2013 Annual Report

July 2012 – July 2013
Submitted by Roy Want, SIGMOBILE Chair
www.sigmobile.org

SIGMOBILE is the ACM Special Interest Group on the Mobility of Systems, Users, Data, and Computing. Engaging with the mobile industry, academic, and government research communities, its scope includes all aspects of mobile computing and communications, such as mobile systems and applications, wireless networking protocols and algorithms, and mobile information access and management. In 2013 mobile computing is a fast moving, topical, and exciting area of computer science and engineering. Supporting the mobile research community, SIGMOBILE sponsors many successful conferences and workshops that are well attended by its members, and generating high-quality and widely cited publications.

These are valuable services for SIGMOBILE’s members and the community, resulting in a strong Special Interest Group, with about 700 members, and with positive income with a fund increase of 4.5% in the last year. In the spring of 2013, SIGMOBILE held its leadership elections, resulting in a new Executive Committee taking the helm on July 1^st, 2013.

 The new elected officers in SIGMOBILE’s Executive Committee (EC) are listed below:

• Chair: Prof. Suman Banerjee (University of Wisconsin-Madison);
• Vice Chair: Prof. Lili Qiu (University of Texas at Austin, USA);
• Secretary: Dr. Alex Wolman (Microsoft Research, Redmond); and
• Treasurer: Prof. Marco Gruteser (Rutgers University).

Following SIGMOBILE’s bylaws, Roy Want (Google Inc.) remains on the Executive Committee as Past Chair. We thank the out-going committee for their hard work and valuable service to SIGMOBILE.

 The previous officers and out-going elected Executive Committee are:

• Chair: Dr. Roy Want (Google Inc, USA);
• Vice Chair: Prof. Robert Steele (University of Sydney, Australia);
• Secretary: Prof. Ramesh Govindan (University of Southern California, USA); and
• Treasurer: Prof. Lili Qiu (University of Texas at Austin, USA).

The out-going Past Chair is Prof. David B. Johnson (Rice University, USA). This marks the end of Dave’s continuous run of EC service to SIGMOBILE (although we hope not the end of his unofficial service to SIGMOBILE), holding SIGMOBILE executive committee positions for the last 16 years. We thank him for his extensive contributions and source of sage advice for the SIG.

SIGMOBILE’s leadership has four committee appointed positions:

• Editor-in-Chief (EIC) for SIGMOBILE's journal/newsletter for our members (Mobile Computing and Communications Review or MC2R), Prof. Suman Banerjee  (Univ. of Wisconsin, Madison, USA)
• Information Director: Dr. Sharad Agarwal (Microsoft Research) – This is a New Appointment. The SIG thanks Prof. Robert Steele (University of Sydney, Australia), the out-going Information Director who served in this role for 8 years.
• Digital Library Coordinator:  Dr. Guanling Chen (University of Massachusetts Lowell, USA),
• Award Committee Chair: Edward W. Knightly (Rice University, USA)

In January 2012 SIGMOBILE established the Mobile Computing Research Community (MCRC) fund to support research projects and activities that have wide benefit to the mobile research community. We solicit proposals for these awards based on the guidelines presented below:    

Guidelines

MCRC proposals will typically support the following kinds of activity:

• Research data or benchmark archive. e.g. CRAWDAD at Dartmouth
• New community software: e.g. CAD, mobile research tools
• Maintenance of software already used by the community
• Education support for mobile computing
• Student conference sponsorships
• Open collaborative research project funding

Call for Proposals

Submission Process

Using the format described here, proposals should be sent by email to the SIGMOBILE executive committee using the email address: sigmobile-mcrcfund@acm.org. All proposals must have an a priori established SIGMOBILE Executive Committee member who is prepared to champion the proposal during the selection process. The committee endeavors to review a proposal, and either accept or reject a proposal within 1 month of submission.

Funding Criteria:

• The proposal must be submitted by a SIGMOBILE member
• The project proposal must be judged to be of high-quality by the SIGMOBILE Executive Committee
• The project must be relevant to, and provide value for, a wide cross-section of the SIGMOBILE membership.
• An award should not exceed $20k in a calendar year.
• A proposal must be for a specified period of time, but not exceed 3 years.
• For proposals longer than one year, a 2-page report must be generated each year summarizing its achievements. Continued funding will be conditional on a positive review of the annual report by the Executive Committee.
• The project must disseminate its results to SIGMOBILE members through either the sigmobile.org website, MC2R quarterly publication, or at one of SIGMOBILE’s sponsored conferences or workshops.
• SIGMOBILE will not pay for hosting organization overhead fees, only for items that directly contribute to the project.

