2nd Call for papers - 4 weeks left!

2nd Workshop on Behaviour Monitoring and Interpretation, BMI'08
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Co-located with the German Conference on AI 2008, Kaiserslautern, September 23th

General BMI session
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Monitoring what goes on in the environment, what people do and how they interact with their surroundings is of interest in several areas, such as in ambient intelligence, healthcare applications, or mobile services. This workshop focuses on methods analysing and interpreting the behaviour of single people, or of small groups of people. This is for the purpose of intention recognition, the triggering of smart home environments, or generally for the investigation of how humans and animals deal with specific problems or how they do specific things.

While much effort is spent on how to obtain information about the behaviour of people, e.g. by video-technologies or sensors equipped at bodies, the goal of this workshop is the high-level representation and interpretation of the monitored behaviour. To make the vision of behaviour monitoring and interpretation a reality, there are many serious challenges that must be addressed including lack of complete information about the monitored behaviour or the imprecision of the obtained data. Furthermore, knowledge representation issues, such as ontologies about behaviour patterns, have to be considered in the context of intention recognition, and questions have to be answered concerning how to reason about behaviour patterns, e.g. for making predictions.

Ambient Assisted Living session
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While technological advances in sensing and processing have ushered in an unprecedented opportunity for realising behaviour monitoring applications, much effort remains needed for the development of methods to integrate and exploit the available data for addressing specific applications. In addition to the general BMI topic, part of this year’s workshop features a thematic focus section on Ambient Assisted Living (AAL). AAL has been an area of expanded interest in utilizing available technology to offer quality of life and well-being solutions for a growing segment of the population. Methods and approaches in formulating and addressing application needs in AAL will be presented and discussed. Prospective authors are encouraged to submit a paper on the general BMI topic or contribute to the AAL section.


The list of possible topics includes, but is not limited to

Methodologies
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- knowledge representation and reasoning
- pattern recognition
- spatial and temporal reasoning
- dynamic scene analysis and interpretation

Application areas
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- ethology
- ambient intelligence
- disaster management
- health care


Thematic session's topics include in particular
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- multi-modal (e.g. vision-based) data fusion for AAL
- feedback interfaces between monitoring, processing and reasoning
- human pose and gesture interpretation for AAL
- environment discovery in AAL applications based on user interactions
- user behaviour models and context awareness

After the success of BMI'07, this one-day workshop is intended as a forum for discussion, exchange of points of views, assessment of results and methods, and as a source of dissemination and promotion of the newest advances in the area of behaviour monitoring and interpretation. The program will include a number of presentations by the invitees representing several different aspects concerning the role of monitoring and interpreting behaviours of people and groups of people, followed by discussions.


Members of the Program Committee
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Timothy D. Adlam, University of Bath, UK
Hamid Aghajan, Stanford University, USA
Stephen Balakirsky, National Institute of Standards and Technology, USA
Roland Billen, University of Liege, Belgium
Christophe Claramunt, Naval Academy Research Institute, France
Christian Freksa, Universität Bremen, Germany
Antony Galton, University of Exeter, UK
Björn Gottfried, University of Bremen, Germany
Hans Werner Guesgen, Massey University, New Zealand
Karin Klabunde, Philips Research, Germany
Paul McCullagh, University of Ulster at Jordanstown, UK
Gerhard Navratil, Technical University Vienna, Austria
Bernd Neumann, University of Hamburg, Germany
Christoph Schlieder, Universität Bamberg, Germany
Sabine Timpf, University of Augsburg, Germany
Nico Van de Weghe, Ghent University, Belgium
Howard D. Wactlar, Carnegie Mellon University, USA
Stephan Winter, University of Melbourne, Australia
Stefan Wölfl, University of Freiburg, Germany
Yaolong Zhao, University of Tsukuba, Japan


Workshop Chair
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Björn Gottfried
Centre for Computing Technologies (TZI)
Universität Bremen, Germany
bg AT tzi.de


Workshop Co-Chair
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Hamid Aghajan
Department of Electrical Engineering
Stanford University, USA
aghajan AT stanford.edu


Proceedings
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All submitted papers will be rigorously reviewed by the international technical program committee. There will be post-workshop proceedings available this year.


Important Dates
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Submission of papers June 6, 2008
Notification of authors July 16, 2008
Final Versions of papers July 28, 2008
Workshop September 23, 2008


Submission Details
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Papers should be formated according to Springer LNCS guidelines. The length of each paper should not exceed 15 pages. All papers must be written in English and submitted in PDF format. Submissions should be sent in electronic form to Bjoern Gottfried: bg AT tzi.de

February 25, 2008