[evaal contest] EvAAL Call for Competition 2013

[Francesco Potortì]

Here we are again, this year with three tracks!

Please help spread the word.

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			Third EvAAL Competition
       (Evaluating AAL Systems through Competitive Benchmarking)
			 http://evaal.aaloa.org

	   Track 1: Indoor Localization and Tracking for AAL
		      1-5 July 2013 -- Madrid, ES

		 Track 2: Activity Recognition for AAL
		     8-12 July 2013 -- Valencia, ES

		   Track 3: Companion Robots for AAL
		      15-19 July 2013 -- Pisa, IT

	  in conjunction with the AAL Forum (pending approval)
		     September 2013, Norrköping, SE

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 An initiative supported by the AALOA community (http://www.aaloa.org)
 and organised by the universAAL project (http://www.universAAL.org)


We are pleased to announce the third 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.

During the competitions, we will collect data sets in realistic
environments (the living labs), which we hope will be useful 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 Indoor Localization and Tracking for AAL, to be held on 1-5
  July 2013 at the Living Lab of the Polytechnic University of Madrid, ES

- Track 2 on Activity Recognition for AAL, to be held on 8-12 July 2013
  at the CIAmI Living Lab in Valencia, ES

- Track 3 on Companion Robots for AAL, to be held on the 15-19 July 2013
  at the DomoCasa Lab in Pisa, IT

- EvAAL workshop to be held in conjunction with the AAL Forum in
  September 2013, Norrköping, SE (http://www.aalforum.eu/).


Track 1 – Indoor Localization and Tracking for AAL

Localization is a key component for achieving context awareness. Recent
years have witnessed increasing interest in location-based services and
applications. In most cases, however, location information is limited by
the accessibility to Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS), which
is largely unavailable in indoor environments.  The purpose of this
track is supporting localization needs of AAL applications.

Track 2 – Activity Recognition for AAL

The automatic and unobtrusive identification of user’s activities is one
of the challenging goals of context-aware computing. Real-time
monitoring of human movements could be a useful tool for many purposes
and future applications such as lifelog, healthcare or
entertainment. The purpose of this track is supporting activity
recognition needs of AAL applications.

Track 3 – Companion Robots for AAL

The use of robots in domestic environments as companions that assists
elderlies in their own home is a growing research field, and the
robotics community can already show very good examples of systems able
to execute different tasks and complex actions. This track, new to the
third year of EvAAL, aims at defining benchmarks for the integration of
such robots with intelligent environments that provide user localization
and situation detection.  The purpose is facilitating human-robot
interaction in AAL environments.


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Candidate competitors are invited to submit an extended abstract
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: they
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.

Extended abstracts, not exceeding 4 pages, must be submitted by the
deadline indicated below.

Evaluation criteria for the competition, restrictions on the accepted
technologies, and a description of the benchmarks are detailed in the
technical annexes of this call, which are published at
http://evaal.aaloa.org.  Possible refinements of the annexes, also based
on participating competitors comments, will be timely distributed to all
participants.

Depending on the number of submitted requests for participation, it may
be necessary to restrict the number of participants in the competition
to the best ranked papers, due to space/logistic constraints at the
Living Labs.

A complete version (8-12 pages in LNCS form) of the accepted works will
be published in the EvAAL Proceedings.  An extended version of the best
papers will also be published on the Journal of Ambient Intelligence and
Smart Environments (JAISE), which is SCI indexed.

Competitors are admitted to the competition and their paper is included
in the proceeding under the three following conditions:b

1. participate to the competition in July at the living lab hosting the
   relevant track; the organizers will set individual appointments for
   each competing team;
2. present their work at the final EvAAL workshop that will be held in
   conjunction with the AAL Forum, in September 2013 at Norrköping, SE;
3. provide organizers with the internal data produced by their systems
   during the competition and the documentation describing the
   deployment of their system, as requested by the organizers; the data
   will be published on the EvAAL website.

As in past editions, the winners of the competition will be announced at
a special session of the AAL Forum, a major event in the field of
Ambient Assisted Living in Europe (pending approval, to be finalised
by April 2013). A prize will be awarded to the highest placed teams.

We encourage submissions from both academia and industry (there are no
restrictions to the composition of competing teams) with the aim of
seeking innovative solutions for AAL applications. Please check the
EvAAL web site at http://evaal.aaloa.org/ for more information and
regular updates on the progress of the competition.

Contact: info at evaal.aaloa.org
Submission: https://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=evaal2013


Important Dates
---------------------------------------------------------------
Submission Deadline: March 5, 2013
Acceptance Notification: March 20, 2013
Camera Ready Deadline: April 30, 2013
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Organizing Committee:
----------------------------
General co-chairs
  Juan Carlos Augusto (Middlesex university, UK)
  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)

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Notes:

(1) The competitors will be requested to interface their competing
    artefacts with the measurement tools that will be used in the
    competition.  A shepherding phase is planned during which the EvAAL
    organizers will help competitors to implement this integration.

(2) Teams interested in monitoring the EvAAL competition and willing to
    contribute to the discussions on its scientific organization may
    subscribe to Contest mailing list at
    http://evaal.aaloa.org/listinfo/contest


-- 
Francesco Potortì (ricercatore)        Voice:  +39.050.315.3058 (op.2111)
ISTI - Area della ricerca CNR          Mobile: +39.348.8283.107
via G. Moruzzi 1, I-56124 Pisa         Skype:  wnlabisti
(entrance 20, 1st floor, room C71)     Web:    http://fly.isti.cnr.it