OVERVIEW
Smartphone platforms, such as the iPhone and Google Android, are rapidly developing into rich platforms for building applications for cyber-physical systems, educational enrichment, enabling citizen scientists, disaster response, and environmental monitoring. For example, recent research has yielded cyber-physical applications and cloud services to track patient lifestyle choices for health purposes, monitor CO2 emissions around smartphone users, predict and respond to traffic accidents, measure traffic and derive road quality, and monitor cardiac patients. Many of these applications that combine sophisticated sensor capabilities of smartphones and cloud computing have become mainstream, such as Google Goggles, which provides an augmented reality overlay on a smartphone camera for situational awareness.
Smartphone sales are expected to outpace desktop/laptop computer sales in 2011. It is critical for software engineers to understand and research the key issues of building applications for this new platform. This workshop will foster new research and ideas that will be important for future software engineering research submissions to SPLASH.
The sophisticated capabilities of smartphones compared to previous mobile platforms provide a number of unique opportunities for research and development. For example, the latest smartphones can receive a variety of environmental stimuli, such as GPS location, acceleration, ambient light, sound, and imagery. Moreover, these smartphone platforms possess multiple network connections, such as WiFi and cellular data, which can be used with standard TCP/IP networking to connect them to external computing resources. Finally, smartphone platforms provide market-based software distribution mechanisms that can both push updates to phones and automatically track usage and report errors to researchers.
Building complex smartphone applications, however, is a new and challenging endeavor. Application developers must deal with limited resources, such as the battery capacity of the smartphone, which makes balancing the Quality of Service (QoS) concerns against resource consumption hard. Moreover, each platform has unique requirements that are placed on applications, such as Android’s use of the specialized Binder inter-process communication mechanism with system services, which require careful consideration in the application’s software architecture. Finally, application interaction with the physical world adds new challenges, such as resource conserving sensor data fusion.
This workshop aims to nurture new thinking on how to tackle the challenges of using smartphone computing at scale, as well as how these unique systems can be applied in novel ways to important societal problems. Our goal is to bring together a combination of academic research, industrial experience, and independent application development ideas – with the objective to bring together a diverse set of perspectives on these topics and their applications. Some of the issues that might be discussed in this workshop are:
- Summaries of experience and documented best-practices for introducing smarthpones into the curricula (e.g., traditional software engineering, networking, software patterns, or network application design course, or a senior projects course)
- Industry/academic experience reports describing success/failure in implementing and using applications built on smartphones
- Approaches to building mobile cyber-physical systems using smartphones
- Tools for supporting early estimation of power, network bandwidth, and other types of resource consumption
- Cloud software architectures for scalably supporting data collection and synchronization across thousands of smartphones
- Novel software architectures for fusing streams of sensor data on smartphones
- Issues of support/maintenance for applications built on top of smartphone platforms
- Evolution and distribution issues of smartphone software stores
- New applications of smartphone computing
- Techniques for addressing portability and application retargeting across a very diverse and heterogeneous collection of devices and platforms
- Demonstrations of working smartphone-based systems that illustrate a novel development technique
- Specific research issues of building mission critical applications using smartphone platform.
SCHEDULE AND ACCEPTED PAPERS
The following represents the schedule of the NEAT workshop, with links to the final version (when available) of papers, presentations, and author photos provided within each presentation slot. A collection of all papers is available here.
| Time | Activity |
|---|---|
| 8:30 | Welcome and Introduction |
| 8:50 | Reverse-Engineering User Interfaces to Facilitate
Porting to and across Mobile Devices and Platforms |
| 9:20 | Teaching Students to Learn to Learn Mobile Phone
Programming |
| 9:50 | |
| 10:00 | |
| 10:30 | Constrained Data Acquisition for Mobile Citizen
Science Applications |
| 11:00 | Cloud Computing and MapReduce for Reliability and
Scalability of Ubiquitous Learning Systems |
| 11:30 | ET (Smart) Phone Home! |
| 12:00 | |
| 2:00 | Short Talk: Mobile Cyber-physical Systems and Smartphone Security |
| 2:15 | Short Talk: Smartphones Across the K-16 Curriculum |
| 2:30 | Group Discussion on Key Issues |
| 3:00 | Break |
| 3:30 | Group Discussion on Key Issues |
| 5:30 | Workshop Ends |
ORGANIZATION
Please address all questions about the workshop to the organizers by writing to neat@vt.edu
Co-Chairs:
Jeff Gray, University of Alabama
Jules White, Virginia Tech
Program Committee
Aniruddha Gokhale, Vanderbilt University
Anthony Wasserman, Carnegie Mellon Silicon Valley
Christelle Scharff, Pace University
David Wolber, University of San Francisco
Frank McCown, Harding University
James Hill, Indiana University Purdue University Indianapolis
Gerald Gannod, Miami University
Jing Zhang, Motorola Research
Jonathan Sprinkle, University of Arizona
Mark Goadrich, Centenary College of Louisiana
Sean Eade, Siemens Corporate Research