Proposals should include:

• Title: What is the project to be called?
• Subject matter: What is the purpose of this project?
• People: Who speaks for, and takes responsibility for this project? Who else is on the team? What are their qualifications, or track-record for carrying out this project?
• Requested Award: The total amount requested
• Duration: Will this project need on-going, continual funding? If so, how many years of seed money are being sought, and what is the plan for continuing funding?
• Schedule: When will it start and end?
• Prior work: What work has already been done in this area and how will this project build on it?
• Relevance: What SIGMOBILE membership is this project relevant to? Do they have similar projects already underway? How will they be involved?
• Potential value: What is the potential value of the proposed project to SIGMOBILE members?
• Deliverables: What will be the outcome of the project?
• Delivery vehicle: Who is the audience for this outcome? How will these people be informed of the outcome? Where applicable, how will they get access to it?
• Additional funding: Have you considered other sources of funding? Will someone match SIGMOBILE MCRC Funding?
• Dependency: What other things does the successful completion of this project depend upon?
• End-game: How will you know the project has succeeded?

Format

• Proposals should be 3 US-letter size pages typed in 10-pt Arial font. Additional supporting material such as CVs, resumes, figures or papers may be included in an appendix

ACM Tech Packs are “innovative learning packages by subject experts for serious computing professionals”, basically an annotated reading list of the most useful papers for students or professionals wanting to enter the field or refresh their knowledge about the latest significant publications in the area. The Mobility Tech Pack was created by the SIGMOBILE EC and has been available on the ACM website since the beginning of 2012; it can be found at the link http://techpack.acm.org/mobility/. SIGMOBILE is committed to keeping the Tech Pack up to date as the subject evolves over time.

In 2012-13, SIGMOBILE has provided sponsorship in the form of financial support for three programs in the mobile computing research community:

The Community Resource for Archiving Wireless Data At Dartmouth (CRAWDAD) continues to be a thriving resource for the SIGMOBILE community.  At the end of June 2013 it contains 86 datasets, each containing one or more traces about wireless networks or mobile users, and 24 tools, many of which are designed to help researchers work with such datasets. There were 4 new datasets or tools released since the last report, and there are currently 6 datasets in the pipeline for release. There are now over 5,200 users from 95 countries around the world -- 7 new countries since last year's report!  CRAWDAD continues to be popular, with more than 1,000 new users registering within the past year. Although the primary archive is at Dartmouth, the CRAWDAD site and data are mirrored on servers located in the UK and Australia to guarantee uninterrupted service, and fast downloads to users all around the world.

CRAWDAD data has supported over 879 papers in the field, and continues to be the go-to place for authors wishing to share data they've collected, or to obtain data they can use for testing their system prototypes and algorithms. SIGMOBILE support makes it possible for the CRAWDAD project to retain a technical staff person (part time) to maintain the site. This year, we developed a new "self-serve" website that allows contributors to provide all the metadata needed to release a dataset, which we hope will streamline the process of releasing a new dataset, and will reduce our dependence on technical staff.  Furthermore, through the volunteer efforts of Prof. Chris McDonald of the University of Western Australia, we have completely rewritten the website, with a dramatically simpler underlying framework that will make it more robust, easier to maintain, and easier to set up mirror sites. Last year, SIGCOMM joined SIGMOBILE by adding its financial support.    

Networking Networking Women (N2 Women) is a discipline-specific community for researchers in the communications and networking research fields. The main goal of N²Women is to foster connections among the under-represented women in computer networking and related research fields. N² Women allows women to connect with other women who share the same research interests, who attend the same conferences, who face the same career hurdles, and who experience the same obstacles. To assist in their networking goals, N² Women has an email list for the group: N2Women@acm.org. There are currently 639 members of N² Women in July 2013.

N² Women is an ACM SIGMOBILE program that has been financially supported by SIGMOBILE, Microsoft Research, HP Labs, NSF, and CRA-W. In the past year, funds from SIGMOBILE were used for two purposes. First, SIGMOBILE funds were used to continue the successful N² Women Student Fellowship program.  A student applies for a Fellowship and, if selected, N² Women partially covers the student's travel cost (up to $500) to a conference where an N² Women event will be held. In exchange, the student must help organize the N² Women meeting. The benefit of doing the organization, in addition to the travel funds, is for the student to connect with the organizers of the conference who are, typically, leaders in the research field. N² Women arranges for a senior member of N² Women to assist/mentor the student in this task. Since June 2012, there have been 13 N² Women Student Fellows who organized N² Women events at the following conferences: 

• Anna Zakrzewska, DTU Technical University of Denmark (ICC 2013)
• Shuang Li, Ohio State University (INFOCOM 2013)
• Fatemah Afghah, University of Maine (SECON 2013)
• Yanyan Zhuang, University of Victoria (INFOCOM 2012)
• Tavakolifard Mozhgan, Norvegian Univ. of Science and Tech. (ICNC 2012)
• Xia Zhou, UCSB (SIGCOMM 2012)
• Sanorita Dey, University of South Carolina (MobiHoc 2012)
• Jingyao Zhang, Virginia Tech (SECON 2012)
• Yujin Li, North Carolina State University (ICC 2012)
• Shijia Pan, Carnegie Mellon University (SenSys 2012)
• Shruti Sanadhya, Georgie Tech (MobiCom 2012)
• Sanaz Barghi, University of California, Irvine (GlobeCom 2012)
• Parya Moinzadeh, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (Dyspan 2012)

Second, SIGMOBILE funds were used to partially fund the keynote speaker’s (Anna Scaglione, Professor at University of California, Davis) travel expenses to the 3^rdNetworking Networking Women Workshop. The workshop was held in conjunction with INFOCOM on April 19, 2013 in Torino, Italy and had 30 attendees (20 faculty/industrial researchers and 10 students). The most recent N² Women workshop attracted a smaller audience than the previous two workshops (both of which had 65 attendees); we believe the smaller size is a consequence of holding the workshop in Europe rather than North America (i.e., N² Women has more than two times fewer members in Europe than in North America).

