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1st EvAAL Competition
(Evaluating AAL Systems through Competitive Benchmarking)
http://evaal.aaloa.org

Special theme on Indoor Localization and Tracking

25-29 July, 2011
Valencia, ES

in conjunction with the AAL Forum
(26-28 September 2011,Lecce ,IT)

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An initiative supported by the AALOA community (http://www.aaloa.org) and organised by the universAAL project (http://www.universAAL.org)


We are pleased to announce the first EvAAL Competition on Indoor Localization and Tracking to be held on the 25-29 July, 2011 at the CIAMI Living Lab in Valencia, and the concluding workshop to be held in conjunction with the AAL Forum on the 26-28 September 2011,Lecce ,IT (http://www.aalforum.eu/).

Localization is a key component for achieving context-awareness. Recent years have witnessed an increasing trend of location-based services and applications. In most cases, however, location information is limited by the accessibility to Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS), largely unavailable for indoor environments. The scope of this competition is to award the best indoor localization system from the point of view of Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) applications. To this end much research has been done in both the sensor network community and the ubiquitous computing community to provide techniques for localization and tracking in smart environments. This competition is an opportunity to bring together both academic and industrial research communities to work together on challenging and open problems, to evaluate various approaches, and to envision new research opportunities. The universAAL project organises this competition because it is an opportunity to find good solutions to relevant AAL challenges. Participation in the competition is therefore also an opportunity to influence the universAAL project. This competition is the first of several planned by universAAL to find good solutions to different challenges in the AAL domain. The whole initiative is organized as an AALOA project so that the AAL community is involved from the beginning and can more easily take over the continuation of EvAAL after the universAAL project finishes.

During the competition, we will collect a large amount of data that could be very useful as benchmarks to researcher communities who simulate and test their solutions. These will be significant benchmarks, because they will have been collected in a realistic environment (the living lab).

Candidate competitors are invited to submit a paper describing their localization system. A "competitor" can be any individual or group of individuals, from one or several organisations, working as a single team. The papers will undergo a peer review by the technical program committee members. The papers must describe original work and include a description of the hardware, deployment, and algorithms and protocols used.

Each paper must not exceed 4 pages (including tables, figures, etc.) and must be submitted by April 24th, 2011 using the web forms which will be available from March 15th on the EvAAL website.

Submitters of accepted papers will be invited to participate in the competition itself, to be held at the CIAMI Living Lab (http://www.ciami.es) in Valencia, during the last two weeks of July, 2011.

The evaluation criteria for the competition, restrictions on the accepted technologies, and a description of the benchmarks are detailed in the technical annex of this call, available in http://evaal.aaloa.org/current-competition/techannex (see notes 1 and 2 below). Possible refinements of the annex, also based on participating competitors comments, will be timely distributed to all participants.

Depending on the number of accepted papers, it may be necessary to restrict participation in the competition to the best ranked papers, due to space/logistic constraints at the Living Lab.

Accepted papers will be presented at the EvAAL workshop that will be held in conjunction with the AAL Forum (http://www.aalforum.eu/), and will be published in the AAL Forum proceedings.

The winner(s) of the competition will be announced at a special session of the AAL forum, a major event in the field of Ambient Assisted Living in Europe. The organizers intend to provide a prize for the best entries, and to make some contribution to travel costs for all participants.

The organizers encourage submissions from both academia and industry (there are no restrictions to the composition of competing teams) with the aim of seeking innovative localization solutions for AAL applications that represent leading-edge research prototype development. Please check the EvAAL web site (http://evaal.aaloa.org) for more information and regular updates on progress with the competition.

Contact: info@evaal.aaloa.org

Important Dates
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Abstract registration: from March 15th, 2011
Paper Submission Deadline: April 24th, 2011
Acceptance Notification: May 14th, 2011
Camera Ready Deadline: June 30th, 2011
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Organizing Committee:
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General Co-Chairs
Stefano Chessa, (University of Pisa and ISTI-CNR, Italy)
Sergio Guillen, (ITACA-UPV University of Valencia, Spain)

Technical Program Committee Co-Chairs:
Rainer Mautz (ETH Zurich)
Francesco Furfari (ISTI-CNR, Italy)
Dario Salvi (Polytecnic University of Madrid, Spain)
Juan Pablo Lazaro (TSB Spain)

Local Committee:
Juan Pablo Lazaro (TSB Soluciones Tecnologicas, Spain)
Dario Salvi (Polytecnic University of Madrid, Spain)
Laura Belenguer (ITACA-UPV, Spain)

Publication chair:
Reiner Wichert (Fraunhofer IGD, Germany)

Publicity Chairs:
Casper Dahl Marcussen (Region Syddanmark, Denmark)
Francesco Potortì (ISTI-CNR, Italy)


Program Committee:
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Bruno Andò (University of Catania, Italy)
Paolo Barsocchi (ISTI-CNR, Italy)
Philippe Canalda (University of Franche-Comté, France)
Francesco Furfari (ISTI-CNR, Italy)
Juan Pablo Lázaro (TSB Spain)
Ivan Martinovic (University of Kaiserslautern, Germany)
Rainer Mautz (ETH Zurich)
Filipe M. L. Meneses (University of Minho, Portugal)
Adriano J. C. Moreira (University of Minho, Portugal)
Francesco Potortì (ISTI-CNR, Italy)
Dario Salvi (Polytecnic University of Madrid, Spain)
Saied Tezari (Fraunhofer IGD, Germany)
Reiner Wichert (Fraunhofer IGD, Germany)

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Notes:
(1) In order to have a smooth organization of the competition, the competitors will be requested to interface their competing artefacts with the measurement tools (that will be provided by universAAL project) that will be used in the competition. To this purpose there will be a shepherding phase in which the EvAAL organizer will help competitors to implement this integration.

(2) The evaluation criteria for the competition, restrictions on the accepted technologies, and a description of the benchmarks are described in the technical annex of this call. Refinements of the technical annex based on competitors requests will be timely distributed to all participants.
The technical annex is available at:
http://evaal.aaloa.org/current-competition/techannex