5th International Conference on Embedded and Ubiquitous Computing in 上海 (Shanghai, China), 17-20 December 2008

上海交通大学 (Shanghai Jiao Tong University) organized the 5^th International Conference on Embedded and Ubiquitous Computing in 上海 (Shanghai, China) on 17-20 December 2008. My talk "Human Universality in Ubiquitous Computing: Maslow, Where Are You?" occurred during the Context-aware Computing session.

I was motived by a room full of researchers for my 20-minutes talk. The audience was receptive, and an attendee even said that designing meaningful services for the general public (a core aspect of my presentation) was the most important problem of the moment; a heartening comment.

Reacting to my statement that context-awareness may fail like strong artificial intelligence during the 20^th century, a sharp Singaporean researcher argued about the potential of context-awareness; actually we agreed: context-awareness should prove useful but maybe not as much as initially envisioned and promised. He pertinently deplored that designers of good sensors are not involved in developing the intelligence of these sensors; I added that e.g. psychologists and sociologists could greatly help design fully integrated sensing systems.

Reacting to my statement that lack of interest in human needs hampers ubiquitous computing, another attendee indicated from experience in diabetes support that business models also lack; an element I will think about.

Finally, an attendee inquired about studies on cellular phones. I replied that I knew only one currently interesting study, which demonstrated a gap between planned and actual uses of first cell-phones. My results may similarly fail to represent requests of users when ubiquity spreads, but may suggest pertinent future services, help specialists consider neglected aspects of their work, and provide hints to designers.

Read the post "Publication #23" for details about the publication.

The conference was satisfactory, and participants were present and active; I will consider joining again in 2009 and 2010. Dining with dear Chinese friends, I missed the evening events organized by the conference committee but heard they were great.