In all N² Women announcements, SIGMOBILE (and other sponsors of N² Women) are thanked. See http://committees.comsoc.org/n... for further details about N²Women.

ACM-W: In 2013, SIGMOBILE continues to sponsor ACM-W (ACM’s Women in Computing organization). “ACM-W's mission is to celebrate, inform and support women in computing, and work with the ACM-W community of computer scientists, educators, employers and policy makers to improve working and learning environments for women.” This is an organization that the Executive Committee (EC) whole-heartedly supports. Women in CS education can request sponsorship for SIGMOBILE conferences, and for eligible cases, the EC will provide sponsorship for travel and registration.

Last year SIGMOBILE helped to launch ACM’s new Learning Webinar series, on January 26, 2012, when David B. Johnson, SIGMOBILE’s Past Chair, served as the moderator for the pilot webinar in the series.  The webinar series continues to be a great success in 2013.

SIGMOBILE Conferences and Workshops

SIGMOBILE currently sponsors or co-sponsors five annual conferences, all recognized as the premier conferences and focus areas within the field:

• MobiCom: The Annual International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking, covers all areas of mobile computing and mobile and wireless networking at the link layer and above. MobiCom has been held every year since 1995.
• MobiHoc: The ACM International Symposium on Mobile Ad Hoc Networking and Computing, addresses the challenges emerging from wireless ad hoc networking and computing, with the focus being on issues at and above the MAC layer. MobiHoc has been held every year since 2000.
• MobiSys: The International Conference on Mobile Systems, Applications, and Services, addresses broad systems research issues in mobile computing and mobile networking, particularly valuing the practical experience gained from designing, building, and using mobile systems, applications, and services. MobiSys has been held every year since 2003.
• SenSys: The ACM Conference on Embedded Networked Sensor Systems, focuses on systems issues in the emerging area of embedded, networked sensors, spanning multiple disciplines, including wireless communication, networking, operating systems, architecture, low-power circuits, distributed algorithms, data processing, scheduling, sensors, energy harvesting, and signal processing. SenSys has been held every year since 2003.
• Ubicomp: The International Conference on Ubiquitous Computing, addresses the interdisciplinary field of ubiquitous computing, which utilizes and integrates pervasive, wireless, embedded, wearable and/or mobile technologies to bridge the gap between the digital and physical worlds. Ubicomp has been held every year since 1999, and SIGMOBILE began sponsoring it in 2009.

The 18th Annual International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking, was held at the Hilton Istanbul, in Istanbul, Turkey, August 22-16, 2012. The General Chairs were Özgür B. Akan (Koc University, Turkey) and Eylem Ekici (The Ohio State University, USA), and the Program Co-Chairs were Lili Qiu (University of Texas at Austin, USA) and Alex C. Snoeren (University of California, San Diego, USA).

The technical program featured two plenary speakers: The first, Prof. Ian F. Akyildiz (School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology, USA) on NanoNetworks: A New Frontier in Communications; and Three Theories for Delays, Clocks and Security in Wireless Networks  by Prof. P. R. Kumar (Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Texas A&M University, USA).

 The MobiCom 2012 program also included two days of workshops:      

On Wednesday August 22nd:

• The 7thACM International Workshop on Challenged Networks (CHANTS 2012)
• The 7th ACM International Workshop on Mobility in the Evolving Internet Architecture (MobiArch 2012)
• The 7th ACM International Workshop on Wireless Network Testbeds, Experimental evaluation and Characterization (WiNTECH 2012)

And on Sunday, August 26th:

• The 4th ACM International Workshop on Wireless of the Students, by the Students, for the Students (S3 2012) (CFP)
• The 1st ACM International Workshop on Mission-Oriented Wireless Sensor Networking (MiSeNet 2012) (CFP)
• The 1st ACM International Workshop on Practical Issues and Applications in Next Generation Wireless Networks (PINGEN 2012) (CFP)

MobiCom 2013 will be held September 30th – October 4th at the Hyatt Regency in Miami, Florida.  The General Chair is Sumi Helal (University of Florida, USA), and the Program Co-Chairs are Ranveer Chandra (Microsoft, USA) and Robin Kravets (University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, USA).

Covered in last year’s report, MobiHoc 2013, the 14th International Symposium on Mobile Ad Hoc Networking, will be held at the LaLit Ashok hotel Bangalore, India, July 29th to August 1st 2013. The General Chairs will be A. Chockalingam (Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore) and D. Manjunath (Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay). The Technical Program Chairs will be Massimo Fanceschetti (UC San Diego) and Leandros Tassiulas (University of Thessaly/CERTH).

