[visionlist] EvAAL Call for Competition 2014

Apologies for possible duplicates.

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Fourth EvAAL Competition
(Evaluating AAL Systems through Competitive Benchmarking)

TRACK 1: LOCALIZATION AND ACTIVITY RECOGNITION FOR AAL
7-10 July 2014 — Madrid, ES

TRACK 2: RF-BASED INDOOR LOCALIZATION SOLUTIONS IN PUBLIC SPACES
organized by the EVARILOS project
June 2014 — Ghent, BE

TRACK 3: RF-BASED INDOOR LOCALIZATION ALGORITHMS
organized by the EVARILOS project
May – July 2014 — online remote competition

Final EvAAL workshop
11 July 2014 — Madrid, ES

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An initiative organised by the AALOA community (http://www.aaloa.org)
and partially supported by universAAL (http://universaal.org)
and EVARILOS (http://www.evarilos.eu)

We are pleased to announce the 4th EvAAL Competition. EvAAL aims at
bringing together academic and industrial research communities to work
together on challenging open problems in Ambient Assisted Living (AAL),
with the purpose of evaluating different approaches to AAL and
envisioning new research opportunities. EvAAL is an opportunity to find
good solutions to a number of challenges in the AAL domain.

During the competition, we will collect data sets in realistic
environments (the living labs), which we offer as benchmarks to
researcher communities for the simulation and test of their solutions.

The competition is composed of three tracks and a final workshop:

– Track 1 on Localization and activity recognition for AAL, to be held
on 7-11 July, 2014 at the Smart House Living Lab of the Universidad
Politécnica de Madrid, Spain

– Track 2 on RF-based indoor localization solutions in public spaces,
organized by the EVARILOS consortium, to be held in June, 2014, at the
test facilities of iMinds, Belgium

– Track 3 on RF-based indoor localization algorithms, organized by the
EVARILOS consortium, to be held online in May/June/July, 2014, with
remote access to test facilities at Technische Universität Berlin,
Germany and iMinds, Belgium

– EvAAL workshop to be held on the 11 July, 2014 at the Universidad
Politécnica de Madrid, Spain, and accompanying online session for the
competitors in Track 2 and Track 3

Track 1 – Localization and Activity Recognition for AAL

The automatic and unobtrusive identification of user’s activities is one
of the challenging goals of AAL. Real-time monitoring of human daily
activities (e.g. sleeping, cooking, watching TV, etc.) could be a useful
tool for many future AAL applications such as behavioural pattern
recognition, detection of diseases or entertainment. Recognition of
daily activities can make use of several sources of information
including real-time position, usage of electronic appliances and
recognition of movements.

The aim of this competition is to award the best system in terms of
activity recognition, localization and gesture/posture recognition from
the point of view of AAL applications. We will welcome competitors to
install their systems at the Smart House Living Lab and integrate their
data with the ones provided by our installations for the best
accuracy. The final score will be based on the accuracy of the
recognized activities, localization and gestures/postures and other
AAL-related criteria including user acceptance, integrability and
installation complexity.

Track 2 – RF-based Indoor Localization Solutions in Public Spaces
Organized by the EVARILOS project

Localization in urban environments and buildings, where people spend
most of their time, is a key component for achieving
context-awareness. Due to the poor performance of established outdoor
solutions like the GPS service, a number of alternative indoor
localization solutions have been recently proposed, many of them
leveraging radio frequency (RF).

This track, organized by the EVARILOS consortium (see
), focuses on benchmarking
complete localization solutions. The contestants will have opportunity
to install additional hardware and software at the iMinds test facility
in Ghent, Belgium. Available contexts include an office environment and
an enclosed open space. All competing systems have to be either
RF-based, or in case of multimodal systems, they have to possess a
strong RF-based component. Hybrid systems where other technologies are
used such as infrared, ultrasound, RFID, or other are also allowed. The
track especially targets industry participation but also welcomes
academia.

