UbiComp / ISWC 2024
Call for Student Challenge Submissions

Submission Deadline: June 14, 2024

The Student Challenge aims to foster new and nascent design ideas featuring around a specific challenge of relevance to the UbiComp/ISWC community this year.

Accessible Urban Mobility

The majority of the world’s population now lives or commutes daily in urban areas. Making our cities navigable in an accessible manner is paramount to the quality of life not just of persons with a permanent disability or mobility impairment, but also for those persons facing a temporary impairment (e.g. through illness or some accident), parents with baby strollers, and small children. Even for persons without impairments, an accessible city provides ease of mobility and improves the daily experience of navigating.

In this year’s UbiComp/ISWC Student Challenge, we invite teams of students from diverse academic backgrounds to unleash their creativity and develop innovative approaches to explore extant accessibility data and provide novel solutions for accessible urban mobility.

This challenge offers a unique platform to ideate, innovate, and showcase your ideas and creations to the UbiComp/ISWC conference attendees. This year, we specifically invite participants to create innovative solutions that empower users and urban planners to improve the accessible mobility and navigability of urban environments by means of ubiquitous computing and sensing technologies. As part of the challenge, you can utilize any available open datasets, but we strongly encourage you to explore data sources such as the Project Sidewalk database as a starting point. Proposals should also consider any ethical issues arising in the proposed solution, and describe how they can be dealt with.

The UbiComp/ISWC Student Challenge presents a remarkable opportunity for you to showcase your work and creativity to esteemed leaders in the field, and transform your innovative ideas into tangible reality. This year, we will review and evaluate the proposed ideas, considering Innovation, Creativity, Social Impact and Implementation as the main criteria. Please note that the selected proposals should be presented in-person at the conference. The live presentation will also be part of the evaluation criteria.

Summary of Key Dates

• June 14, 2024: Submit your idea proposal abstract (max 1 A4 page) and register your team using this form.
• June 28, 2024: Acceptance notification.
• July 1, 2024: Begin the development phase of the project.
• August 23, 2024: Submit a short paper describing your proposal’s key challenges and design approach. The short paper should contain design outputs (e.g. wireframes, storyboards etc.), and any implementation details or results, if available (max 4 pages using the ACM SIGCHI 2-column conference template)
• September 27, 2024: Submit a video demo (max 3 minutes), and code repository of your solution (optional).
• October 4, 2024: Complete the development and presentation of the solution.
• October 5-9, 2024: Participate in the conference and present a poster and live demonstration of your project.

Data Sources for the Challenge

It is important that teams start with an understanding of the accessibility and mobility challenges faced by persons with impairments. Before you begin, make sure to spend some time listening to persons with impairments to understand their experiences. Videos such as this one for persons with mobility impairments, or this one for low-vision/blind persons are a good place to start, and of course, if you can interview actual persons in your vicinity, it would be even better.

We invite you to explore the Project Sidewalk database, which contains thousands of geo-located Google Street View images, annotated for accessibility problems (type of problem, and severity). The projects covers areas in several cities across the world, and offers a free API from which data can be downloaded. See the project database here: https://sidewalk-amsterdam.cs.washington.edu/explore.

Of course, the challenge is not limited to exclusive use of this dataset. Feel free to combine the information with other urban datasets, e.g. the EU transport open datasets, or globally-sourced datasets reviewed here. And, if you can’t find the data you’re looking for, it’s perfectly acceptable to create your own synthetic (fake) data for the purposes of the challenge!

Competition Format

Idea Submission (Deadline: June 14, 2024)

All participating teams must submit their ideas using this form. The submission deadline is June 14, 2024.

Your submission should include the following:

1. Names and contact information for your team members: Provide names, institution, and email address of 2-5 team members, and contact information for the team leader.
2. Topic/Title of your idea: Provide the general topic, or a specific title for the idea you want to develop in your challenge.
3. Description of your idea (max 1 page): Provide a summary of your idea, if you intend to use a reference dataset and how, and/or specific functionalities of your software solution
4. Link to supporting materials (Optional): Include links to any relevant supporting materials such as images, videos, PowerPoint presentations, or other multimedia resources.

Completion of registration form: Ensure that all the required fields on the registration form are filled out accurately, including contact information and any other necessary details.

Review and Notification (Deadline: June 28, 2024)

The student challenge chairs will review your idea submission and notify you by June 28 if your submission has been accepted.

Demo Development (July 1, 2024 to October 4, 2024)

The demo development phase starts after the notification of acceptance (July 1st, 2024) and lasts until 1 day before the presentation at the conference (October 4, 2024).

Student teams can reach out to the SDC organisers for support, advice or mentoring during the development phase via email. Depending on the number of submissions and team member availability, we may also organise a technical kick-off meeting in July to assist with any queries about the challenge.

