3rd Workshop on Behaviour Monitoring and Interpretation, BMI'09

November 3rd: Studying Moving Objects in a three-dimensional world

From previous Workshops to a new one

The two previous editions of BMI (BMI'07 and BMI'08) were co-located with the annual German AI conference. As the submitted papers show, there is a strong tendency to two categories of contributions: those which are application driven by and related to different AI fields, and those related to general methods for the observation, representation and interpretation of human behaviours in space and time. Since the latter primarily focuses on spatial aspects (primarily of pedestrians, but also of vehicles), it would make sense to offer a more specific workshop that is dedicated to this sub-area of people, and more general objects, moving in space. In addition, another related workshop was held in conjunction with GIScience 2008: "The International Workshop on Moving Objects: From Natural to Formal Language". The organisers of these workshops recognised that it makes sense to join their workshops in order to consolidate the community of spatiotemporal reasoning. Additionally, advances made in the geo-information community towards the third dimension show the need to extend the workshop topics accordingly. The main conference (3D-GeoInfo) gives an ideal platform for this approach.

Workshop Issues

In the last decade, many technologies have been devised to obtain information about the motion behaviour of people, among others by GPS, GSM, RFID, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, ZigBee and video-technologies. Based upon such technologies, this workshop aims to focus on the high-level representation and interpretation of the monitored behaviours in3D. This concerns primarily the spatial and spatiotemporal aspects of such behaviours, including:

the monitoring of moving objects, in particular movement in outdoor and indoor spaces
methods for analysing and interpreting locomotion behaviours
the consideration of locomotion behaviours of either single objects or of groups of objects
the modelling of spatial and spatiotemporal aspects of locomotion behaviours
the relationship between psychological and formal conceptualisations of moving objects
the dealing of moving objects with natural language/linguistics
the comparison of work about moving objects from researchers from different disciplines
applications and related areas that require the consideration of moving objects

To make the vision of spatiotemporal behaviour monitoring and interpretation a reality, there are many serious challenges that must be addressed including lack of complete information about the monitored behaviours and the imprecision of the obtained data. Furthermore, knowledge representation issues, such as ontologies about behaviour patterns of movements have to be considered in the context of intention recognition; furthermore, questions have to be answered concerning how to reason about behaviour patterns, e.g. for making predictions, for short:

vague and incomplete spatiotemporal measurements of movements
the dealing with granularity issues
ontological aspects for representing movement information

In this workshop, specific attention will be given to the above mentioned issues in combination with the third spatial dimension. Note that besides movements in 3D space, 3D analysis and visualisation of spatio-temporal data (2D + time) is encouraged as well, resulting in questions such as "Why and when is it possible to restrict approaches to 2D?" and "When do we need 3D?".

Workshop Relevance

Modelling 'reality' has always been a fundamental issue in geography. Considering two major aspects of reality, i.e. space and time, leads to a crucial GIScience research domain concerning moving objects. Indeed, motion or movement enters the picture whenever one and the same object occupies different positions in space at different times. Great advances have been made in the context of positioning techniques in recent years. As a consequence, application areas such as navigation, location based services, ubiquitous computing, smart places, ambient intelligence, and more specific areas like ambient assisted living came into existence. One fundamental issue in all these areas is the consideration of locomotion behaviours of humans for whom such technologies are devised. Besides such application areas, different scientific fields, such as ecology or geographical information science call for methods helping in analysing the spatiotemporal behaviour of moving people. Moreover, these research fields and application areas state new fundamental questions concerned with the analysis of locomotion behaviour, making it necessary to provide a scientific forum as this workshop is intended to be.

Workshop Format

This one-day workshop is intended as a forum for discussion, exchange of points of views, assessment of results and methods, and as a source of dissemination and promotion of the newest advances in the area of behaviour monitoring and interpretation, in particular concerning the locomotion behaviours of objects in 3D. The program will include a number of presentations concerning the role of monitoring and interpreting the spatiotemporal behaviours of objects and groups of objects in 3D. The workshop will be organised in a way to stimulate interaction amongst the participants. To this end, an important part of each regular time slot will be reserved for discussion. Then, the aim of the workshop is to have a clear current state of the art and to have in depth discussions about the different topics, as well as to identify current or to propose new research lines. Interested researchers are invited to submit either short discussion papers about continuing work or longer papers presenting advanced research.