EarComp 2021

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. For the second edition of the workshop, we will also consider research contributions which do not build on top of eSense but present innovative developments with other devices.

How can long-term data support a change in health behavior? Lessons learned using sensors embedded in a ring.

Hannu Kinnunen, born in 1972 in Finland, received his Master degree in Biophysics and Doctor of Science degree in Electrical Engineering from University of Oulu, Oulu, Finland in 1997 and 2020, respectively. He has worked in the industry with pioneering wearable companies Polar Electro (1996–2014) and Oura Health (2014–2021) in various specialist and leadership roles. In addition to algorithms embedded in consumer products, his work has resulted in numerous scientific publications and patents (current h-index 27). His past research interests included feasible methodology for metabolic estimations utilizing accelerometers and heart rate sensors, and lately his work has concentrated on wearable multi-sensor approaches for the quantification of human health behavior, sleep, and recovery.

Proceedings [draft]:

• Detecting Verbal and Non-Verbal Gestures Using Earables.

  Matias Laporte, Preety Baglat, Shkurta Gashi, Martin Gjoreski, Silvia Santini, Marc Langheinrich

• Designing Memory Aids for Dementia Patients using Earables.

  Matija Franklin, David Lagnado, Chulhong Min, Akhil Mathur, Fahim Kawsar

• Towards Automatic Recognition of Perceived Level of Understanding on Online Lectures using Earables.

  Dongwoo Kim, Chulhong Min, Seungwoo Kang

• AirCase: Earable Charging Case with Air Quality Monitoring and Soundscape Sonification.

  Haibin Zhao, Tobias Röddiger, Michael Beigl

• Earables for Detection of Bruxism: a Feasibility Study.

  Erika Bondareva, Elín Rós Hauksdóttir, Cecilia Mascolo

• Detecting forward leaning posture using eSense and developing a posture improvement promoting system.

  Yushi Takayama, Shun Ishii, Anna Yokokubo, Guillaume Lopez

• Earable Design Analysis for Sleep EEG Measurements.

  Swati Mandekar, Lina E Jentsch, Kai Lutz, Mehdi Behbahani, Mark Melnykowycz

• Coremoni-WE: Individual Core Training Monitoring and Support System Using an IMU at the Waist and the Ear.

  Nishiki Motokawa, Ami Jinno, Yushi Takayama, Shun Ishii, Anna Yokokubo, Guillaume Lopez

• PilotEar: Enabling In-ear Inertial Navigation.

  Ashwin Ahuja, Andrea Ferlini, Cecilia Mascolo

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 novel, and creative ideas that are yet to produce concrete research results but are at a stage where community feedback would be useful.

Moreover, we will have a special submission category - "Dataset Paper" - soliciting a 1-2 page document describing a well curated and labelled dataset collected with earables (eventually accompanied by the dataset).
Full research papers will be in ACM sigconf template with 2 columns and the accepted papers will be included in the ACM Digital Library. All papers will be digitally available through the workshop 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. In addition, depending on the quality and depth of the submissions we might consider producing a Book on "Earable Computing" contributed by the authors of the papers, and edited by the Workshop Organisers.

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 longer than 6 pages (including references) for Full Papers and 2 pages (including references) for Interactive Posters and must be in PDF format. 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 “sigconf” template style. Word users should use the interim template downloadable from the ACM site.

Submission Site: https://new.precisionconference.com/submissions

Submission Instructions: to select the appropriate track choose "SIGCHI" in the field Society, "Ubicomp/ISWC 2021" as Conference, and, finally, pick "Ubicomp/ISWC 2021 Workshop: EarComp" as Track.

• Submission Deadline: June 15, 2021 (11:59 PM PDT)
• Acceptance Notification: July 15, 2021
• Camera Ready Deadline: July 31, 2021
• Workshop: September, 2021 (exact date TBC)

For any question/concern, get in touch with earcomp@esense.io.

General Chairs
Fahim Kawsar, Nokia Bell Labs
Robert Harle, University of Cambridge

Program Chairs
Alessandro Montanari, Nokia Bell Labs
Chulhong Min, Nokia Bell Labs

Web, Publicity and Publication
Andrea Ferlini, University of Cambridge

Program Committee
Michael Beigl, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology
Marios Costantinides, Nokia Bell Labs Cambirdge
Nigel Davies, Lancaster University
Inseok Hwang, Pohang University of Science and Technology
Seungwoo Kang, Korea University of Technology and Education
JeongGil Ko, Ajou University
Nicholas Lane, University of Cambridge
Youngki Lee, Seoul National University
Dong Ma, University of Cambridge
Cecilia Mascolo, University of Cambridge
Tatsuo Nakajima, Waseda University
Tadashi Okoshi, Keio University
Shijia Pan, UC Merced
Johannes Schöning, University of Bremen
Junehwa Song, KAIST
Mani Srivastava, UCLA
Kristof Van Laerhoven, University of Siegen
Moustafa Youssef, Alexandria University