[dcchairs2016] UbiComp/ISWC 2016 Doctoral School notification - #115

[dcchairs2016 at ubicomp.org]

Dear Ekin Gedik,

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

115: "Are You (Not) Entertained? Estimating the state of a crowd in an event using wearable sensors"

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 115, Review 1 ------------------------

Title: Are You (Not) Entertained? Estimating the state of a crowd in an event using wearable sensors


Confidence

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

Contribution to UbiComp

   The paper addresses the analysis of crowd behavior aiming at deriving the
   user experience of crowd members. The use of wearables for gathering
   sensor data from the crowd members as a starting point makes the paper
   sufficiently pertinent to UbiComp.

Overall Rating

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

The Review

   The aim of the PhD research can be briefly summarized as mastering the
   following steps for "crowd events" (speed dating, networking events,
   ...):
   1.	Measurement of sensor data via wearables carried by event participants
   2.	Detection of individual actions
   3.	Detection of interactions
   4.	Inferring of user experience
   Obviously, the work has a strong slant towards machine learning (ML). 
   State of the art reflection is decent, the “methodology and key
   ideas” section is pleasant to read and well structured. The section on
   “conducted and planned research” is also rather elaborate and shows
   that the advancement of the work is about right for the doctoral
   colloquium (far enough advanced, still far enough from the defense). 
   A point of critique regards step 4 above: inferring UX is a quite
   ambitious goal, given the complex and in part hedonic nature of UX. The
   paper is not yet convincing w.r.t. the concrete plans here and does not
   create much confidence yet that this step can be achieved.


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

   At least the following improvements should be made for the final version
   in case of acceptance: (1) more concise and well-structured description
   of the conducted and planned research, such that the plan for a complete
   PhD becomes convincing; (2) Elaboration on the third research question
   (at several points in the text, whenever relevant): what would make up
   the UX of an event, how could it be assessed and potentially improved (a
   ubicomp question!), etc.;
   (3) proof-reading for correction of typos etc.; 

   Note: If related paper 121 (Laura Cabrera-Quirós on "multimodal analysis
   of human behavior in crowded mingling scenarios") gets accepted, the
   similarities and differences w.r.t. ML approaches should be highlighted
   at the presentations. So please get in contact with Laura.