International Workshop on 

Ubiquitous Computing 
(IWUC 2004)

April 13-14, 2004 - Porto, Portugal 

First Announcement and Call for Papers 

See here the workshop program:

In conjunction with the Sixth International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems - ICEIS 2004 (http://www.iceis.org/) 

PDF Version

Co-Chairs: 

Soraya Kouadri Mostéfaoui (primary contact)
Dep. of Computer Science
University of Fribourg
Chemin Du Musée 03 CH-1700
Phone: (41) 26 300 84 72 
Fax: (41) 26 300 97 31 

Zakaria Maamar
College of ISs
Zayed University
P.O. Box 19282, Dubai U.A.E
Phone: (971) 4 2082 461
Fax: (971) 4 2640 854 

Omer Rana
School of Computer Science and Welsh E-Science Centre,
Cardiff University,
5 The Parade, Cardiff CF24 3XF, UK
email: o.f.rana@cs.cardiff.ac.uk
phone: +44 29 2087 5542
fax: +44 29 2087 4598


Workshop Background and Goals 

The development and availability of new computing and communication devices, and the increased connectivity between these devices, thanks to wired and wireless networks, are enabling new opportunities for people to perform their operations anywhere and anytime. Furthermore, due to the  high acceptance rate of such devices by the user community, it is expected that these devices will become so pervasive that most users will take them for granted. Generally known as Ubiquitous Computing (UC), the vision of UC is to push computational services out of conventional desktop interfaces into environments characterized by transparent forms of interactivity.

Despite the growing interest in UC, there is still some progress to be made before UC shifts from the research mode to the commercial and intensive use modes. The support technologies, however, are improving at an impressive pace. Most of the research and development activities are currently aimed at improving the devices themselves and the technologies these devices will use to communicate. At present, the main use of mobile devices is still voice-oriented, but several indicators show that this is changing. 3G networks (e.g., GPRS, UMTS) and recent development of communication and presentation protocols (e.g., XML, WAP) are being combined to give users a high-quality experience of data-centric services. 

Besides the central role that hardware infrastructure plays in the expansion and penetration of UC, other issues still need to be tackled to better assist developers of UC applications. Developers are put on the front line of satisfying the promise of businesses and service providers for delivering Internet content to mobile devices. Indeed, the fact that an application for mobile users has different requirements, calls for new techniques to identify and specify these requirements. With regard to users, it is expected that they will be frequently engaged in complex operations such as searching the net for better business opportunities. Therefore, their association with intelligent components, to act as proxies, is deemed appropriate. UC environments of the near future will be populated by a large number of computing devices, spread across the network, and often invisible. These devices need to be coordinated for better interactions. Devices, whether carried on by people or embedded into other systems (within the home or at other sites), will constitute a global networking infrastructure -- and likely to provide a new level of openness and dynamics. These interactions raise many new issues that draw upon existing research areas, as well as introduce new research and development challenges, in technical areas (such as device design, wireless communication, location sensing, etc), psychology (privacy concerns, attention focus, multi-person interaction, etc), and design (direct interaction, work patterns, etc).

Existing global efforts in Grid Computing also shares some similarities with the aims of this workshop, although Grid computing at present is  restricted to high-end computational resources. Making the Grid more open,  and accessible to a wider range of users will also require the need to  address similar challenges. 


Topics of interest 

In this workshop, we aim to identify ecent and significant developments in the general area of ubiquitous computing. Topics of interests include, but are not limited to:
- Mobile computing vs. Pervasive computing vs. Ubiquitous computing.
- Design methodologies and evaluation techniques.
- New interfaces and modes of interactions between people and  ubiquitous computing devices, applications or environments. 
- Grid Computing technologies for Wireless networks 
- Context awareness.
- Agent-based ubiquitous applications.
- Services for ubiquitous applications.
- Middleware for service discovery.
- Integration of wired and wireless networks.
- Enabling technologies such as Bluetooth, 802.11, etc.
- Security and privacy issues.
- Visionary future scenarios.
- Mobile services 
- Performance tuning of mobile applications 

Format of the Workshop 

The workshop will consist of oral presentations. The proceedings of the workshop will be published in the form of a book by ICEIS.

Invited Keynote Speaker

Dr. Michael Berger from Siemens AG, Germany

Submission of Papers 

There will be two types of papers: long (approx. 4000 words) and short (approx. 2000 words). Furthermore, a keynote speaker and a discussion panel are planned. Postscript/RTF versions of the manuscript should be submitted thru ICEIS web-based paper submission procedure.

Important Dates 

Full paper submission: January 15, 2004
Author notification: February 15, 2004
Camera-ready paper submission: March 1, 2004


Workshop Program Committee: 

L. Baresi (Dipartimento di Elettronica e Informazione Politecnico di Milano, Italy)
P. Bellavista (Bologna University, Italy)
A. Bhatti (Zayed University, UAE)
W. Binder (EPFL, Switzerland)
B. Benatallah (The University of New South Wales, Australia)
M. Brian Blake (Georgetown University USA)
G. Da Bormida (Giunti Research, Italy)
G. Dimarzo Serugendo (University of Geneva, Switzerland) 
M. Dumas (Queensland University of Technology, Australia)
S. Dustdar (Vienna University of Technology , Austria)
L. Esmahi (Athabasca University, Canada)
B. Farouk (Eurecom, France)
T. Finin (UMBC, USA)
O. FOUIAL (ENST, France)
B. Habib (ENST, France)
S. Helal (University of Florida, USA)
A. Lahlou (University of Versailles, France)
D. K.W. Chiu (Dickson Computer Systems, Hong Kong, China)
A. Karageorgos (UMIST, United Kingdom)
B. Koenig-Ries (TU München, Germany)
G. Kouadri Mostéfaoui (University of Fribourg, Switzerland)
W. Mansoor (Zayed University, UAE)
D. McMullen (Pervasive Technologies Lab, Indiana University, USA)
B. Michael (Siemens, Germany)
D. MEDDOUR (France Telecom R&D, France)
B. Medjahed (Virginia Polytechnic Institute & State University)
A. Messer (Samsung, USA)
T. NADOUR (ENST, France)
N. Narendra (IBM Software Labs, India)
M. Ouzzani (Virginia Tech, USA)
A. Popovici (ETH Zurich, Switzerland)
M. Rauterberg (Technical University Eindhoven, The Netherlands)
J. Shepherdson (British Telecommunications, UK)
A. Skarmeta (University of Murcia, Spain)
S. Tatesh (Lucent Technologies, UK)
A. Toufik (University of Versailles, France)
M. Ulieru (University of Calgary, Canada)
C. Van Aart (University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands)
Q. Z. Sheng (The University of New South Wales, Australia)


Conference Location 

The workshop will be held at the Universidade Portucalense, Porto, Portugal.

Registration Information 

To attend the workshop you need to register at http://www.iceis.org 

Secretariat 

ICEIS 2004 Secretariat - International Workshop on Ubiquitous Computing (IWUC 2003)
Universidade Portucalense
Rua Dr. António Bernardino de Almeida, 541-619
4200-072 Porto Portugal
Tel: +351225572512
Fax: +351225572015
E-mail: workshops ( at ) iceis.org 
Web site: http://www.iceis.org 

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