PerCrowd 2020 - 3rd International Workshop on Context-Awareness for Multi-Device Pervasive and Mobile Computing

Pervasive and mobile systems proliferate every aspect of our daily lives and offer ubiquitous connectivity and computation for users. Thanks to this proliferation, users often find themselves in environments with more than one smart device - and are increasingly likely to own several devices themselves. Indeed, according to Statista, over 25% of the estimated 5 billion mobile users will own more than one smart device.
Smart devices are well known to suffer from energy and performance issues due their constrained resources. However, most research considers devices in isolation despite studies showing that smart devices are frequently co-located in proximity to at least one other device. This suggests that devices can potentially collaborate in conjunction to reduce the effort of resource intensive tasks, ranging from sensor sampling, decision making, screen sharing, network tuning to processing in general. Merging the resources of multiple devices to work together in a self-organizing manner is a tough challenge. Smart devices are not autonomous nor social entities that are aware of their context, e.g., location, local resources, other devices, and user’s preferences, among others. Thus, they lack proactive behavior that can optimize their operations. Common context understanding is critical in multi device setups, e.g., for the formation of collaboration groups, and for negotiating responsibilities between the devices. Since smart devices function in multiple roles, understanding how to use context to improve different aspects of multi-device setups become very complex as different challenges and considerations need to be addressed based on the type of resources that are merged, e.g., networking, processing, sensing, storage and so on. In addition, since smart devices are owned by users, devices need to be aware also about their owners preferences to avoid disrupting his/her Quality of Experience (QoE), and to foster continuous multi-device QoE for users.
The goal of this workshop is to explore the use and effect of multi-device context for interaction and communication between devices, including self-organization of proactive pervasive and mobile systems. While proactive behavior is not possible to achieve in an isolation manner, our workshop explores how to achieve automated devices proactiveness in conjunction. The significance of this research area is corroborated by the ever increasing variety of smart devices that are more and more being embedded in our day lives., e.g., smart fridges, smartwatches, smartphones, smart Tvs, pervasive displays, drones, and the emergence of novel self-organizing computing infrastructures that operate in multi-device environments, e.g., edge and fog computing; and the increasing processing required by applications that cannot be executed in a single device, e.g., decision making using artificial intelligence.
Our workshop is the first to address the opportunities and challenges arising from the combination of two emerging domains that are critical for the PerCom community: context-awareness and collaborative multi-device computing. Unlike other existing workshops, PerCrowd focuses on opportunistic multi-device collaborations that can enhance the operational behavior of proximal devices, and provide continuous multi-device experience for users. Our unique focus makes PerCrowd an exciting and innovative forum to discuss key challenges related with the state-of-the-art research in multi-device computing.