EarComp 2019

Sensory earables are increasingly becoming a mainstream compute platform with a promise to fundamentally transform personal-scale human sensing applications. Over the past few years, a number of research efforts in the ubiquitous computing domain have sought to achieve useful, engaging, and sometimes ambitious behavioural analytics with sensory earables including studies of the human face; of emotion and stress; continuous monitoring of cardiovascular function; oxygen consumption and blood flow; and tracking eating episodes as well as dietary and swallowing activities. At the same time, we have started seeing commercial efforts such as Bragi's The Dash, Bose SoundSport, Jabra Elite Sport, and Sony Xperia offering music experience augmented with sensory services including fitness tracking, real-time translations and conversational agents. Naturally, earables are becoming an intense interdisciplinary area of study with many and diverse applications including HCI, empathic communication, behavioural science, health and wellbeing, entertainment, education, and security.

However, as of today, earable computing lacks an academic forum to bring together researchers, practitioners, and design experts from academia and industry to discuss, share, and shape this exciting new area of research. We are organising this very first workshop on Earable Computing with a hope that this workshop will serve as a catalyst for advancements in sensory earable technology as well as present a clear sense of direction for the research community to proceed in this space.

As a launchpad, we aim to leverage the Open Earable Platform, eSense, from Nokia Bell Labs. These devices are being shared with 50+ academic institutions to accelerate the research in this space. In particular, we expect the very first workshop will include participants from these institutions reporting on their research with sensory earables to bootstrap this community.

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Earables: The Next Leap in Wearable Computing

Romit Roy Choudhury - University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign (UIUC)

Abstract: This talk will argue that “earables” is the next significant milestone in the field of wearable computing. With numerous sensors, neural processors, and radios getting embedded into modern earphones, we envision these devices to create a new eco-system in the next 5 years. Earables will run voice assistants like Alexa; sensors will perform activity and gesture recognition for the head and upper body; multi-modal inference algorithms will enable health and AR/VR applications through in-ear sensing and context-awareness. The leap from today’s ear-phones to “earables” would mimmic the transformation from basic-phones to smart phones. Today’s smartphones are hardly a calling device anymore, much like how tomorrow’s earables will hardly be a wireless speaker or microphone. This talk will attempt to foresee the road ahead, starting with the socio-technical drivers and opportunities, followed by the technical research questions that emerge from this new eco-system.

Romit Roy Choudhury is a Jerry Sanders III AMD Scholar and Professor of ECE and CS at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign (UIUC). He joined UIUC from Fall 2013, prior to which he was an Associate Professor at Duke University. Romit received his PhD in the CS department of UIUC in Fall 2006. His research interests are in wireless networking, mobile sensing, and embedded systems. Along with his students, he received a few research awards, including the MobiSys Best Paper Award, UIUC Distinguished Alumni Award, ACM Sigmobile Rockstar Award, Hoffmann Krippner Award, etc. He was elevated to IEEE Fellow in 2018. More info at Romit's at Systems Networking Research Group (SyNRG).

Proceedings [draft]:


Session Chair: Daniel Roggen, University of Sussex

• Towards Respiration Rate Monitoring Using an In-Ear Headphone Inertial Measurement Unit

  Tobias Röddiger, Daniel Wolffram, David Laubenstein, Matthias Budde and Michael Beigl - Karlsruhe Institute of Technology

• Head Motion Tracking Through in-Ear Wearables

  Andrea Ferlini, Alessandro Montanari, Cecilia Mascolo and Robert Harle - University of Cambridge, and Nokia Bell Labs

• Can Earables Support Effective User Engagement during Weight-Based Gym Exercises?

