Proceedings of the 2nd workshop on Workshop on Physical Analytics

Abstract

Welcome to the second workshop on Physical Analytics (WPA-15), which is held in conjunction with MobiSys 2015. WPA is motivated by the observations that people spend a significant part of their daily lives performing a variety of activities in the physical world---traveling to places, interacting with various physical objects, and being subject to various audio-visual stimuli. The goal of the workshop is to offer a forum that brings researchers and industry practitioners together to explore the technologies that enable unobtrusive capture of individual and collective interactions in the physical world, and to understand the opportunity and challenges for commercial applications and services that leverage such interaction. This year, we have a collection of 6 refereed and 2 invited papers that span a wide range of exciting topics, including characterizing the workplace using sensor data, detecting user activities from WiFi signals, measuring users' heights using wireless signals, mapping a measured to position to a location in the physical world, inferring companionship and human relationship from sensor data, using smartphone sensing data for analyzing driver risk profiles for insurance applications, etc. The program also includes selected invited talks that highlight the key advances and business opportunities related to the ability to sense human interaction and activities in the physical world.