MUM 2020

Jonathan Liebers, Roman Heger, Sarah Clinch
2021 IEEE pervasive computing  
was changed to a virtual venue that brought together researchers and practitioners from academia and industry. The program included two keynotes, 32 paper presentations, 11 posters, six demos, and in total 96 participants. To host the online conference, the general chair, Stefan Schneegass, chose "Remo" Ã as a solution that was very well received by the attendees of the conference. In Remo, the virtual conference area was designed to mimic the originally planned location, the Zollverein UNESCO
more » ... orld Heritage site in Essen (cf., Figure 1 ). Besides a packed program of audio and video presentations, Remo allowed participants to gather at various locations within the virtual venue for conversations with a handful of their peers. Those locations included the virtual registration desk, the main room with several tables in front of a virtual stage, and also a lounge area for some relaxed socializing. Furthermore, a dedicated virtual location for any single virtual poster and demo exhibition was provided. This enabled the individual work to be presented in front of a smaller group in a personalized way on a versatile and interactive virtual whiteboard. The multitude of small-scale locations, allowing communication between a few attendees each, facilitated the overall online exchange and rich interactivity of the virtual venue. The first day of the conference on Sunday, November 22, 2020, started with three workshops on the tangible web to support mobile and cross-device interactions, mixed reality applications for in-vehicle experiences in automated driving, and wearable designing for attention and executive control in implicit interaction. It was followed by a doctoral colloquium on Monday, November, 23, 2020 (for more about attending online doctoral events, see the column in our October-December 2020 issue: 10.1109/MPRV.2020.3021300). This year, articles accepted to the 9th ACM International Symposium on Pervasive Displays (PerDis) could be presented at the MUM conference since the PerDis Symposium 2020 was canceled due to the prevalent pandemic. Overall, six articles were presented across a dedicated PerDis session and the session on health and wellbeing. The main part of the conference was started by Pattie Maes of the MIT Media Lab, presenting a great opening keynote on enhancing human cognition. In her talk, she presented new types of wearable devices that monitor the user but that also can intervene and support people with new skills in live settings. This enables new opportunities for human studies in psychology and neuroscience or the creation of new products. Her work ranges from the topic of attention, to communication, also including memory and learning, as well as creativity and decision-making. One example is "AttentivU," a system that can notify participants in a classroom setting or car drivers when their attention of the current situation begins to drift, positively enhancing their attention over time. Another system, "Dormio," can support creativity by leveraging hypnagogic dreams, mimicking the steel-ball technique of Thomas Edison. Overall, her presentation was very inspiring and very well received by the audience. Afterward, the program continued with a session on mobile and wearable computing. Radu-Daniel Vatavu and Jean Vanderdonckt presented a design space and the users' preferences for graphical menus on smart glasses. Their findings are based on a larger user study (N ¼ 251) and their results indicate key variables that influence user's preference of the visual appearance of graphical menus. Christopher Clarke et al. explored an opportunity for private audio channels in public settings by correlating the realtime data of earphones' inertial sensors against a camera recording. This allows the creation of applications that stream personal audio to each user by spontaneously associating an earable device with a camera view. In addition, Alexander Schiewe et al. investigated visualization approaches on a smartwatch for real-time feedback during running activities. To extend the capabilities of mobile devices that employ touchscreens, Huy Viet Le et al.
doi:10.1109/mprv.2021.3066827 fatcat:srve4ru33bd2vo6n5okycpitle