  Meeralakshmi Radhakrishnan and Archan Misra - Singapore Management Univeristy

• STEAR: Robust Step Counting from Earables

  Jay Prakash, Zhijian Yang, Yu-Lin Wei and Romit Roy Choudhury - University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign (UIUC)

• Towards In-Ear Inertial Jaw Clenching Detection [short]

  Siddharth Rupavatharam and Marco Gruteser - Rutgers University

Session Chair: Nigel Davies, University of Lancaster

• eSense Veers: a Case Study of Acoustical Manipulation in Walking without Sight both on Subtle and Overt Conditions

  Kohei Matsumura and Kazushi Okada - Ritsumeikan University

• Using an in-ear device to annotate activity data across multiple wearable sensors

  Alexander Hölzemann, Henry Odoemelem and Kristof Van Laerhoven - University of Siegen

• The CAMS eSense Framework – Enabling Earable Computing for mHealth Apps and Digital Phenotyping

  Jakob E. Bardram - Technical University of Denmark

• Using the eSense Wearable Earbud as a Light-Weight Robot Arm Controller [short]

  Henry Odoemelem, Alexander Hölzemann and Kristof Van Laerhoven - University of Siegen

• A data sharing platform for earables research

  Jovan Powar and Alastair R Beresford - University of Cambridge

Moderator: Fahim Kawsar (Nokia Bell Labs)

In this first edition of the workshop, we will only accept contributions from academic research groups that are working with the eSense computing platform. We will solicit two categories of papers.

Full papers (up to 6 pages including references) should report a reasonably mature work with earables, and is expected to demonstrate concrete and reproducible results albeit scale may be limited.

Interactive poster papers (up to 2 pages including references) are encouraged to report early stage work with earables or describing a well curated and labelled dataset collected with the eSense earable (eventually accompanied by the dataset).

Accepted papers will be included in the ACM Digital Library. All papers will be digitally avialable through the worshop website, and the UbiComp adjunct proceedings. For each category of papers we will offer a "Best Paper" and "Best Dataset" awards sponsored by Nokia Bell Labs.

Topics of interest (NOT an exhaustive list):

Acoustic Sensing with Earables

Kinetic Sensing with Earables

Multi-Modal Learning with Earables

Multi-Task Learning with Earables

Active Learning with Earables

Low-Power Sensing Systems for Earables

Authentication & Trust mechanisms for Earables

Quality-Aware Data Collection with Earables

Experience Sampling with Earables

Crowd Sourcing with Earables

Novel UI and UX for Earables

Auditory Augmented Reality Application with Earables

Health and Wellbeing Applications of Earables

Emerging applications of Earables

All submissions must be original work not under review at any other workshop, conference, or journal. While the workshop will accept papers describing completed work as well as work-in-progress, the emphasis is on early discussion of novel and radical ideas (potentially of a controversial nature) rather than detailed description and evaluation of incremental advances.

Submissions must be no greater than 6 pages (including references) for Full Papers and 2 pages (including references) for Interactive Posters and must be a PDF file. Reviews will be single-blind: authors name and affiliation should be included in the submission.

The submission template can be downloaded from ACM site.
Alternatively, the Overleaf version can be found here.

Latex documents should use the “sigchi” template style. Word users should use the interim template downloadable from the the from ACM site..

Submission Site: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=earcomp2019

• Submission Deadline: 23:59, Aug 15, 2019 (AoW)
• Acceptance Notification: Aug 25, 2019
• Camera Ready Deadline: Sep 6, 2019
• Workshop: Sep 10,2019

Program Chairs
Fahim Kawsar, Nokia Bell Labs
Alastair Beresford, University of Cambridge

Local Arrangement
Chulhong Min, Nokia Bell Labs
Jovan Powar, University of Cambridge

Web, Publicity and Publication
Alessandro Montanari, Nokia Bell Labs
Akhil Mathur, Nokia Bell Labs

Program Committee
Kristof Van Laerhoven, University of Siegen
Jakob E. Bardram, Technical University of Denmark
Tatsuo Nakajima, Waseda University
Archan Misra, Singapore Management University
Chulhong Min, Nokia Bell Labs
Mani Srivastava, UCLA
Akhil Mathur, Nokia Bell Labs
Jamie Ward, Goldsmiths, University of London
Nigel Davies, Lancaster University
Junehwa Song, KAIST
Alessandro Montanari, Nokia Bell Labs
Nova Ahmed, North South University
Tadashi Okoshi, Keio University
JeongGil Ko, Ajou University
Vassilis Kostakos, University of Melbourne
Youngki Lee, Seoul National University
Moustafa Youssef, Alexandria University
Johannes Schöning, University of Bremen