Project Submission (Multiple deadlines!)

Each participating team should submit the following materials:

• [August 23rd] Short paper (max 4 pages): The paper should include the motivation, background, and design / technical description of the solution, and include a minimum of 4 references. Please use the UbiComp/ISWC templates and guidelines to prepare the short paper. The short papers should provide a clear description of how the technology benefits users, including potential malicious uses beyond privacy concerns. Design approaches should consider approaches to mitigate possible ethical, social, and security implications.
• [September 27th] Video Demo (max 3 minutes): The video should showcase a complete use case of the technology, and incorporate storytelling elements to provide context and enhance understanding of the submission.
• [September 27th] Code repository (Optional): While not mandatory, we encourage you to open-source your code, as it allows for greater transparency and collaboration. If you do, please include clear instructions for installation and usage to facilitate evaluation and replication of your solution. It is important to note that the quality of the code will not be a factor in the judging process, so feel free to share your code regardless of its current state.

Conference Presentation

Teams will showcase their demos at UbiComp/ISWC 2024. Alongside the demo presentation, please prepare a poster that concisely summarizes your idea, design, and implementation. Evaluations will be conducted by a jury and the audience, with the chance to win awards.

Project Ideas

Some ideas to encourage utilization of this dataset might include:

1. Assistive Navigation with AR/VR:
   • Develop an AR/VR or Audio-based system that overlays real-time accessibility information on Google Street View, guiding users with different disabilities through accessible routes.
   • Explore haptic feedback integration for navigation cues and obstacle detection.
   • Design virtual simulations of urban environments to allow users or planners to practice navigating them or evaluate alternatives to accessibility design before going outside.
2. Smart Infrastructure with Sensors:
   • Integrate extant data with sensor-based solutions for detecting and reporting accessibility issues in real-time (e.g., broken curb cuts, blocked ramps).
   • Design systems that utilize sensor data to automatically trigger maintenance notifications or reroute navigation apps.
   • Explore integrating sensors with public transportation systems to predict accessibility challenges (e.g., crowded platforms, malfunctioning elevators).
   • Integrate extant data with other sensor-based data (e.g. crowd densities, vehicle traffic volumes) to extend accessibility and navigation awareness.
3. AI-powered Accessibility Assessments:
   • Develop machine learning models that analyze Street View images to automatically identify and classify accessibility problems (e.g., sidewalk width, ramp gradient).
   • Train AI models to predict potential accessibility issues based on environmental factors (e.g., construction zones, weather conditions).
   • Design an interactive platform where users can report new accessibility issues and contribute to improving the data accuracy.
   • Develop synthetic data to assist model training and adapt existing dataset to new urban conditions (e.g. cities in different regions, with different architectures or features).
4. Personalized Accessibility Tools:
   • Create personalized apps for smartphone or wearable devices that adapt to individual needs and preferences based on user profiles and real-time data.
   • Explore AI-powered recommendation systems suggesting accessible routes, services, and resources based on user mobility limitations and context.
   • Design tools that leverage natural language processing to provide voice-based accessibility information and assistance.

Competition Rules, Details, and Suggestions

Team Size and Composition: We require teams to be composed of 2 to 5 students. The students are not required to be from the same institution and can come from different educational backgrounds (Bachelors, Masters, and PhDs).

Judging Criteria: We will judge projects based on four criteria: Innovation & creativity (how novel the idea is, how the idea advances the state of the art, how it combines multiple ideas from different disciplines), Implementation (level of technical maturity of the demo), Social impact (how many people would this technology affect in a positive way, what is the impact on these individuals’ quality of life).

Registration Requirement: Please register for the contest and submit your idea using the form. If your team is accepted, at least one of your team members MUST pay a registration fee and attend the conference (or be accepted as a student volunteer, in which case they can participate for free). You will then be able to demonstrate your idea to the live audience, claim your awards, and enjoy the awesome UbiComp/ISWC conference! More details about registration requirements and financial support for student participants will be available on the main conference website soon.

Demo Ideas: Teams will be permitted to demo only one idea; different demos of the same idea are permitted.

Extra Equipment: Teams will be required to bring all the hardware devices needed to present the demos to the conference. No additional equipment will be provided at UbiComp.

WiFi: WiFi is available at the conference; however, please be aware of bandwidth restrictions. Teams are welcome to use the conference WiFi as a part of their demos; however, we recommend having a Plan B, such as your own local network using routers.

Anonymity: Submissions are not anonymous and should include your team members’ names, affiliations, and a team/project name.

Contact

For questions regarding the challenge, please reach out to the Student Challenge Chairs at sc-2024@ubicomp.org

Student Challenge Chairs: Hao Xue (University of New South Wales, Australia), Andreas Komninos (University of Patras, Greece), Franca Delmastro (IIT-CNR, Italy)