Proceedings to be published on .

We are pleased to announce the 4th EvAAL Competition. EvAAL aims at bringing together academic and industrial research communities to work together on challenging open problems in Ambient Assisted Living (AAL), with the purpose of evaluating different approaches to AAL and envisioning new research opportunities. EvAAL is an opportunity to find good solutions to a number of challenges in the AAL domain.

During the competition, we will collect data sets in realistic environments (the living labs), which we offer as benchmarks to researcher communities for the simulation and test of their solutions.

The competition is composed of three tracks and a final workshop:

Track 1 on Localization and activity recognition for AAL, to be held on 7-11 July, 2014 at the Smart House Living Lab of the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, Spain

Track 2 on RF-based indoor localization solutions in public spaces, organized by the EVARILOS consortium, to be held in June, 2014, at the test facilities of iMinds, Belgium

Track 3 on RF-based indoor localization algorithms, organized by the EVARILOS consortium, to be held online in May/June/July, 2014, with remote access to test facilities at Technische Universität Berlin, Germany and iMinds, Belgium

EvAAL workshop to be held on the 11 July, 2014 at the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, Spain, and accompanying online session for the competitors in Track 2 and Track 3.

The automatic and unobtrusive identification of user's activities is one of the challenging goals of AAL. Real-time monitoring of human daily activities (e.g. sleeping, cooking, watching TV, etc.) could be a useful tool for many future AAL applications such as behavioural pattern recognition, detection of diseases or entertainment. Recognition of daily activities can make use of several sources of information including real-time position, usage of electronic appliances and recognition of movements.

The aim of this competition is to award the best system in terms of activity recognition, localization and gesture/posture recognition from the point of view of AAL applications.  We will welcome competitors to install their systems at the Smart House Living Lab and integrate their data with the ones provided by our installations for the best accuracy. The final score will be based on the accuracy of the recognized activities, localization and gestures/postures and other AAL-related criteria including user acceptance, integrability and installation complexity.


Track 2 – RF-based Indoor Localization Solutions in Public Spaces
Organized by the EVARILOS project

Localization in urban environments and buildings, where people spend most of their time, is a key component for achieving context-awareness. Due to the poor performance of established outdoor solutions like the GPS service, a number of alternative indoor localization solutions have been recently proposed, many of them leveraging radio frequency (RF).

This track, organized by the EVARILOS consortium (see ), focuses on benchmarking complete localization solutions. The contestants will have opportunity to install additional hardware and software at the iMinds test facility in Ghent, Belgium. Available contexts include an office environment and an enclosed open space. All competing systems have to be either RF-based, or in case of multimodal systems, they have to possess a strong RF-based component. Hybrid systems where other technologies are used such as infrared, ultrasound, RFID, or other are also allowed. The track especially targets industry participation but also welcomes academia.

The performance of the competing localization solutions will be evaluated in several different application categories, like AAL and healthcare, and scores will be published on EVARILOS website. Scores based on an AAL scenario including metrics such as accuracy, installation complexity and user acceptance will be considered for EvAAL ranking.

Track 3 – RF-based Indoor Localization Algorithms
Organized by the EVARILOS project

The track, organized by the EVARILOS consortium (see ), is an online competition for RF-based indoor localization algorithms in which participating teams compete in precise localization under the influence of different RF-interference scenarios. The competing localization algorithms will have to be implemented through remote access on top of the existing hardware resources available at the EVARILOS experimental facilities at TU Berlin and iMinds, described at , including large number of IEEE 802.11g/n access points and IEEE 802.15.4 sensor nodes, deployed in a typical multi-floor office space context. As in Track 2, the competing localization algorithms in Track 3 will be evaluated following the EVARILOS benchmarking methodology, aligned with the upcoming ISO/IEC 18305 standard "Test and evaluation of localization and tracking systems".

This online track will provide contestants with unique opportunity to: test and compare the performance of their RF-based indoor localization algorithms following a standardized evaluation methodology; test the sensitivity of their algorithms to radio interference under controlled conditions; disseminate information about their localization solution as part of the competition workshop, website and the published proceedings and contribute towards the establishment of a public repository of experimental traces from indoor localization solutions.

Candidate competitors are invited to submit a paper describing their system to the appropriate track. A "competitor" can be any individual or group of individuals working as a single team, associated to a single or a number of organisations. The papers will undergo a peer review by the technical program committee members. The papers must include a description of the hardware, deployment, and algorithms and protocols used, and the description of the internal data produced and processed by the system.

Papers in the form of extended abstracts, not exceeding 4 pages in the LNCS/CCIS one-column page format, must be submitted by the deadline indicated below.

The evaluation criteria for the competition, constraints on the accepted technologies, and a description of the benchmarks are detailed in the technical annexes of this call. Possible refinements of the annexes, also based on participating competitors comments, will be timely distributed to all participants.

Depending on the number and quality of submissions, it may be necessary to restrict the number of participants admitted to the competition to the best ranked papers, due to space/logistic constraints at the living labs.

Selected competitors are admitted to the competition under the two following conditions:

1. participate in the competition at the hosting facilities (tracks 1 and 2) or remotely (track 3); the organizers will set individual appointments for each competing team;
2. provide the organizers with the internal data produced by their systems during the competition as will be specified by the reviewers; provide the documentation describing the deployment of their system, as requested by the organizers: the data will be published on the EvAAL website.

Paper Submission Deadline: 15 April 30 April 2014
Acceptance Notification: 4 May 12 May 2014
Camera Ready Deadline: 30 June 12 July 2014