WPA 2015 - 2nd Workshop on Physical Analytics (WPA)

The 2nd edition of this workshop (successfully organized at Mobisys last year) is motivated by the observations that people spend a significant part of their daily lives performing a variety of activities in the physical world?travelling to places (including commuting to/from work using public or private transport), performing activities at various locations (e.g., exercising in the gym, eating at restaurants) , interacting with various physical objects and artefacts (e.g., touching or picking up products at a retail store, or browsing through books at a library), being subject to various audiovisual stimuli (e.g., listening to announcements at transit hubs or watching advertisements on public displays) and interacting with other people (in groups, as part of crowds or one-on-one). A rich variety of infrastructure, mobile and (now) wearable sensors, and associated analytics tools, can provide innovative ways to capture and annotate such behaviors and interactions. These activities and interactions contain a wealth of information about user behavior, preferences, attitudes and interests, that, if harnessed, can benefit both users and consumer-facing businesses.
The 2nd Workshop on Physical Analytics will offer a unified forum that brings researchers and industry practitioners together to explore (a) the technologies (current and emerging) that can enable unobtrusive capture of such individual and collective physical world behavior, and (b) the real-world opportunities for commercial applications and services (e.g., in retail, insurance or healthcare) that leverage upon such understanding of physical world behavior. A particularly interesting question relates to the generalizability of such analytics tools?i.e., whether we can develop a set of common technologies and methods for capturing and understanding physical behavior across such diverse physical locations. We emphasize again the broad scope of the proposed workshop?while topics such as multimedia sensing, localization, wearable computing, activity recognition and privacy are undoubtedly parts of the emerging research agenda, the focus will be on exploring how these components can be harnessed holistically to capture useful real-world physical behavior of users.
More information will be available soon.
Program Chairs
Archan Misra (SMU, Singapore)
Dina Katabi (MIT, USA)