Also, the MobiHoc 2014 conference is planned to be held in August 2014 in Philadelphia, PA, USA

The 11th International Conference on Mobile Systems, Applications, and Services, was held at the Sheraton Hotel, June 25th – 29th, 2013, in Taipei, Taiwan, in-cooperation with SIGOPS. The General Co-chairs were Hao-Hua Chu (National Taiwan University) and Polly Huang (National Taiwan University), and the Technical Program Chairs were Romit Roy Choudhury (Duke University) and Feng Zhao (Microsoft Research).

The MobiSys 2013 technical program began with a keynote talk by Prof. Patrick Baudisch (Hasso Plattner Institute) on Natural User Interface Hardware. On Day 2, a panel was held on Untold Stories of Research, with Moderator: Romit Roy Choudhury (Duke University) and panelists: Jane Liu (Academia Sinica), Ashu Sabharwal (Rice University), Mahadev Satyanarayanan (CMU), Lin Zhong (Rice University).

The MobiSys program also featured 3 workshops, a tutorial, and a PhD Forum on Tuesday, June 25th.

• W1: The 4th ACM Workshop on Mobile Cloud Computing and Services (MCS)
• W2: VANET 2013: The 10th ACM International Workshop on VehiculAr Inter-NETworking, Systems and Applications.
• W3: 1st Workshop on Cellular Networks: Operations, Challenges and Future Design (CellNet)
• Tutorial: Mobile Location Sensing (MLS)
• PhD Forum on Mobile Systems, Applications, and Services 

MobiSys 2014 is being planned for June 16 – 19, 2014 at the Mount Washington Hotel in Bretton Woods, New Hamshire. The General Co-Chairs will be Andrew Campbell and David Kotz (Dartmouth College) and the Co-Program Chairs will be Landon Cox (Duke University) and Morley Mao (University of Michigan)

The 10th ACM Conference on Embedded Networked Sensor Systems, was held November 6-9th 2012, Toronto, Canada. The General Chair was Rasit Eskicioglu (University of Manitoba) and the Program Co-Chairs were Andrew T. Campbell (Dartmouth College) and Koen Langendoen (Delft University of Technology). SenSys is co-sponsored by SIGMOBILE and SIGCOMM (30% each); and SIGARCH, SIGOPS, SIGMETRICS, and SIGBED (10% each) and the NSF.

The opening day began with a keynote presentation by Prof. David E. Culler (Chair EECS Associate CIO, College of Engineering, UC Berkeley, USA) titled, "Sustainable Energy Networks – a SenSys Grand Opportunity".

There were three workshops and a Doctoral Colloquium held on November 6###sup/sup###, 2012.

• W1: BuildSys'12: The 4th ACM Workshop on Embedded Sensing Systems for Energy Efficiency in Buildings
• W2: PhoneSense’12: The 3rd International Workshop on Sensing Applications on Mobile Phones
• W3: mHealthSys’12: International Workshop on Mobile Systems, Applications, and Services for Healthcare
• PhD (Doctoral) Colloquium 2011: a forum to provide a friendly, supportive, and constructive atmosphere where PhD students can present their research-in-progress for an open discussion, guided by a panel of experienced researchers and practitioners.
• Doctoral Colloquium (Chaired by Polly Huang)

In addition, the SenSys 2012 program included an N² Women event on Wednesday, November 7th.

SenSys 2013 will be held November 11-15th, 2013, in Rome Italy. General Chair: Chiara Petrioli (University of Rome ‘La Sapienza’) and Program Co-Chairs, Landon Cox (Duke University) and Kamin Whitehouse (University of Virginia).

The 14th International Conference on Ubiquitous Computing, was held September 5-8th 2012, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and co-sponsored with SIGCHI. The General Chair was Anind K. Dey (Carnegie Mellon University, USA), and the Program Co-Chairs were Hao-Hua Chu (National Taiwan University) and Gillian Hayes (University of California, Irvine, USA).

A keynote launched the conference, presented by Steve Cousins (Willow Garage) on “Personal Robots on the Horizon.”

Ubicomp workshops were held on Sunday, 18th September

• W1: Location-Based Social Networks (LBSN 2012)
• W2: Situation, Activity, and Goal awareness (SAGAware 2012)
• W3: Systems and Infrastructure for the Digital Home (HomeSys)
• W4: Ubiquitous Mobile Instrumentation (UbiMI)
• W5: Methodical approaches to prove the effects of subliminal perception in Ubiquitous Computing Environments
• W6: Digital Object Memories for the Internet of Things (DOMe-IoT)
• W7: Context-Awareness for Self-Managing Systems (CASEMANS 2012)
• W8: Computer Mediated Social Offline Interactions (SOFTec 2012)
• W9: Pervasive Eye Tracking and Mobile Eye-Based Interaction (PETMEI 2012)
• W10: Adaptable Service Delivery in Smart Environments
• W11: Evaluating Off-the-Shelf Technologies for Personal Health Monitoring
• W12: Smart Gadgets Meet Ubiquitous and Social Robots on the Web (UbiRobs)

