Ubicomp 2006

Image source: Ubicomp 2006 website

Ubicomp 2006, the Eighth International Conference of Ubiquitous Computing, will be held in Orange County, California, September 17-21, 2006, hosted by the University of California, Irvine. Ubicomp is the premier international forum for research in ubiquitous computing, bringing together designers, computer scientists, social scientists, and artists, to discuss recent developments and future advance.


Satoru Hashimoto and Yasuto Nakanishi from Keio University will present the demo, SpaceTracer: Sharing Space by Combining Images from Network Cameras, a system that enables to share the contexts from distant places by combining images for 30 minutes fetched from network cameras into an alpha-blended image.

Also several Videos will be present at UbiComp conference series.

The program privacy issues

Tuesday, 2:00pm: Capture and Privacy

Scribe4Me:
Evaluating a Mobile Sound Transcription Tool for the Deaf Tara Matthews (University of California, Berkeley, US); Scott Carter (University of California, Berkeley, US); Carol Pai (Carnegie Mellon University, US); Janette Fong (Carnegie Mellon University, US); Jennifer Mankoff (Human Computer Interaction Institute, Carnegie Mellon University, US)

SenseCam:
a Retrospective Memory AidSteve Hodges (Microsoft Research, UK); Lyndsay Williams (Microsoft Research, UK); Emma Berry (Microsoft Research, UK); Shahram Izadi (Microsoft Research, UK); James Srinivasan (Microsoft Research, UK); Alex Butler (Microsoft Research, UK); Gavin Smyth (Microsoft Research, UK), Narinder Kapur (Addenbrookes Hospital, UK); Ken Wood (Microsoft Research, UK)

Development of a A Privacy Addendum for Open Source Licenses:
Value Sensitive Design in IndustryBatya Friedman (University of Washington, US); Ian Smith (Intel Research Seattle, US); Peter Kahn, Jr. (University of Washington, US); Sunny Consolvo (Intel Research Seattle, US); Jaina Selawski (Intel Corp, US)


LINKS

Ubicom 2007 (Call for proposals)

Ubicomp 2005: Seventh International Conference on Ubiquitous Computing, Tokyo, Japan

Ubicomp 2004: Sixth International Conference on Ubiquitous Computing, Nottingham, England

UbiComp 2003: Fifth International Conference on Ubiquitous Computing, Seattle, Washington, USA

UbiComp 2002: Fourth International Conference on Ubiquitous Computing, Göteberg, Sweden

UbiComp 2001: Third International Conference on Ubiquitous Computing, Atlanta, Georgia, USA

HUC2k: Second International Symposium on Handheld and Ubiquitous Computing, Bristol, United Kingdom

HUC 99: First International Symposium on Handheld and Ubiquitous Computing, Karlsruhe, German

EU row looms over US call to ditch data privacy rights

According to TheParliament.com, Europe’s capitals and EU institutions are deeply divided over calls to drop privacy rights for citizens amid an anti-terror air security crackdown.

EU members states are divided on data protection issues and the European parliament is angry that MEPs (Members of the European Parliament) are not being consulted on handovers of information to US security agencies.

Read full article at TheParliament.com

The Kings' Tale

According to Seattle Post Intelligencer, Amazon.com is developing a system to gather and keep massive amounts of intimate information about its millions of shoppers, including their religion, sexual orientation, ethnicity and income. Its ability to do so emerged in a detailed patent application with the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office (Patent application 20060178946).

Andrew Orlowski publishes at The Register that US Privacy groups renewed last week their calls for search engines and commercial retailers to wipe their databases clean.

Ed Gottsman (Accenture Associate Partner) comments at Of SWFWAPs and Data Privacy “It would have to be very careful when deciding how it uses the data it possesses”

If customer is king, let your customers tell you what they want or you lose them forever.

Two new articles at Technology Review

There are two news and interesting articles at Technology Review.

Remote-Controlled Humans

Electrically stimulating the vestibular nerve can influence human movement -- and may create better virtual-reality devices and prosthetics.
By Emily Singer

Googling Your TV

Prototype software from Google Research could listen to your TV and send back useful information -- and ads of course.
By Wade Roush

Net Watchdog: The Elusive Search for Privacy

Photo by Binitu


This is an extract of PCWorld´s article "Net Watchdog: The Elusive Search for Privacy" by Tom Spring.

AOL's accidental release of the search queries of 650,000 subscribers underscores the growing stakes when it comes to digital privacy. AOL's disastrous mistake is exactly the reason you should be asking yourself whether privacy even can exist in this digital age.

Read more at PCWorld.