[evaal contest] EvAAL next steps and a sincere request for help

[Dario Salvi]

Dear EvAAL supporters and members,


I am writing you for taking back the organization of EvAAL and setting 
up tasks for the next edition.

The very first, fundamental, task is to prepare the Call For Competition 
for 2014.

For that we need to know:
1) what tracks are available and where
2) where the papers will be published
3) where the workshop will be held

These things must be decided by the end of October, early November as 
latest. We need your help NOW, otherwise the future of EvAAL will be 
very uncertain.

Now the details about these 3 points:

Point 1:

we have two possible tracks this year.

The first will be held by the people of the EU project Evarilos 
(http://www.evarilos.eu/index.php). The idea is that they organize a 
track about indoor localization in public spaces: an hospital and an 
office. Probably they will come up with an online competition dedicated 
only to localization algorithms, and they will setup the experiments 
themselves with their own hardware.
This track is a sort of extension of our classic indoor localization 
track in a more complex scenario and a different environment.

The second track, to be held in Madrid, will be oriented towards 
reasoning and context detection. We have thought about two possibilities 
here:
- allow people to come with systems about localization and/or activity 
recognition and measure the accuracy in detecting situations like 
"cooking", "sleeping", "doing sport", "watching television" etc. Those 
situations are detectable by knowing the location and/or by knowing the 
kind of movements.

- Make an offline competition about pure reasoning, where competitors 
are given a data set of a 12h measurement session in the Living Lab with 
the messages generated by the appliances of the lab (switches, 
electronic equipment, doors etc.).


Every track MUST HAVE a responsible. In the case of Evarilos' people 
they are expected to name one, in the case of Madrid we need one who has 
experience in on of the two ideas proposed above, or of any other idea 
you can think of. We need a volunteer AS SOON AS POSSIBLE. The 
responsible will coordinate the work among other volunteers, he or she 
does not need to be a super-expert, but must have some ideas and be 
proactive.

So the action points are: to confirm Evarilos' participation and scope 
and define the Madrid's track.


Point 2:

We have to know where exactly the papers of the competitors will be 
published.
We were discussing about having a sort of proceedings, like the one we 
have had in the CCIS until now, or some other alternative as the people 
from Springer were asking for a minimum acceptance rate.
Another idea was to have a selection of best papers to be published in a 
journal like JAISE, which might be more interesting for academic people.

Before summer, I asked Stefano Chessa and Stefan Knauth to be 
publication chairs of EvAAL 2014 and they accepted.
I would like to receive a confirmation of their commitment, and ask 
them, whoever wants to collaborate, to push this process further.


Point 3:

For the place of the workshop, the most recent idea was to have it in 
Madrid, just after the competition took place. In the case of the 
Evarilos track, they were proposing a "virtual conference" (with people 
connected on-line) so to avoid people from travelling. This could also 
apply if we make the Madrid's track also off-line, but then the workshop 
will be completely on-line and probably less interesting.


In conclusion, we need commitment from some people, especially for what 
regards the organization of the track, the definition of the objectives 
and the publication of the deliverables.

These are only the very first steps, then others will follow, but these 
are the most important ones maybe.



Best regards,




Dario

-- 
Dario Salvi
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9203-1124
http://www.researcherid.com/rid/E-5754-2012
http://scholar.google.es/citations?user=Yeoj3BEAAAAJ
+34 915495700
dsalvi at lst.tfo.upm.es
Life Supporting Technologies
Departamento de Tecnología Fotónica y Bioingeniería
Universidad Politécnica de Madrid
Madrid, Spain