Ubi-MUI2011: International ACM Workshop on Ubiquitous Meta User Interfaces

In conjunction with ACM Multimedia 2011, Scottsdale, Arizona, US, Nov 28 – Dec 1
http://www.acmmm11.org

Intelligent Environments have the vision of enhancing our everyday environment and interaction with its objects by sensing, computing, and communication capabilities. Major characteristics of such environments are the increasing number of intelligent devices (ubiquity), their complexity, and their integration into the background (transparency). Devices will disappear or blend into the background and will be invisible to the user. However, because of this transparency, users fail to develop an adequate mental model for interaction with such environments. To overcome these challenges, new types of user interfaces are required that will represent intelligent environments. Such representative user interfaces create an overall system image for intelligent environments in order to help users to better understand the intelligent environment. In this sense, representative user interfaces are Ubiquitous Meta User Interfaces (Ubi-MUI) that could increase the transparency and predictability of the whole system by visualizing the environments’ internal states, perception and decision making processes, available services and devices, as well as ongoing and adoption plans. Using Ubi-MUI users could observe, analyze, understand, control, and customize the adaptive behavior and context-dependent interactions of their surrounding. In such environments, multimedia play two key roles: they support new ways of interaction that apply to multiple human senses, and they diffuse the presentation of content in the environment of the user. The aim of this workshop is to bring together different research groups to foster the developments of highly intuitive, multimedia supported meta user interfaces that bring transparency, predictability, and control into intelligent environments.

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to, the following:
1. Representing Intelligent Environments
a. Visualization and animation of sensing activities, decisions, and implicit interactions of intelligent systems, which allows users to understand and predict the behavior of the system.
b. Creating awareness for implicit interaction concepts using multimedia artifacts
c. Using avatars, storytelling, or gaming to introduce the functional capabilities and adaptive behaviour of intelligent environments to novice users
2. Concepts for Meta User Interfaces
a. Multimodal, multimedia interfaces to control and modify implicit interactions and environments’ responsive activities
b. User interfaces to shut down the perception features or responsive behaviors of intelligent environments
c. Game-based interfaces to observe, control and modify system behavior
d. Haptic, multi touch, or tangible ubiquitous meta user interfaces
e. Supportive user interfaces that create a system face for intelligent environments
f. Natural meta interaction concepts allowing users an easy access to multimedia environments (search, exploration, manipulation and control of media and devices), touch and gesture based interfaces, 3D displays and audio immersive systems for augmented-reality.
g. Metaphors and coordination algorithms for distributed conflict management, mechanisms that allow users an explicit interaction with adaptive environments.
3. Implementation, and Evaluation Aspects
a. Methods to evaluate the added-value of multimedia assisted meta user interfaces
b. User studies related to mental models for human-environment-interaction and meta user interfaces
c. Novel approaches to effectively manage the complexity of development, Real-time, de-centralized media-processing architectures, middleware architectures for sensor and multimedia integration.
d. Activity analysis and domain observations related to phenomena such as loss of control and over-automation
e. Smart Multimedia sensors with the ability to capture, store, and process audio and video signals for situation recognition and implicit interaction purposes. This specially includes human activity recognition and monitoring as well as socially-aware multimedia

Submitted papers must not have been previously published and must not be currently under consideration for publication elsewhere. Authors are invited to submit a full paper according to the guidelines available on the conference website at http://www.acmmm11.org. Reviewing will be double blind. Only electronic submissions will be accepted. Papers will be reviewed with an emphasis on potential to contribute to the state-of-the-art in the field. Each paper will receive at least two reviews. Selection criteria include accuracy and originality of ideas, clarity and significance of results, and presentation quality. All papers accepted will appear in the workshops proceedings and will be included in the ACM Digital Library.
All accepted papers that are registered and presented in the workshop are eligible to submit an extended version to the special issue.

Program Chairs:
Dr. Ali Asghar Nazari Shirehjini, DAI-Labor, Technische Universität Berlin, Germany
Dr. Abdulsalam Yassine, University of Ottawa, Canada
Prof. Dr.-Ing. Sahin Albayrak, DAI-Labor, Technische Universität Berlin, Germany