- Affiliated to IEEE PerCom 2018
- March 19-23, 2018 (day to be confirmed)
- Athens, Greece

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 recog- nize 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 in- creasingly on large datasets for designing and testing models of users’ activities, the process of data labelling is becoming a major concern for the community. This also reflects the increasing need of intelligent inter- active annotation tools, which can reduce the manual annotation effort and improve the annotation perfor- mance and quality in large datasets.

To address these problems, this year’s workshop has a particular focus on:

1. intelligent and interactive tools and automated methods for annotating large user datasets.

Furthermore, we aim to address the general problems of:

2. the role and impact of annotations in designing pervasive applications,
3. the process of labelling, and the requirements to produce high quality annotations, especially in the
context of large datasets.

The goal of the workshop is to provide a ground for researchers from interdisciplinary backgrounds to reflect on their experiences, challenges, and 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;
- processes of and best practices in annotating user data;
- methods towards an automation of the annotation;
- improving and evaluating the annotation quality;
- ethical issues concerning the annotation of user data;
- 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.


Format: Maximum of 6 pages including references, formatted in accordance with the IEEE Computer Society author guidelines. The IEEE LaTeX and Microsoft Word templates, as well as related information, can be found at the IEEE Computer Society website (http://www.computer.org/web/cs-cps/authors). All papers included in the PerCom 2018 Workshops will appear in the conference proceedings published by IEEE.

Submission: Through the EDAS submission system (link to be provided)

Review process: The review process will be double blind.

Registration: There will be no separate workshop registration, but one single registration will cover both conference and workshop participation. It is mandatory that at least one author will register and will participate to present the paper during the technical sessions of workshops.

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Special Issue
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The authors of selected papers from this year's workshop will be invited to submit an extended version to a special issue of the MDPI Sensors Journal (impact factor 2.67).

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Important dates:
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Submission deadline: November 11, 2017
Notification: December 23, 2017
Camera ready version: January 12, 2018 (FIRM)
Author registration due by: January 12, 2018 (FIRM)
Workshop: March 19-23, 2018 (exact day TBC)

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Program Committee:
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Organisers
- Kristina Yordanova, University of Rostock, Germany
- Adeline Paiement, Swansea University, UK


Committee Members
- Galia Angelova, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, Bulgaria
- Sebastian Bader, University of Rostock, Germany
- Alison Burrows, University of Bristol, UK
- Ian Cleland, Ulster University, UK
- Diane Cook, Washington State University, USA
- Ian Craddock, University of Bristol and Toshiba Research, UK
- Thierry Declerck, German Research Centre for Artificial Intelligence, Germany
- Tom Diethe, University of Bristol, UK
- Peter Flach, University of Bristol, UK
- Peter Haddawy, Mahidol University, Thailand
- Gustaf Hendeby, Linköping University, Sweden
- José Hernández-Orallo, Universitat Politècnica de València, Spain
- Jesse Hoey, University of Waterloo, Canada
- Stephen Intille, Northeastern University, USA
- Rachel King, University of Reading, UK
- Thomas Kirste, University of Rostock, Germany
- Aftab Khan, Toshiba Research, UK
- Antonio Krüger, Gearman Research Centre for Artificial Intelligence, Germany
- Frank Krüger, University of Rostock, Germany
- Edith Law, University of Waterloo, Canada
- Takuya Maekawa, Osaka University, Japan
- Chris Nugent, Ulster University, UK
- Carl Olsson, Malmö University, Sweden
- Leandro Pecchia, University of Warwick, UK
- Thomas Ploetz, Newcastle University, UK
- Niall Twomey, University of Bristol, UK
- Pete Woznowski, University of Bristol, UK



For further information regarding the workshop and paper submission, please visit our webpage (https://text2hbm.org/arduous/) or contact Kristina Yordanova at kristina.yordanova@uni-rostock.de or Adeline Paiement at A.T.M.Paiement@swansea.ac.uk.

Follow us on Facebook (www.facebook.com/arduousWorkshop/) or ResearchGate (www.researchgate.net/project/ARDUOUS-International-Workshop-on-Annotation-of-useR-Data-for-UbiquitOUs-Systems).