In 2013 ACM Ubicomp will merge with the long running independent Pervasive computing conference and become Ubicomp 2013. The conference will be held 8th – 12th September, 2013, in Zurich, Switzerland.  The General Chairs will be Friedemann Mattern (ETH Zurich, CH) and Silvia Santini (TU Darmstadt, DE)  and the Program Co-Chairs will be John F. Canny (UC Berkeley, USA), Marc Langheinrich (University of Lugano, CH), and Jun Rekimoto (University of Tokyo, Japan)

In addition to the conferences and co-located listed workshops above, SIGMOBILE also sponsors the HotMobile workshop (previously WMCSA) as a stand-alone event, not co-located with a conference. The HotMobile workshop series focuses on mobile applications, systems, and environments, as well as their underlying state-of-the-art technologies, in a small workshop format that makes it ideal for presenting and discussing new directions or controversial approaches. The Executive Committee encourages the MobiCom Program Committee meeting be collocated with HotMobile to ensure that a representative selection of senior researchers attend the event. This workshop was previously sponsored each year by the IEEE Computer Society, but has been sponsored only by ACM SIGMOBILE since HotMobile 2008.

HotMobile 2013 The 14th International Workshop on Mobile Computing Systems and Applications, was held February 26-27th, 2013, in Jekyll Island, Georgia, USA.  The General Chair was Sharad Agarwal (Microsoft Research, USA), and the Program Chair, Alexander Varshavasky (AT&T Labs, USA).

The conference opened with a keynote by Thad Starner (Georgia Institute of Technology), titled “Wearable Computing: Through the Looking Glass.”

HotMobile 2014 will be held February 26-27th, 2014, in Santa Barbara, California, USA.  The General Chair is Matt Welsh (Google Inc), and the Program is Chair Stefan Sariou (Microsoft Reseach).

SIGMOBILE also sponsored the following high-value additional events over the last year. These are annual decisions and sponsorship one year does not guarantee support in a following year. If the standard remains high, SIGMOBILE is however likely to continue with its support.

• PerDis’2013: The 2nd International Symposium on Pervasive Displays, June 4-5th, 2013 at the Google campus in Mountain View, California, USA.
• WUWNet 2012: The 6th ACM International Workshop on Underwater Networks, November 5-6th,  2012, Los Angeles, California, USA.

Each year, SIGMOBILE is also "in-cooperation" with a number of events sponsored by other organizations. Events offered "in-cooperation with" SIGMOBILE allow its members to register at the same discounted rate as for members of other sponsoring organizations for the event, providing a significant savings to SIGMOBILE members. During this past year (July 2012 through June 2013), SIGMOBILE was in-cooperation with the following events:

• The 5th International Conference on COMmunication Systems and NETworkS (COMSNETS 2013), Bangalore, India, 7-10 January, 2013 
• Wireless Health Conference (Wireless Health 2012), San Diego, CA, USA, 23-25 October, 2012 
• IEEE Symposium on New Frontiers in Dynamic Spectrum Access Networks (DySPAN 2012), Bellevue, WA, USA, 16-19 October, 2012 
• The 14th International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction with Mobile Devices and Services (MobileHCI 2012), San Francisco, USA, 21-24 September, 2012 

SIGMOBILE continues to be fortunate to receive strong support for its conferences and workshops in the period July 2012-2013, from leading-edge companies and organizations from around the world. This last year, many organizations have contributed to SIGMOBILE conferences and workshops, helping to ensure their success. This  include the following:

Academia Sinica, AirTight, Avealabs, AT&T, CDAC, CMU, COMSNETS Assoc., Dejan Research, Extreme Networks, facebook, Google, HP, IBM, Intel-ISTC (Social, NTU, PC), KOC University, Mediatek, Microsoft Research, Ministry of Economic Affaris, R.O.C, Motorola, National Taiwan University, NSC, NSF, Sapienza (Univ. of Rome), Taipei City Government, TATA Consultancy Services, Tejas Networks, Telifonica, TUBITAK, Qualcomm.

As always, SIGMOBILE is sincerely grateful for all contribution.

In addition to the proceedings for each of the conferences and workshops that SIGMOBILE sponsors, SIGMOBILE also publishes a peer-reviewed, quarterly journal/newsletter for SIGMOBILE members, Mobile Computing and Communications Review (MC2R). Non-members may also subscribe to MC2R, and the publication is also available in the ACM Digital Library.

The Editor-in-Chief for MC2R is Prof. Suman Banerjee (University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA). The current Area Editors for MC2R are Dr. Sharad Agarwal (Microsoft Research, USA), Prof. Aditya Akella (University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA), Prof. Christian Bettstetter (University of Klagenfurt, Germany), Prof. Srdjan Capkun (ETH, Zurich, Switzerland), Prof. Augustin Chaintreau (Columbia University, USA),  Prof. Eylem Ekici (Ohio State University, USA), Dr. Michelle Gong (Google, USA) , Prof. Marco Gruteser (Rutgers University, USA), Prof. Prashant Krishnamurthy (University of Pittsburgh, USA), Prof. Panos Papadimitratos (EPFL, Switzerland),Prof. Andreas Terzis (Johns Hopkins University, USA), Prof. Moustafa Youssef (Egypt-Japan University of Science and Technology, Egypt), and Prof. Lin Zhong (Rice University, USA).

