Call for White Papers
The National Science Foundation is sponsoring a workshop on Pervasive Computing at Scale (PeCS) with the following objectives:- identify open problems and fundamental challenges that must be addressed to enable deployment of pervasive computing systems at massive scale;
- understand the needs of new applications capable of complex inferences about personal, social, and urban spaces across a set of domains, including but not limited to: smart health and well-being, social networks, smart environments, human behavioral modeling and persuasion, cyber-physical systems, and environmental and critical infrastructure monitoring and protection (e.g., smart grids);
- explore infrastructures, algorithms and tools necessary for the collection and analysis of data from large ensembles of pervasive heterogeneous and distributed devices (e.g., mobile phone sensing, wearable sensors, embedded sensors) and intelligent multi-scale decision making;
- understand the implications for privacy, security, trust and social aspects of large-scale pervasive computing systems;
- identify software challenges, including middleware and operating systems, for pervasive computing and associated applications;
- explore new interfaces and modes of interactions between people and pervasive computing devices, applications or environments;
- study the computing continuum and trade-offs where pervasive applications are self adaptive across a wide spectrum of devices and networking technologies, from the smallest embedded sensors to the computing cloud;
- provide theoretical foundations toward defining the "Science of Pervasive Computing"; for example, How to guarantee reliable pervasive computing at scale in the presence of uncertain and incomplete information? How to quantify and assess information quality for making accurate decisions?
- explore the nexus between scalability and application characteristics and context with the goal of identifying fundamental insights, models and methods;
- identify new networking challenges as very large pervasive systems become commonly integrated with the Internet;
- understand assurance and verification for critical applications (e.g., health-care or safety); and,
- identify challenges in simulation, emulation and experimentation with pervasive systems at scale.
We solicit two page white papers on various topics related to scaling in pervasive systems. The whitepapers must include three paragraphs describing the following: (i) the background and experience of the participant in this field; (ii) the vision of the participant; and (iii) evidence that pursuing this vision will lead to major advances in the field - the remainder of the white paper can expand on the vision. Please note, whitepapers that present mature or already-published work will not be accepted. Acceptance will be based on several factors including the quality of the whitepaper and the ability to form a diverse program in terms of topics and participants.
Participation in the workshop is by invitation only. Invitations will be extended based upon review of the whitepapers. A limited number of international participants may be invited. Washington State University will pay travel expenses for all participants through an NSF grant.
All participants are required to contribute to a workshop report that will be provided to the NSF. The report will be edited by the workshop co-chairs.