Labelling user data is a central part of the design and evaluation of pervasive systems that aim to support the user through situation-aware reasoning. It is essential both in designing and training the system to recognise and reason about the situation, either through the definition of a suitable situation model in knowledge-driven applications, or though the preparation of training data for learning tasks in data- driven models. Hence, the quality of annotations can have a significant impact on the performance of the derived systems. Labelling is also vital for validating and quantifying the performance of applications. With pervasive systems relying increasingly on large datasets for designing and testing models of users’ activities, the process of data labelling is becoming a major concern for the community. Even more, with the increase of pervasive applications relying on annotated data, it becomes important to develop standards and normalisation methodologies for transferability of annotated data across different applications.

To address the problem, this year’s workshop focuses on experiences with existing tools, datasets and annotation approaches in real-world use cases, including negative outcomes and the reflection of possible resolutions of the related problems. Furthermore, we aim to address the general problems of (1) the role and impact of annotations in designing pervasive applications, (2) the process of labelling, and the requirements to produce high quality annotations for diverse settings and tasks, (3) innovative tools, interfaces and automated methods for annotating user data, especially weekly supervised and unsupervised machine learning methods for annotating data and (4) methods for standardisation and normalisation in annotation practices, (5) label adaptation and evolution. The goal of the workshop is to bring these topics to the attention of researchers from interdisciplinary backgrounds, and to initiate a reflection on possible resolutions of the related problems.

We invite you to submit papers with a maximum of 6 pages that offer new empirical or theoretical insights on the challenges and innovative solutions associated with labelling of user data, as well as on the impact that labelling choices have on the user and the developed system. The topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

methods and intelligent tools for annotating user data for pervasive systems;
methods for standardisation and normalisation in annotation practices;
influence of interface on annotation;
processes of and best practices in annotating user data;
methods towards automation of the annotation process;
improving and evaluating the quality of annotations;
beyond the labels: ontologies for semantic annotation of user data;
high-quality and re-usable annotation for publicly available datasets;
impact of annotation on a ubiquitous and intelligent system’s performance;
building classifier models that are capable of dealing with multiple (noisy) annotations and/or making use of taxonomies/ontologies;
the potential value of incorporating modelling of the annotators into predictive models;
evaluating the efficacy of transfer learning via existing annotated datasets;
handling semantic and temporal shift and drift in pervasive computing applications;

Position papers: This year, we are also encouraging participants to submit position papers to support discussion during and after the workshop, as well as to support participants in gaining feedback for their work. These papers should broadly reflect open questions, concerns, proposals or recommendations surrounding data annotation. For example, topics of interest in a position paper might include:

• limitations in current reporting of data annotation methodologies

• reuse and sharing of data annotation vocabularies and ontologies

• reflections on data annotation praxis
• ethical and privacy issues connecting to annotation of user data

• protocol papers for studies employing annotation in pervasive environments.

Submission guidelines:

Format: Maximum of 6 pages including references, formatted in accordance with the IEEE Computer Soci- ety author guidelines. The IEEE LaTeX and Microsoft Word templates, as well as related information, can be found at the IEEE Computer Society website. Workshop papers will be included and indexed in the IEEE digital libraries (Xplore).

Submission: Through the EDAS submission system: https://edas.info/N30138

Review process: The review process will be double blind.

Registration: Each accepted workshop paper requires a full PerCom registration (no registration is available for workshops only). It is mandatory that at least one author registers and presents the paper during the technical sessions of workshops.

Important dates:
Submission deadline: November 14, 2022

Notification: January 05, 2023

Camera ready version: January 30, 2023 (TBA)

Workshop: March 2023 (TBA)

The 7th International Workshop on Annotation of useR Data for UbiquitOUs Systems is held as part of the 21st International Conference on Pervasive Computing and Communications (PerCom 2023) in Atlanta, USA.