Problem Space

Building on the success of M-MPAC 2009 (that combined the previous editions of
MPAC and MobMid), this event aims to carry on development of a research roadmap
on essential middleware abstractions, platforms and applications for pervasive
mobile and embedded systems.

This year is marked by the resurgence of tablet devices (e.g. iPad and a myriad
of competing products) that aim to combine the performance of PCs with the
portability and freedom of PDAs. This trend drives an increase in the popularity
of pervasive mobile and embedded computing. Recent years have also witnessed the
rise (and sometimes resurgence) of relatively powerful mobile communication
devices such as mobile phones, mobile Internet devices and netbooks, as well as
several embedded devices, like TV set-top boxes, portable media players (e.g.
iPods), eReaders (e.g. Kindle), etc. These devices have enabled a wide spectrum
of novel pervasive applications, such as healthcare monitoring, enhanced
shopping applications/environments, ad-hoc gaming, sport tracking, street
navigation and observation, context-aware collaborative computing, etc. Moreover,
with the rise of cloud computing infrastructures developers have also started
exploring the possibility of empowering resource-constrained mobile devices with
such infrastructures offering unlimited storage and computing resources.

Developing practical applications for this kind of devices is still in most cases
a complex and time-consuming process. Many of the existing applications have been
built in an ad-hoc manner and without any possibility for code reuse. As the
number and type of mobile and embedded devices, and pervasive applications
increases, so does the need to enable interoperability among them. Identifying
appropriate middleware abstractions and organizing successfully used protocols,
algorithms, and software modules into generic middleware platforms can facilitate
application development, foster software reuse, and enable rapid prototyping of
pervasive applications.

It is unclear and in many respects still an unexplored research area to what
extent traditional middleware services can be provided on these devices. Porting
existing middleware architectures to these new computing platforms turns out to
be often infeasible. Instead, a thorough reconsideration of middleware
abstractions and their supporting infrastructure is needed to allow applications
to make effective use of the available computational power, memory,
communication technologies, integrated sensors, etc. An ideal middleware
platform should be capable of handling the resource constraints of these
devices but at the same time exploit their unique features such as availability
of location information, embedded sensors, mobility, spontaneous interaction,
context-awareness, etc.

Topics

The main topics of the workshop include, but are not limited to:

* Device platforms

Virtualization technologies and applications
Distributed Ensembles
Interaction paradigms and protocols
Emerging mobile platforms (e.g. Android)
Virtual machines

* Networking

Emerging wireless technologies and platforms
Experiences or case studies with new technologies (WiMax, WiBree, LTE, etc)
and devices (MIP, UMPC, wearables, etc)
Multi-link scenarios: WiFi, Bluetooth, cellular network
Quality of service and network selection

* Data issues

Data formats and encoding
Availability and durability of data in personal networks
Synchronization of personal devices with other consumer electronics
(e.g. cameras, iPods, etc)
Data portability

* Adaptability

Context-awareness, location monitoring
Resource management, cyber foraging, and energy-awareness
Using cloud infrastructures for computing-intensive tasks and data storage
Autonomics and self-* properties

* Security and Privacy

Privacy preservation and identity management for device-to-device interactions
Security architectures balancing risk and utility
Trust management in device ensembles
Mobile device data security
Identity federation

* Mobile and Social Web

Web architectures (REST, Ajax) for 3-screen usage in pervasive computing
Context and content adaptation and management in pervasive computing
Mobile web scalability and reliability in access
Content adaptation on mobile devices
Collaborative search

* Applications

Healthcare, entertainment, games, mobile TV, smart spaces, shopping,
street navigation, etc.
Mobile phones in sensor and ad hoc networks
Application development on mobile and embedded devices
Programming models

* Experiences and case studies

Lessons from deployments
User experiences
Performance studies

Submission

Submissions should not exceed 8 pages and should be formatted using the ACM
proceeding style (see http://www.acm.org/sigs/pubs/proceed/template.html).
Submission implies that at least one of the authors will register and present
the paper. Please submit your paper in PDF at
http://www.cis.strath.ac.uk/external/m-mpac2010/openconf/.

Papers should present a view of the state of the art in a particular sub-problem
area, identify specific middleware challenges, and suggest potential avenues for
exploration by proposing models, abstractions and infrastructure components
addressing these challenges. Approximately two thirds of the workshop will be
devoted to the presentation and discussion of these papers, while the remaining
third of the time will be devoted to the development of the research roadmap.

Papers will be reviewed by at least 3 members of the programme committee. The
review process will be based upon identifying the relevance and potential of the
position statement to contribute to the elaboration of the roadmap and to
stimulate discussion.

All accepted papers will appear in a special workshop proceedings volume in the
ACM Digital Library. The publication of the best workshop submissions and the
research roadmap is under investigation.


Programme Committee

Paolo Bellavista, Universita di Bologna, Italy
Renato Cerqueira, PUC-Rio, Brazil
Dan Chalmers, University of Sussex, UK
Domenico Cotroneo, University of Naples, Italy
Didier Donsez, Universite Joseph Fourier, Grenoble I, France
Nikolaos Georgantas, INRIA, France
Paul Grace, Lancaster University, UK
Rene Meier, Trinity College Dublin, Ireland
Sonia Ben Mokhtar, CNRS Lyon, France
Sougata Mukherjea, IBM Research, India
Shrikant Naidu, Motorola India Lab, India
Tatsuo Nakajima, Waseda University, Japan
Nitya Narasimhan, Motorola Labs, US
Aaron Quigley, HILT Lab, University of Tasmania, Australia
Oriana Riva, ETH Zurich, Switzerland
Luis Rodrigues, Technical University of Lisbon, Portugal
Romain Rouvoy, Universite Lille 1, France
Patrick Stuedi, Microsoft Research, US
Francois Taiani, Lancaster University, UK
Sotirios Terzis, University of Strathclyde, UK (Workshop Co-Chair)
Venu Vasudevan, Motorola Labs, US
Luis Veiga, Technical University of Lisbon, Portugal (Workshop Co-Chair)
Ian Wakeman, University of Sussex, UK