Feedback given to all proposals -more than 20 proposals selected for the second round

Ten Proposals are now pushed forward – more than 50% acceptance rate for the 2nd round.

The PeC laboratory received more than 80 project proposals as a result of the Call for Proposals (for research groups) that was closed in the end of August. The call was launched along with the inauguration of the laboratory in the beginning of June.

During the first three weeks of September, the review committee, consisting of representatives of academia and different Nokia organizations, was busy reading, reviewing, evaluating, and analyzing all the proposals.

The reviewers commented on the general quality of the proposals. “It was high and showed the correct level of ambition. The research areas proposed were matching well with the targets of the call”. The committee was also happy to notice that proposals came from all around the globe (roughly half of the proposals were from Switzerland whereas the rest were rather equally spread around the world).

Based on the review process, around 20 proposals were selected for the second round.

The most common reasons why a certain project did not qualify for the second round were:

• The project did not complement the research strategy of the NRC Lausanne – strategic mismatch
• The project showed minor improvements to the current products and was considered to be more an incremental development of existing technologies than a higher risk research
• The project proposed an activity that is (or has been) already ongoing and investigated within Nokia.
• In some cases we were also forced not to qualify some projects that meet all the set criteria due to our limited capabilities to participate in the proposed projects.

The scope of the original Call for Proposals included the following topics.

Context aware services and applications

The context awareness can provide significant usage improvements for applications and provide basis for totally new type of services. The derivation of users current context, knowledge of the contextual history and capability to predict near future context open up new possibilities - as individual enablers and when combined with internet services. The classical example of using context in a mobile device is the switching the operating mode automatically according to detected user's context. But other services and applications going much beyond that can be foreseen. We are willing to hear your ideas. Some samples of research challenges are e.g.:

• Context calculation using a mobile platform
• Architecture for context calculations
• Context prediction
• Enablers for context data creation (like new sensors)

Social networks linked to location and context

The contextual information can have interesting applications in social networks. One can create groups based on context information, feed current context information to Internet etc. The research challenges related to this topic are e.g.:

• Creation of (ad-hoc) social networks based on context information
• Calculating the relevant links in complex network based on context information
• Creating scalable services
• Context information relevant to the social networking
• User perceptions to context based social networks

Usability and human aspects, pervasive communication interfaces

User understanding and user interface design are critical factors for successful introduction of new pervasive communication systems, applications, and services. It is important to understand how complex technical functionality can be presented to the user(s) in an easy and delightful manner. The research challenges in this area are e.g.:

• Usability of pervasive applications and services
• Utilization of context information in pervasive interfaces
• Pervasive and ambient intelligence, and learning technologies
• Multi-modal interaction in pervasive interfaces
• Technology enablers for pervasive communication interfaces
• User interface innovations and novel UI concepts

Networking and context awareness

The context information can be exchanged locally and the context of my device can be compared with the other devices nearby. In addition, the context information can be made more accurate by monitoring the external sensors possibly available in the vicinity. The research challenges are:

• Finding devices and sensors providing input for context calculation
• Connecting devices and sensor nodes efficiently (e.g. wrt. power consumption)
• Deciding what data is relevant locally, what globally
• Filtering and storing the relevant data, predicting what data is relevant
• Context enablers like new type of sensors

Security, privacy, and trust aspects in pervasive communication

Providing confidentiality and integrity of communicated data are key security features in the area of pervasive communications. In addition, users need to be able to trust the communication systems and be able to find out whether their peers are trustworthy. As the systems become more pervasive, the privacy issues are amplified. Some examples of research challenges are:

• Finding scalable and efficient authentication and key management solutions
• How to make sure that all security threats, also on system level, are addressed
• Designing appropriate reputation systems for various situations
• How to utilize communities to build trust
• How to control and manage leakage of privacy of personal information

Call for Proposals instructions, including how to leave your proposal (pdf)

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