UBICOMP

On behalf of the entire organizing committee, it is our great pleasure to welcome you to the 14th International Conference on Ubiquitous Computing. This marks the fourth time the UbiComp conference has being held in North America, following Orlando, Florida (2009), Orange County, California (2006), Seattle, Washington (2003) and Atlanta, Georgia (2001). UbiComp truly captures the wide variety of research activities in the diverse field of ubiquitous computing, encompassing research from, e.g., Human Computer Interaction, Mobile Computing, Location and Sensing Technology, Machine Learning, Middleware and Systems, and Programming Models and Tools.

Each UbiComp conference represents a snapshot of our field, capturing the state-of-the-art in technology, the research challenges we are addressing, as well as the people that form the UbiComp community. Each year's proceedings represent an opportunity to learn about new areas and identify upcoming research opportunities, and this year is no exception. UbiComp 2012 builds upon the tradition by expanding to a dual-track technical program, while still allowing participants to experience the program in a variety of sessions, ranging from context awareness to location sharing, from smartphones to fixed infrastructures, from user experiences to novel interactions, and from persuasive computing to physiological sensing.

This year our international Program Committee, composed of 45 of the leading researchers in the field of ubiquitous computing, evaluated 301 submissions - 223 full papers and 78 notes. Using a multi-phase review process, after quick-rejecting a small number of incomplete or off-topic submissions, each submission was initially reviewed by at least two members of the program committee and two or more external reviewers. Of the 301 submissions, 67 were evaluated by 1-3 additional PC members. After an online discussion, 11 submissions were auto-accepted and 93 submissions were chosen for further review and discussion at a 2-day PC meeting. In total, the Program Committee and 415 external reviewers spent countless hours to provide feedback to the authors through 1245 reviews. After this rigorous process, a record total of 58 submissions - 50 full papers and 8 notes - were accepted for publication in these proceedings, representing an overall acceptance rate of 19.3%. We are pleased to note this acceptance rate equals the highest in the fourteen-year history of the UbiComp conference thus far. We feel our selective review process has resulted in a high-quality set of published papers. A sub-committee discussed and selected 12 of the 58 accepted papers (equivalent to 4% of the submitted papers) to be recognized in these proceedings for their particular level of quality. Of these 12, 3 stood out as the best papers of UbiComp 2012 (equivalent to 1% of the submitted papers).