The performance of the competing localization solutions will be
evaluated in several different application categories, like AAL and
healthcare, and scores will be published on EVARILOS website. Scores
based on an AAL scenario including metrics such as accuracy,
installation complexity and user acceptance will be considered for EvAAL
ranking.

Track 3 – RF-based Indoor Localization Algorithms
Organized by the EVARILOS project

The track, organized by the EVARILOS consortium (see
), is an online competition for
RF-based indoor localization algorithms in which participating teams
compete in precise localization under the influence of different
RF-interference scenarios. The competing localization algorithms will
have to be implemented through remote access on top of the existing
hardware resources available at the EVARILOS experimental facilities at
TU Berlin and iMinds, described at ,
including large number of IEEE 802.11g/n access points and IEEE 802.15.4
sensor nodes, deployed in a typical multi-floor office space context. As
in Track 2, the competing localization algorithms in Track 3 will be
evaluated following the EVARILOS benchmarking methodology, aligned with
the upcoming ISO/IEC 18305 standard “Test and evaluation of localization
and tracking systems”.

This online track will provide contestants with unique opportunity to:
test and compare the performance of their RF-based indoor localization
algorithms following a standardized evaluation methodology; test the
sensitivity of their algorithms to radio interference under controlled
conditions; disseminate information about their localization solution as
part of the competition workshop, website and the published proceedings
and contribute towards the establishment of a public repository of
experimental traces from indoor localization solutions.

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Candidate competitors are invited to submit a paper describing their
system to the appropriate track. A “competitor” can be any individual or
group of individuals working as a single team, associated to a single or
a number of organisations. The papers will undergo a peer review by the
technical program committee members. The papers must include a
description of the hardware, deployment, and algorithms and protocols
used, and the description of the internal data produced and processed by
the system.

Submitted papers in the form of extended abstracts, not exceeding 4
pages, must be submitted by the deadline indicated below.

The evaluation criteria for the competition, constraints on the accepted
technologies, and a description of the benchmarks are detailed in the
technical annexes of this call, which will be published shortly at
. Possible refinements of the annexes, also
based on participating competitors comments, will be timely distributed
to all participants.

Depending on the number and quality of submissions, it may be necessary
to restrict the number of participants admitted to the competition to
the best ranked papers, due to space/logistic constraints at the living
labs.

Selected competitors are admitted to the competition under the two
following conditions:

1. participate to the competition at the hosting facilities (tracks 1
and 2) or remotely (track 3); the organizers will set individual
appointments for each competing team;
2. provide the organizers with the internal data produced by their
systems during the competition as will be specified by the reviewers;
provide the documentation describing the deployment of their system,
as requested by the organizers: the data will be published on the
EvAAL website.

After the competition, competitors will be requested a complete version
(8-20 pages in LNCS form) of their papers, which will be subjected to
further peer review. Papers that pass the second peer review will be
eligible to be published in the EvAAL Proceedings. For track 1 and track
2, publication on the EvAAL proceedings and official ranking on EvAAL’s
web site are subject to participants attending the final workshop in
person. This condition is not required of participants admitted to
track 3, given the online nature of this track, though they are warmly
invited to attend the workshop.

Papers that are not published on the EvAAL proceedings per the above
criteria will be published on EvAAL’s web site.

A participation fee to the workshop of maximum 300€ will be asked to
participants of track 1 for covering organizational costs, though its
amount be reduced depending on the results of negotiations with our
sponsors. Costs relative to tracks 2 and 3 are covered by EVARILOS.
EVARILOS will organize remote attendance to the workshop.

The winners will be announced during the workshop, prizes will be
awarded by our sponsors to the highest-ranking competitors.

We encourage submissions from both academia and industry (there are no
restrictions on the composition of competing teams) with the aim of
seeking innovative solutions for AAL applications. Please check the
EvAAL web site at for more information and
regular updates on the progress of the competition.

Contact: info@evaal.aaloa.org
Submission:

Important Dates

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