NExt-generation Applications of smarTphones (NEAT 2011)
A Workshop Held at SPLASH
Portland, Oregon USA
October 24, 2011

http://cs.ua.edu/neat


WORKSHOP 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 we would like to see addressed
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 platforms


IMPORTANT DATES

Paper Submission: August 12, 2011
Author Notification: September 23, 2011
Workshop: October 24, 2011


SUBMISSION INFORMATION

Submissions may include 2-page Position Papers or 4-5 page Short Papers.

Papers should be formatted according to the ACM SIGS formatting requirements described
on the workshop web page (2 column). All papers must be submitted in PDF using EasyChair.

Please visit the workshop website for formatting details and a link to the EasyChair
submission site.


WEBSITE

Additional details about the workshop as it evolves can be found at:

http://cs.ua.edu/neat


ORGANIZERS AND CONTACT INFORMATION

Co-Chairs:

Jeff Gray, University of Alabama
Jules White, Virginia Tech

Please address all questions about the workshop to the organizers by writing to neat@vt.edu


PROGRAM COMMITEE

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
Jerry Gannod, Miami University
Jing Zhang, Motorola Research
Jonathan Sprinkle, University of Arizona
Mark Goadrich, Centenary College of Louisiana
Sean Eade, Siemens Corporate Research