researchers who take advantage of the proliferation of mobile devices and use them as instruments for research on ubiquitous computing. We are especially interested in the mobile devices, systems, applications, methods and tools that were built to explore such rich datasets. More so, we want researchers to share their experiences, successes and frustrations on conducting research in such power and processing constrained devices in order to capture a state-of-art on theories, models, methodologies and tools that cope with these challenges.