MC2R publishes articles that provide a balance between state-of-the-art research and practice, with a thorough pre-publication review of every article by experts in the field. Beyond papers reporting the latest research results in all areas related to SIGMOBILE's scope, MC2R keeps the SIGMOBILE community apprised of relevant happenings in the area, by providing regular features on the status of major international mobile computing and communications standards, such as those from IETF, ITU, ISO, and IEEE. The journal also provides a variety of additional resources, such as bibliographies of recent publications in other journals, paper and book reviews, workshop and conference reports, calls for papers, information on research groups throughout the world, bibliographies and locations of technical reports, and other general news in the field.

In addition, MC2R places a strong emphasis on quick publication of interesting completed, or work-in-progress technical work; the average turnaround time for papers published in MC2R is about 6 months. Papers in MC2R are selected mainly from an ongoing open call for papers, plus special sections based on conferences and workshops, occasional special topic issues, and some invited papers. The acceptance rate for papers submitted through the open call for papers is quite selective, remaining under about 20%.

In the recent issues, the following are some example articles that were published in the different categories described above: (i) interviews (expert testimonies) of leading researchers in our field conducted by graduate students at various universities, (ii) a survey of the ongoing efforts of standards groups, (iii) articles capturing experiences of different research groups in building large-scale wireless test-beds, (iv) report on different conferences and workshops, and (v) comments on approaches to judge the quality of different publication venues, e.g., conferences, workshops, and journals. In addition, for peer-reviewed articles that have been published in these issues, the editorial team has introduced a mechanism by which a summary of the reviews, and the author response to these reviews, are published along with the final manuscript. This allows the publication to capture more of the dialogue between the authors and reviewers in realizing the final version of the paper.

All aspects of the journal's operation are run entirely by volunteers, including final assembly of each issue

SIGMOBILE Newsletter

SIGMOBILE also publishes a monthly E-Mail Newsletter for its members. This electronic newsletter was started in 2004 and is edited by SIGMOBILE's Information Director, Prof. Robert Steele (University of, Sydney, Australia). The newsletter includes SIGMOBILE announcements, pointers to relevant mainstream news articles of interest to SIGMOBILE members, a calendar of upcoming events of interest to our members, and pointers to developer news for active developers in the area of mobile computing and wireless networking.

SIGMOBILE Website

As an additional resource for our members and the community, SIGMOBILE maintains an extensive web site at http://www.sigmobile.org, including information about SIGMOBILE and its activities, information about our journal/newsletter MC2R, and information about membership in SIGMOBILE. This web site also contains archived copies of most SIGMOBILE conference web sites, including all previous years of MobiCom, MobiHoc, and MobiSys.

SIGMOBILE Social Media

SIGMOBILE makes use of social media to support interactive communication with its community. It has groups on LinkedIn and Facebook and has a SIGMOBILE Twitter feed.

There are currently four Local Chapters of SIGMOBILE chartered with ACM – one added this year:

• Dublin Chapter: Mobile Computing Society Ireland (NEW 2013): This is a University based Chapter organized by the RINCE Institute, Dublin City University (DCU).
• Nanyang Technological University Student Chapter: This is a Student Chapter of SIGMOBILE, organized within the Nanyang Technological University (NTU) ACM club in Singapore.
• Sydney Professional Chapter: This is a Professional Chapter of SIGMOBILE, organized in Sydney, Australia.
• Taiwan Chapter: This is a University based Chapter organized by the Institute of Computer Science and Information Engineering, National I-lan University (NIU), Taiwan

Local Chapters provide a local focus for activities related to the area of SIGMOBILE, including mobile computing and wireless and mobile networking, and continue SIGMOBILE’s work within their local regions.

We encourage interested groups around the world to form a SIGMOBILE chapter in their local community, school, city, or region. For details about the benefits and procedures for forming a Local SIGMOBILE Chapter, see http://www.sigmobile.org/chapt....

The SIG’s membership was 698 on June 30th 2013, down 4% from the previous year. The membership has spanned the 698-800 range for last 6 years, and for all time has been in the 437-872 range. SIGMOBILE provides substantial benefits to our members, including:

• The quarterly journal, and newsletter "Mobile Computing and Communications Review" (MC2R), which serves both as a newsletter keeping SIGMOBILE members informed, and as a scientific journal publishing high-quality peer-reviewed research papers on mobile computing and wireless and mobile networking.
• A monthly e-mail SIGMOBILE newsletter, including SIGMOBILE announcements, pointers to relevant mainstream news articles of interest to SIGMOBILE members, a calendar of upcoming events of interest to our members, and pointers to developer news for active developers in the area of mobile computing and wireless networking.
• Announcements via the moderated, members-only email distribution list, keeping you informed of the latest happenings in our field, such as conference Calls for Papers.
• Qualify for the lowest registration rates at conferences and workshops sponsored by SIGMOBILE, and for the many events that are "in cooperation" with SIGMOBILE. SIGMOBILE sponsors five conferences each year (MobiCom, MobiHoc, MobiSys, SenSys, and Ubicomp).
• Opportunities to share ideas, learn of new results and practices, network with colleagues, and be active in a vibrant community of colleagues in all areas of mobility of systems, users, data, and computing.
• Through the Member Value Plus program, automatically receive a CDROM after each of SIGMOBILE's five conferences, containing the full conference Proceedings.

