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

[Mitja Lustrek]

> 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.).

There is also a third option, which I find attractive:
We could hold a live competition in conjunction with an appropriate
conference, such as Ubicomp, AmI, IE ... This solves the problem of travel,
since the people likely to compete would also be likely to attend the
conference anyway. If we allowed only equipment with a relatively short
set-up time (say, an hour) and if the sequence of activities to be
recognized were not long, we could squeeze half a dozen competitors in a
day.  They could not use ambient sensors, but wearable sensors, cameras (of
the regular and Kinect varietay), robots etc. are all still possible. The
main reason this idea is cool is that it is interesting for spectators (thay
can watch activities being recognized as the competition is in progress, we
could have a live electronic scoreboard etc.). 

> We have to know where exactly the papers of the competitors will be
> published.

> 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.

Again, I suggest a workshop at some conference interesting for the
competitors anyway. This may also solve the issue of the proceedings -
depending on how the conference is organized.

Best regards,

Mitja