EvAAL 2013 competition

The Third EvAAL[1] Competition took place during 2013 through the two stage system which has been used so far: a benchmarking of teams against challenges during summer followed by a workshop co-located with AALForum. 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. For this edition there were two tracks to compete on: “Indoor Localization and Tracking for AAL” (which took place during 1-5 July at Universidad Politecnica de Madrid in Spain, and “Activity Recognition for AAL”, (which took place during 8-12 July at TSB in Valencia, Spain. While the workshop took place in conjunction with the AAL Forum which was held during 24^th of September in Norrköping, Sweden.

Candidate competitors were invited to submit an extended abstract describing their system to the appropriate track. There was an evaluation process which selected a dozen systems to compete amongst both tracks. The revised version of the system papers have been included in a proceedings of the event published by Springer. There will also be a Thematic Issue of the journal on Ambient Intelligence and Smart Environments (JAISE) focused on the measurement of AAL systems performance inspired on EvAAL 2013 which will be published during 2015.Candidate competitors were invited to submit an extended abstract describing their system to the appropriate track. There was an evaluation process which selected a dozen systems to compete amongst both tracks. The revised version of the system papers have been included in a proceedings of the event published by Springer. There will also be a Thematic Issue of the journal on Ambient Intelligence and Smart Environments (JAISE) focused on the measurement of AAL systems performance inspired on EvAAL 2013 which will be published during 2015.

The competition itself has shown improvements in terms of the geographical diversity of the competitors, the technology used, and the improved performance of the systems tested. The winner of the “Indoor Localization and Tracking for AAL” was the team representing RTL Service, a Russian company producing innovation in this sector. The winner of the “Activity Recognition for AAL” competition was the team representing the Josef Stefan Research Institute from Slovenia.

The EvAAL organizing committee would like to acknowledge the importance of all those involved in the different stages of the event, the commercial sponsors Texas Instruments, Asus, meGha, joiiup Apacher and the EU supported programs AALOA and UniversAAL who created and sustained this competition since its inception.

 EvAAL 2013 - Organizing Committee:

General co-chairs
  Juan Carlos Augusto (Middlesex university, UK)

  Stefano Chessa , (CNR-ISTI, IT)
  Francesco Furfari, (CNR-ISTI, IT)

Track 1 TPC co-chairs (Indoor localization and tracking for AAL)
  Till Riedel (Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, DE)
  Paolo Barsocchi (CNR-ISTI, IT)

Track 2 TPC co-chairs (Activity recognition for AAL)
  Kaori Fujinami (Tokyo university, JP)
  Juan Antonio Álvarez García (University of Seville, ES)

Track 3 TPC co-Chairs (Companion robots for AAL)
  Paolo Dario (Scuola superiore S.Anna, IT)
  Rui Loureiro (Middlesex university, UK)

Local Committee co-Chairs:
  Dario Salvi (Polytecnic university of Madrid, ES)
  Juan Pablo Lazaro (TSB, ES)
  Filippo Cavallo (Scuola superiore S.Anna, IT)

Publication Chair:
  Juan A. Botía (University of Murcia, ES)

Publicity Chair:
  Francesco Potortì (CNR-ISTI, IT)

Dataset Management Chair:
  Stefano Chessa (Pisa university, IT)

Software Tools Chair:
  Alejandro Medrano (Polytechnic university of Madrid, ES)

Financial co-Chairs:
  Rose Lai (ITRI, TW)
  Morgen Chang (ITRI, TW)
  Axel Sikora (University of applied sciences, Offenburg, DE)
  Jesus Bermejo (Telvent, ES)
 

Workshop and award ceremony

Workshop: The EvAAL workshop has been officiate by Juan Carlos Augusto (University of Middlesex, UK) and Pilar Sala (University of Valencia, ES). Six teams presented its system in a dedicated poster section, namely Alex P.Moschevikin (RealTrac team- RTL-Service & PetrSU, Russia), Andreas Braun (AmbiTrick team- Fraunhofer Institute for Computer Graphics Research, Germany), João Quintas (IPNLas team - Institute Pedro Nunes, Portugal), Gerald Pirkl (Magsys team - DFKI GmbH Kaiserslautern, Germany), Simon Kozina (IJS team - Jožef Stefan Institute , Slovenia), Francesco Potortì (AReM team – CNR-ISTI, Italy).

The workshop was organized as a side event of the AAL Forum, which took place in Norrköping (SE). The AAL forum is an annual conference of the Ambient Assisted Living Joint Programme. The objective of the AAL Forum is twofold: on the one hand the conference aims to show the significant progresses made by the AALJP projects and its practical implications on the daily life of seniors. On the other hand a considerable attention will be dedicated to the most recent EU initiatives, like the pilot European Innovation Partnership on Active and Healthy Ageing.

Award ceremony: The winners were announced by Juan Carlos Augusto (University of Middlesex, UK) and Juan Pablo Lázaro (University of Valencia, ES) during the closing ceremony of AALForum. Each participant received a prize from the sponsors, the importance of the prize was proportional to their relative position within the competition.