PTLIE

Workshop Theme and Goals

You are cordially invited to submit your contribution in the Workshop on "Pervasive Technologies in e/m-Learning and Internet-based experiments" organized within the "First International Conference on Pervasive Technologies Related to Assistive environments (PETRA 2008)". This Workshop aims to bring together researchers and practitioners from academia and industry to engage in an in-depth discussion on various research and deployment issues regarding pervasive environments in the field of e-/m- Learning as well as in Internet-based paradigms. The anticipated outcome of this workshop is to provide a dialog channel between researchers and practitioners in these fields, enhancing the synergy among them.

Topics of Interest

We encourage submissions from both academic and industry sector. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

• Pervasive, dynamic and more efficient training patterns in e-learning/m-learning environments and scenaria,
• Recent advances in e-learning/m-learning platforms (e.g. whiteboard, chat channels, discussion forums, e-Tutoring),
• Intelligent networks, ubiquitous learning
• QoS models and metrics
• IP-based technologies in e-learning/m-learning,
• Virtual and remote laboratories using Web-Services
• Learning materials and simulation tools
• Assistive environments (e.g. for disable peoples)
• Initiatives and networking
• Continuous education and training with e-learning/m-learning environments

Workshop Chairs

Ioannis Anagnostopoulos janag@aegean.gr	University of the Aegean, Greece
Eleftherios Kayafas kayafas@cs.ntua.gr	National Technical University, Greece

Submission Information

Interested authors should submit their contribution through e-mail to the workshop chairs, under the instructions described in the Proceedings.

Games

Workshop Theme and Goals

As gaming becomes more pervasive we are challenged in our job, learning and personal life by the growing access to virtual spaces and communities that offer opportunities for everyday needs and aesthetic experiences. "Creative Industries" have a need for design measures that reveal new interaction methods, scenario metaphors and in-depth cocreation. This workshop will bring together research and best practices in creative media design for this new challenging field. Gaming appeals to our wits, our senses and emotions; game design is provoked to engage our expressive and experiential capabilities. Theoretical, empirical or semiotic analyses of games may help to explain how. Effective design needs evaluation methods for exploring new concepts. Game design also needs the testing of usability, playability, and methods for involving players.

Gaming also appeals to our social needs. We see developing communities and social networks around (online) games. Recent research indicates that game and sociability design can stimulate social capital in these communities. New platforms and interfaces for gaming may create new ways of shaping our social world.

Games are becoming a more substantial part of training and education in different sectors. Serious games need rich, engaging (social) interaction, but still a lot is to be learned on the trade-off between various design criteria, and the need to blend existing genres into unpreceeded future worlds. The focus of this workshop is on innovative methods for the design and evaluation of pervasive games and game play.

Topics of Interest

Topics include but not limited to:

• Creativity and Resonant Interaction
• Multi-modal communication
• Immersiveness
• Experience design
• Perception and performance metaphors
• Alternate and mixed realities
• Creative industries
• Research methodologies in creative practice
• Assessment of exploratory technologies
• (Social and Audiovisual) Usability and playability
• Adaptivity
• Cognition, representation, communication
• User/player centered design
• Game interpretation for design
• Psychological, social, and cultural differences in perception and participation
• Communities, networks, social interaction and social capital
• Cross-cultural and intercultural approaches
• Mechanisms of exclusion
• Game criticism
• Applications in Serious Gaming
• Assessment of exploratory learning approaches

Workshop Chairs

Spiros Sirmakessis syrma@cti.gr	TEI of Messolongi and RA Computer Technology Institute, Greece
Maria Rigou rigou@cti.gr	RA Computer Technology Institute and University of Patras, Greece

Submission Information

Interested authors should submit their contribution through e-mail to the workshop chairs, under the instructions described in the Proceedings.

AlzWor

More info: http://www.mucom.mobi/AlzWorkshop08

Workshop Theme and Goals

Caring in a patient's home environment is proven to be both cost-effective for healthcare schemes and also beneficial to patients. It has been shown that patients who receive treatment in the familiar environment of their home and around relatives have a better chance of shorter recuperation.

Specific patient categories may benefit from care in the home environment as their condition is such may allow them to conduct a normal lifestyle if proper support is provided. One of these categories are Alzheimer's disease sufferers, where the role of family carers has also become more prominent, as care in the familiar surroundings of home may delay onset of some symptoms and delay or eliminate the need for more professional and costly levels of care.

