Workshop Program

Co-Chairs
Soraya Kouadri Mostéfaoui (primary contact)
Mobile Information Systems Laboratory
University of Applied Sciences of Western Switzerland, Fribourg
Bd. Pérolles 80, CP-32, CH-1700
Phone: (41) 26 429 68 37
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

George M. Giaglis
Dep. of Management Science and Technology
Athens University of Economics and Business (AUEB)
Evelpidon 47A & Lefkados 33, Office 907,
GR-11362 Athens, GREECE
Phone: (30) 210 8203682
Fax: (30) 210 8203685

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 INSTICC.

Submission of Papers
There will be two types of papers: long (approx. 5000 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.

Publication in a Journal
A list of selected papers from the workshop will be published in a special issue of Ubiquitous Computing and Communication Journal (UBICC)

Important Dates
Paper Submission: March 5, 2007
Author Notification: April 3, 2007
Final Camera-Ready and Registration: April 16, 2007

Workshop Program Committee (will be updated soon)
Alfredo Cuzzocrea, University of Calabria, Italy
Mieso Denko, University of guelph, Canada
Umesh Bellur, Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay, India
Rajiv Ramnath, The Ohio State University, Columbus, USA
Djamal Benslimane, University Claude Bernard Lyon 1, France
Stephane Bressan, National University of Singapore, Singapore
Michael Sheng, CSIRO, Australia
Takahiro HARA, Osaka University, Japan
B. König-Ries, TU München, Germany
P. Mihailescu, British Telecommunications plc, UK
S. Dustdar, Vienna University of Technology, Austria
P. Bellavista, Università degli Studi di Bologna, Italy
N. C. Narendra, IBM Software Labs, India
M. Berger, Siemens Corporate Technology, Germany
A. Messer, Samsung, USA
G. Kouadri Mostefaoui, Computing Laboratory, Oxford University, UK
Paris Kitsos, Hellenic Open University, Greece
P. E. Kourouthanassis, Athens University of Economics and Business, Greece
S. Hadjiefthymiades, University of Athens, Greece
I. Maglogiannis, University of Aegean, Greece
C. Randell, University of Bristol, UK
E. Fleisch, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology & University of St. Gallen, Switzerland
J. Munoz, Valencia University of Technology, Spain

Workshop Location
The workshop will take place in conjunction with the 9th International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems (ICEIS 2007) in Funchal, Madeira - Portugal.

Registration Information
At least one author of an accepted paper must register for the workshop. If the registration fees are not received by April 9, 2007, the paper will not be published in the proceedings. For registering go to http://www.iceis.org

Secretariat
ICEIS 2007 Secretariat - The Fourth International Workshop on Ubiquitous Computing (IWUC-2007)
E-mail: workshops@iceis.org
Web site: http://www.iceis.org