In addition, SIGMOBILE provides additional benefits to the broader community served by SIGMOBILE:

• Organization and sponsorship of five annual conferences (MobiCom, MobiHoc, MobiSys, SenSys, and Ubicomp).
• Promotion of emerging new areas through sponsorship of numerous workshops each year.
• An ACM Mobility Tech Pack edited by the SIGMOBILE officers, providing an annotated reading list of the definitive mobile research papers to date; thus enabling somebody new to the field to rapidly come up to speed.
• The SIGMOBILE Outstanding Contribution Award, given to recognize an individual who has made a significant and lasting contribution to the research on mobile computing and communications and wireless networking.
• The SIGMOBILE Distinguished Service Award, given to recognize an individual who has made exceptional contributions to ACM SIGMOBILE, its conferences, publications, or its local activities.
• The SIGMOBILE RockStar Award, recognizes an individual who has made recent outstanding research, or product, contributions to the field of mobile computing during the early part of his, or her, career.
• Best paper awards are given at all five of our sponsored conferences and presented each year.
• Support for students at SIGMOBILE conferences and workshops, through reduced registration fees, student travel awards for some conferences (with NSF support), and student poster sessions.
• The SIGMOBILE web site, including a wealth of information for the community such as complete information on SIGMOBILE conferences and workshops, a Ph.D. thesis collection, paper formatting instructions for authors, reviewer guidelines, and a feedback questionnaire.
• SIGMOBILE also provides financial support for mobile networking community programs such as CRAWDAD (Community Resource for Archiving Wireless Data At Dartmouth) and N² Women (Networking Networking Women).

Outstanding Contribution Award 2012

The highly prestigious SIGMOBILE Outstand Contributions Award (OCA) was presented to Professor P. R. Kumar (Texas A&M University) for “Pioneering contributions to the foundations of asymptotic performance analysis of large scale wireless networks”, at MobiCom, September 2012 in Istanbul, Turkey. P.R. Kumar is the 13th recipient of the OCA since the SIGMOBILE was formed. The SIGMOBILE Outstanding Contribution Award is given for significant and lasting contributions to research on mobile computing and communications, and wireless networking.

Best Papers

The SIGMOBILE Best Paper Award for each conference is given to the authors of the best paper from among all papers submitted to the conference that year. Typically the conference Technical Program Committee forms the Selection Committee for this award; additional awards are at the discretion of the conference organizers.

MobiSys 2013, Best Paper Award

“Energy Characterization and Optimization of Image Sensing Toward Continuous Mobile Vision” by Robert LiKamWa (Rice University), Bodhi Priyantha, Matthai Philipose (Microsoft Research Redmond), Lin Zhong (Rice University), Paramvir Bahl (Microsoft Research Redmond)

MobiCom 2012, Best Paper Award

“Distinguishing Users with Capacitive Touch Communication”, by Tam Vu (Rutgers University, USA), Akash Baid (Rutgers University, USA), Simon Gao (Rutgers University, USA), Marco Gruteser (Rutgers University, USA), Richard Howard (Rutgers University, USA), Janne Lindqvist (Rutgers University, USA), Predag Spasojevic (Rutgers University, USA) and Jeffrey Walling (Rutgers University, USA) 

MobiHoc 2012, Best Paper Award

“Serendipity: Enabling Remote Computing among Intermittently Connected Mobile Devices”, Cong Shi, Vasileios Lakafosis, Mostafa Ammar, and Ellen Zegura (Georgia Institute of Technology). 

 SenSys 2012, Best Paper Award

“Energy-Efficient GPS Sensing with Cloud Offloading” by Jie Liu (Microsoft Research), Bodhi Priyantha (Microsoft Research), Ted Hart (Microsoft Research), Heitor Ramos (Federal University of Minas Gerais, Brazil), Antonio A F Loureiro (Federal University of Minas Gerais, Brazil), Qiang Wang (Harbin Institute of Technology, China)

Ubicomp 2012, Best Paper Award

“An Ultra-Low-Power Human Body Motion Sensor Using Static Electric Field Sensing Gabe” by Cohn (University of Washington and Microsoft Research consultant), Sidhant Gupta (University of Washington and Microsoft Research consultant), Tien-Jui Lee (University of Washington), Dan Morris (Microsoft Research and University of Washington affiliate professor), Josh Smith (University of Washington), Matt Reynolds (Duke University), Desney S. Tan (Microsoft Research, and University of Washington affiliate professor), and Shwetak Patel (University of Washington) 

ACM Student Research Competition (SRC)

The SRC is an annual event sponsored by Microsoft Research at the MobiCom conference. The most recent event was in 2012, and had the following winners:

First Place: Peter Dely, Karlstadt University "CloudMAC - Torwards Software Defined WLANs"

Second Place: Riccardo Crepaldi, University of Illinois Urbana Champaign "LoadingZones: Leveraging Street Parking to Enable Vehicular Internet Access"

Third Place: Michele Segata, University of Insbruk "A Simulation Tool for Automated Platooning in Mixed Highway Scenarios"

Throughout the year, some of the our SIGMOBILE publications have been reported in popular technical news articles. The list below captures some of the articles for MobiSys 2013 and MobiCom 2012, but this list is not comprehensive. It does, however, give readers a sense of the interest in SIGMOBILE research.