Technologists working in the area of pervasive healthcare are often unaware of issues that are common knowledge amongst medical professionals and healthcare practitioners, and are thus unable to provide solutions that address real problems. Conversely, the medical world is often unaware of recent technological developments and is as such, unable to request or recommend solutions that might provide helpful interventions in the lives of patients. The 2nd workshop in on this topic aims to bring together the technical expertise of the technologists and the real-world issues, problems and practices as experienced by medical professionals. The workshop's objective is to spark a dialogue amongst professionals across disciplines by establishing common bases and language, highlighting good practice and recent advances in technical and medical research.

The workshop would be organised in a session of invited talks from medical professionals, practitioners and policy makers, as well as a session of invited talks from technologists in the area of pervasive healthcare. The two sessions will be followed by a third, interactive session where mixed groups will participate in discussion and exchange of ideas, working on mock problems provided by the session chairs. A summary of the sessions will take place at the end of the proceedings, where the mixed groups will be asked to present their opinions on the challenges presented in designing pervasive healthcare systems that address the needs of patients suffering from mental illnesses.

Topics of Interest

We would like to invite contributions (both theoretical and technical) in the following thematic areas:

• Intelligent systems for the self-support of the elderly, personal medical assistants
• Autonomous systems for monitoring the clinical condition of the elderly
• Intelligent medical environments
• Sensor networks in medical applications
• Smart medical appliances
• Human Computer Interaction for mental patients
• Human Computer Interaction for medical professionals

Workshop Chairs

Andreas Komninos andreas.komninos@gcal.ac.uk	Glasgow Caledonian University, UK
Sofia Stamou sofia@stamou.net	University of Patras, Greece

Submission Information

Interested authors should submit their contribution through e-mail to andreas.komninos@gcal.ac.uk, under the instructions described in the Proceedings. Submissions must be in PDF format and fully anonymised.

BeTAA

Workshop Theme and Goals

Automatic behaviour tracking is of particular importance for supporting elderly or mentally impaired persons. Since these persons often aren't willing or able to talk about their daily activities or to actively keep track of those, it is important to develop technologies that do this for them and provide the information to medical staff, carers, family members and other stakeholders, such as assistive technologies in the environment.

This workshop wants to bring together researchers and practitioners who work on the field of behaviour tracking at either the sensor, algorithmic, or application level.

Topics of Interest

We solicit contributions to the following topics:

Technologies for

• Location tracking
• Gesture and motion tracking
• Sensing of affect, emotion, cognitive state

Analysis: inferring behaviour from multimodal data

• Sensor fusion
• Feature extraction
• Data analysis

Applications for

• Behaviour based assistance
• Behaviour based environment adaptation
• Inclusion of carers and other socially important persons

General Info

The workshop will be a full-day event and will be split into three major parts:
- presentation of ideas, projects, and prototypes;
- discussion; and
- group work.

As tangible outcome of this workshop we aim for joint publications on issues identified, collaboration and networking efforts, and grant proposals.

Workshop Chairs

Christian Peter cpeter@igd-r.fraunhofer.de	Fraunhofer IGD Rostock, Germany
Gerald Bieber gery@igd-r.fraunhofer.de	Fraunhofer IGD Rostock, Germany
John Waterworth jwworth@informatik.umu.se	Umea University, Umea, Sweden

Submission Information

Interested authors should submit their contribution through e-mail to the workshop chairs, under the instructions described in the Proceedings.

PerHoMo

Workshop Theme and Goals

You are cordially invited to submit your contribution in the Workshop on "Home Monitoring" organized within the "First International Conference on Pervasive Technologies Related to Assistive environments (PETRA 2008)". This Workshop aims to bring together researchers and practitioners from academia and industry to engage in an in-depth discussion on various research and deployment issues regarding pervasive environments in the broad field of Home Monitoring. The anticipated outcome of this workshop is to provide a dialogue channel between researchers and practitioners in this field, enhancing the synergy among them.

Topics of Interest

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

• Wireless sensor networks for health/security monitoring
• Smart homes and telecare
• Home care and personal area networks
• Software infrastructure for smart home environments
• User attitudes towards smart homes

Workshop Chairs

Costas Pattichis pattichi@cs.ucy.ac.cy	Dept. of Computer Science: University of Cyprus, Cyprus)
Efthivoulos Kyriakou ekyriac@ucy.ac.cy	Dept. of Computer Science and Engineering, Frederick University, Cyprus
Dimitrios Vogiatzis dimitrv@iit.demokritos.gr	NCSR Demokritos, Athens, Greece

Interested authors should submit their contribution through e-mail to Dr. E. Kyriakou or to Dr. D. Vogiatzis, under the instructions described in http://www.petrae.org/proceedings.htm. At least one author of each accepted paper is required to register with the workshop and present the paper. Authors are strongly encouraged to use the correct document style for their initial submission, so that preparation of the final ready for accepted papers is simplified.

