[dcchairs2016] UbiComp/ISWC 2016 Doctoral School notification - #100

[dcchairs2016 at ubicomp.org]

Dear Michael Haus,

Please find enclosed the review for your accepted submission for the Ubicomp/ISWC 2016 Doctoral School.

100: "System Approach Towards Private Proximity Services"

Please read the reviews and instructions that the committee members included in it carefully, as they contains necessary further steps to ensure your DC paper submission appears in the program. Any of the committee instructions has to be considered as required for your final version.

As a reminder, the final version ("camera ready" version) is due no later than Wednesday, July 17th, 2016 at 11:59pm PDT. We will send more instructions about how to upload the camera-ready version of your paper before the deadline.

Thank you for submitting your work to UbiComp 2016, and congratulations again on your acceptance to the Ubicomp 2016 DS. We look forward to seeing you in Heidelberg in September!


Max Mühlhäuser
Nadir Weibel
Rene Mayrhofer

UbiComp 2016 Doctoral School Chairs


------------------------ Submission 100, Review 1 ------------------------

Title: System Approach Towards Private Proximity Services


Confidence

   3  (Very confident - I am knowledgeable in the area)

Contribution to UbiComp

   Proximity Based Services (PBS) inform users about nearby users, places,
   objects. Proper design of / techniques for PBS and useful  / usable
   privacy approaches are pertinent for UbiComp.

Overall Rating

   5  (Probably accept: I would argue for accepting this paper.)

The Review

   The paper concerns PBSs and Privacy Enhancing Technology (PET) for These,
   see above.

   The PhD plan concerns both novel PBS approaches and novel PET for PBS.

   As to the former, axes of research for improvement mentioned comprise (a)
   the combination with LBS (Location based Systems, providing absolute
   positions, mostly outdoor), (b) "multimodal" approaches (several Location
   techniques, e.g., noise pattern matching plus BT plus Wifi signal
   strength footprinting etc.), (c) range extension via multi-hop
   Information forwarding in infrastructureless approaches.

   As to the latter, two main axes of Research can be identified from the
   paper: (a) securing privacy sensitive PBS related information on the
   device, and (b) efficient, crypto-based techniques for proximity
   "testing" i.e. finding out via encrypted data about interesting
   parties/objects in proximity.

   Alas, the paper shows considerable inconsistencies and blurry content.
   Most of this critique concerns the planned PBS improvements:
   - in the beginning, several (way too) large axes of research are
   addressed as listed above; late in the paper in section "key idea ...",
   PBS improvement is hardly mentioned; even later ("expected contribution")
   PBS enhancement is mingled with modeling issues and
   prototype/implementation/opensource issues -> it seems to be important
   again (covering 2 of 3 bullet Points) but with doubtable scientific
   content. 


   *************************
   Camera-ready requirements

   THIS FLAW SHOULD DEFINITELY BE CORRECTED: THE SCIENTIFIC GOAL SHOULD BE
   CONSISTENTLY STATED, NOT AS BROAD&BLURRY AS IN THE BEGINNING, BUT MORE
   FARFETCHING THAN IN THE END.

   As to the planned proximity-testing approach, more in-depth would also be
   helpful for assessing the state and promise of the PhD plan.

   The planned evaluation looks good, would however benefit from further
   adjustment to the planned Research achievements.