Call for participation

Context-awareness is widely thought to be an important enabling technology for developing ubiquitous, handheld and wearable computer applications. It describes the ability of a computing device or program to sense, react to, or adapt to the environment in which it is running. In order to understand better how we can use context and facilitate the building of context-aware applications, we need to understand more fully what constitutes a context-aware application and what context is. This workshop will attempt to address these issues by asking the six “W”questions of context-awareness: what, who, where, when, and why? These five questions underpin the sixth meta-question of how? For example:

1. What is context?
   
2. Whose context is important to whom, or what?
   
3. Where can an awareness of context be exploited?
   
4. When is context useful?
   
5. Why are context-aware applications useful?
   
6. How do we implement a generic supporting infrastructure for context-aware applications?
   

These questions are illustrative: potential participants are encouraged to place their own interpretation on the six questions of context-awareness. Please submit a short position statement (see below) giving your viewpoint on these questions, focusing particularly on one of the questions in your submission. This focus will be used to allocate selected participants to small discussion groups that form part of the workshop. Participants will be selected on the basis of their interest in, and familiarity with the problem area.

Don’t be put off

Please don’t be put off by the six “W” questions approach of the workshop. If you find the structure that we have suggested to be too much of a strait-jacket, then feel free to use your own style and approach when writing your position paper. We want the workshop to be a success, which means that we want you to attend it. We are looking for interesting people who are working on “cool stuff or useful things” (to coin a phrase from HUC’99). We want you to come and make thought-provoking, controversial statements about context-awareness that will generate discussion at the workshop, and that will make a lasting contribution to context-awareness after the workshop.

Publication

After the workshop, all participants will be invited to revise and resubmit their abstracts for publication in a special issue of the journal Personal Technologies, which is published by Springer-Verlag. This special issue will be peer-reviewed in the normal way.

Before the workshop, the position papers will be collated into a technical report that will be circulated to participants. These submissions will be revised in the light of the workshop and the technical report will then be republished more widely.

At the conference, the results of the workshop will be presented as a poster during the poster session at CHI2000 and there will be a report on the workshop that will be published in the SIGCHI Bulletin.

General information on CHI workshops and conferences

CHI Workshops provide an extended forum for small groups (15-20 people) to exchange ideas on a specific topic of common interest. CHI 2000 offers workshops covering a wide range of HCI topics. All workshops will be held on Sunday and Monday, 2-3 April 2000.

Workshop participants are selected on the basis of position papers submitted directly to the workshop organizer. A position paper is generally 2-4 pages long and outlines the submitter's views on the workshop theme and the reasons for the submitter’s interest in the topic. Position papers must be received by 28 January 2000. Submitters will be notified of selection by 4 February 2000. Accepted workshop participants will be charged a registration fee of US$75/NLG 150 for a one-day workshop and US$150/NLG 300 for a one-and-a-half or two-day workshop.

Submission details

Note added on 27th January 2000.

Please note that the deadline of 28th January for you to send your submission to us is now a soft deadline, whereas the one for us to notify you (and CHI, who have imposed the deadline) is still hard. Therefore you have until Monday 31st January 2000 to submit your position paper to us. Unfortunately we cannot move the deadline of 4th February 2000 for notifying CHI of the names of the participants at the workshop.

Please send your submission to David Morse or Anind Dey by email; we can cope with most commonly available formats (but if you are not sure, please check with us first). Alternatively, if you would like to send a paper copy of your position paper, please use one of our postal addresses:

David R. Morse Computing Department Faculty of Mathematics and Computing The Open University Walton Hall Milton Keynes, MK7 6AA, UK

Anind K. Dey Graphics, Visualization and Usability Center, College of Computing, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, Georgia, USA 30332-0280