Submission Information

Interested authors should submit their contribution through e-mail to the workshop chairs, under the instructions described in the Proceedings.

HCI-HRI

Workshop Theme and Goals

Recent research results in the area of multimodal interfaces have been focusing on the development of natural, adaptive and intelligent interfaces enabling machines and robots to communicate with humans in ways close to human-to-human interaction. Natural interfaces, catering for visual, speech, and gestural input and human-like interface agents and robots are the two main characteristics of the dominant approaches; in terms of theoretical definition, such interfaces are beginning to take into account emotion representation theories and definitions of virtual personalities. As a result, systems are developed which take into account user expressivity and have robust natural multimodal interaction capabilities.

In addition to computer systems, affect-aware robotic platforms are currently emerging even into the consumer market. Not long ago, the social impact of these products in everyday life was largely unknown. However, with the advent of low-cost robots, able to receive, transmit and process visual, motion and sound information, interface agents and assistants have taken an embodied form as well.

This workshop is based on themes from successfully completed and current European projects in the fields of interfaces and robotics, such as NoE Humaine, IP Callas, and STREP Feelix- Growing.

Topics of Interest

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

• Affect-aware interfaces
• Ambient/natural interfaces
• Adaptive/cooperative interfaces
• Interfaces for attentive and intelligent environments
• Signal acquisition and processing for handicapped people
• Information/Sensor Fusion techniques and Architectures
• Machine Learning for human-computer and human-robot interaction
• Multimodal recognition of affect
• Affect recognition "in the wild"
• Theory of Emotion and Emotion Representation
• Cognitive modeling of users
• Virtual/augmented environments for handicapped people
• Affect-aware e-learning applications
• Applications of Affective Robots
• Emerging affect-aware Standards

Workshop Chairs

Elisabeth Andre	Institute of Computer Science, University of Augsburg, Germany
Kostas Karpouzis	Inst. of Communication and Computer Systems, Greece
Maja Pantic	Imperial College, UK
Catherine Pelachaud	Universite de Paris 8, France

Submission Information

Interested authors should submit their contribution through e-mail to hci-petra@image.ntua.gr, under the instructions described in the Proceedings.

AASTIH

Workshop Theme and Goals

You are cordially invited to submit your contribution in the Workshop on "Ambient Assistive Technologies for Intelligent Healthcare Services (AASTIHS08)" organized within the "First International Conference on Pervasive Technologies Related to Assistive environments (PETRA 2008)". This Workshop is organized by the INHOME Consortium and aims to bring together researchers and practitioners from academia and industry to engage in an in-depth discussion on various research and deployment issues regarding ambient technologies for intelligent healthcare services, pervasive healthcare technologies and applications, services' personalisation and management in assisted living environments, intelligent interactive services environment for assisted living.

Topics of Interest

We encourage submissions from both academic and industry sector. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

• Technologies to support ambient assisted living
• Mobile Telemedicine
• Security, privacy and trust in pervasive healthcare
• Networking and Embedded Systems
• Navigation Systems for Healthcare
• Pervasive healthcare technologies and applications for citizen for chronic disease management, health risk management, health promotion and disease prevention.
• User needs, usability and acceptability issues
• Multimedia in education and training
• Medical image processing & analysis
• Health monitoring & ethical issues
• Influence of ambient technology on medical care
• Diagnosis & monitoring (follow-up) of chronic diseases in the home environment
• Interactive Services for Healthcare and Assisted Living
• Mobile and wireless technologies for healthcare information storage, transmission, processing, and feedback
• Standards and interoperability
• Context aware mobile networks
• Wearable, ambient and home based health and wellness measurement and monitoring technologies
• Sensor networks for pervasive healthcare
• Information management, processing and analysis in pervasive healthcare
• Business cases and cost issues
• Clinical applications, validation and evaluation studies
• Human Computer Interface
• Standards: HL7, XML, GEHR, etc.
• Bio-signal Processing
• Parallel Computing, GRID Applications

Workshop Chairs

Dimitrios D. Vergados vergados@aegean.gr	University of the Aegean
Alevizos Alevizos alevisos@gmail.com	Health Center of Vyronas, Greece

Interested authors should submit their contribution through e-mail to Dr. Dimitrios Vergados or Dr. Alevizos Alevizos, under the instructions described in http://www.petrae.org/proceedings.htm. At least one author of each accepted paper is required to register with the workshop and present the paper. Authors are strongly encouraged to use the correct document style for their initial submission, so that preparation of the final ready for accepted papers is simplified.

Submission Information

Interested authors should submit their contribution through e-mail to the workshop chairs, under the instructions described in the Proceedings.