MobiSys 2013

Camera Tweaks Should Boost Gadget Battery Life
MIT Technology Review | Rachel Metz | June 12, 2013
 
Researchers Tweak Camera Sensors to Boost Smartphone Battery Life
PetaPixel | Eric Calouro | Jun 15, 2013u
 
Camera sensor tweaks could improve smartphone battery life
CNET | Lexy Savvides | June 17, 2013
 
Microsoft Wants to Do Something about Your Mobile’s Power-Hungry Camera
Gizmodo | Logan Booker | Jun 16, 2013
 
Mobile Ads Drain Battery Power 
Information Week | Thomas Calburn | June 26th, 2013
 
Advertising Consumes 23% of Mobile Phone Battery Power
Business Wire | June 25th , 2013
 
Researchers Tweak Camera Sensors to Boost Smartphone Battery Life
PetaPixel | Eric Calouro | June 15th, 2013
 
Many iPhone Apps Ignore Apple’s Privacy Advice, Study Says
MIT Technology Review | Tom Simonite | June 25th, 2013

MobiCom 2012

Flickering lights help smartphones keep time
New Scientist | Jacobe Aron | 26 July 2012   

Fluorescent lights keep smartphones from ten-second drifts
phys.org | Nancy Owano | July 28, 2012        

Each year SIGMOBILE holds its business meeting as part of the ACM MobiCom conference program, usually at the end of the first day. In addition to a general discussion about the status of the SIG, the following topics were discussed in the open meeting.

Open Access/Publication

One of the hot discussion-topics in the ACM over the last year has been the extent to which the ACM should enable open access to the ACM digital library. We discussed this topic in the SIGMOBILE business meeting in order to understand the general position of the mobile research community. The prevailing sentiment is that open access is a good thing as long as it does not undermine the financial stability of the ACM, which is considered to be a well-run, supportive organization. Most people felt that they needed more information about the details of ACM’s finances in order to make a well-informed recommendation. In the meantime, the ACM has responded to the research community as a whole on this topic, and has taken the first steps towards open access as a three-year experiment. These can be summarized as:

• Author-pays Open Access option
  
  • You can now pay to have free access (forever) for your paper in the ACM DL
• Enhanced Free proceedings posting options
  
  • Conference chairs can make the papers in the proceedings open access from the conference website for up to a month total before and after the conference, using an authorizer link to the DL. Note: If a paper is made publicly available before the conference, this must have been stated clearly in the CFP, and on the conference website, to make authors aware of the up-coming disclosure date (e.g for patent considerations)
• New License or Traditional Copyright option
  
  • Authors now have a choice whether to use the traditional exclusive ACM Copyright transfer option, or a non-exclusive license option. The full details can be found at: http://www.acm.org/publication... and, http://www.acm.org/news/featur....

Mobile Computing Community Research (MCRC) Fund

 At the business meeting we discussed the possibility of creating a SIGMOBILE fund to support projects that benefit the SIGMOBILE research community. This was generally considered a good thing to do by those attending the meeting. We briefly examined two other SIGS funds, currently in use 1) The SIGCHI Development fundhttp://www.sigchi.org/about/po..., and 2) The SIGCOMM Community Projects fund http://www.sigcomm.org/content.... In January 2013 SIGMOBILE announced its own MCRC fund, with full details on the SIGMOBILE website.

New Conferences for SIGMOBILE to Support

In 2011, we had considered sponsoring the independent “Pervasive” conference through ACM SIGMOBILE due to its commonality with Ubicomp. However, it merged with ACM Ubicomp through a grass roots process in 2012, and thus has automatically become a SIGMOBILE event (the combination using the “Ubicomp” name). Also, this year we sponsored a new conference called “Pervasive Displays” (PerDis’13) which explores a new trend for mobile devices and fixed infrastructure to work together in support of ad hoc user interaction. PerDis is not part of our list of annual sponsored conferences at this time, but if it continues to grow, would be a future candidate for annual SIGMOBILE sponsorship.

Mobile computing is one of the fastest growing fields within computer science and engineering, and as a result SIGMOBILE continues to be a strong, successful, well-supported organization.  Membership is relatively stable at about 700, and the SIG’s conferences and workshops are well attended, creating a wealth of publications for the ACM digital library and the SIG’s members. This year we also added a 4th SIGMOBLE local Chapter in Ireland. Furthermore, our financial situation has strengthened in 2013 with a 4.5% increase (a positive trend for 5 years now) providing the organization with fiscal flexibility, and the option to support additional high-value research programs. To this end, we have established the MCRC fund to support SIGMOBILE community projects and promote new activities that will benefit the SIG.