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.<\/p>\n
The majority of the world\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
In this year\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
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<\/u>. 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<\/a> as a starting point. Proposals should also consider any ethical issues arising in the proposed solution, and describe how they can be dealt with.<\/p>\n 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<\/b> 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.<\/p>\n 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<\/a>, or this one for low-vision\/blind persons<\/a> are a good place to start, and of course, if you can interview actual persons in your vicinity, it would be even better.<\/p>\n 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<\/a>.<\/p>\n 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<\/a>, or globally-sourced datasets reviewed here<\/a>. And, if you can\u2019t find the data you\u2019re looking for, it\u2019s perfectly acceptable to create your own synthetic (fake) data for the purposes of the challenge!<\/p>\n All participating teams must submit their ideas using this form<\/a><\/b>. The submission deadline is June 14, 2024<\/strong>.<\/p>\n Your submission should include the following:<\/p>\n Completion of registration form<\/b>: <\/span><\/i>Ensure that all the required fields on the registration form are filled out accurately, including contact information and any other necessary details.<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n The student challenge chairs will review your idea submission and notify you by June 28<\/b> if your submission has been accepted.<\/p>\n 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).<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n Each participating team should submit the following materials:<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n Some ideas to encourage utilization of this dataset might include: Team Size and Composition: <\/em><\/strong>We require teams to be composed of 2 to 5 students<\/b>. The students are not required to be from the same institution and can come from different educational backgrounds (Bachelors, Masters, and PhDs).<\/p>\n Judging Criteria:<\/i><\/b> We will judge projects based on four criteria: Innovation & creativity<\/b> (how novel the idea is, how the idea advances the state of the art, how it combines multiple ideas from different disciplines), Implementation<\/b> (level of technical maturity of the demo), Social impact<\/b> (how many people would this technology affect in a positive way, what is the impact on these individuals\u2019 quality of life).<\/p>\n Registration Requirement: <\/em><\/strong>Please register for the contest and submit your idea using the form<\/a>. If your team is accepted, <\/span>at least one of your team members MUST pay a registration fee and attend the conference<\/u><\/span> (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.<\/span><\/p>\n Demo Ideas: <\/em><\/strong>Teams will be permitted to demo only one idea<\/b>; different demos of the same idea are permitted.<\/p>\n Extra Equipment: <\/em><\/strong>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.<\/p>\n WiFi:<\/em><\/strong> 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.<\/p>\n Anonymity: <\/em><\/strong>Submissions are not anonymous and should include your team members\u2019 names, affiliations, and a team\/project name.<\/p>\n For questions regarding the challenge, please reach out to the Student Challenge Chairs at sc-2024@ubicomp.org<\/a><\/p>\n Student Challenge Chairs:<\/b> Hao Xue (University of New South Wales, Australia), Andreas Komninos (University of Patras, Greece), Franca Delmastro (IIT-CNR, Italy)<\/p>\n<\/div> Idea Submission:<\/span><\/b> Author Notification Date:<\/b> Deliverables Due:<\/b>Summary of Key Dates<\/h3>\n
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Data Sources for the Challenge<\/h3>\n
Competition Format<\/h3>\n
Idea Submission (Deadline: June 14, 2024)<\/h4>\n
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Review and Notification (Deadline: June 28, 2024)<\/h4>\n
Demo Development (July 1, 2024 to October 4, 2024)<\/h4>\n
Project Submission (Multiple deadlines!)<\/h4>\n
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Conference Presentation<\/h3>\n
Project Ideas<\/h2>\n
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Competition Rules, Details, and Suggestions<\/h2>\n
Contact<\/h2>\n
IMPORTANT DATES<\/h3><\/div>
\n<\/span>June 14, 2024<\/b>
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\n<\/span>June 28, 2024<\/b><\/span>
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\nAugust 23, 2024
\n<\/strong><\/span>September 27, 2024<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>CONTACT<\/h3><\/div>