Distributed Interactive Systems for Collaboration Experiences (DISCE)

Distributed Interactive Systems for Collaboration Experiences (DISCE) workshop will seek research and position submissions on collaborative Virtual or Augmented Reality three-dimensional interactive systems that have a remote component (e.g., Telepresence, Mixed-presence). The goal is to identify and discuss common interests, the latest research, and the difficulties/challenges that remote collaborative systems may have (e.g., network latency, interaction techniques).

Imagine a world where many people in numerous locations collectively solve complex problems using augmented/virtual reality head-mounted displays. We have seen this type of automation in some industrial research and in a few commercially available applications (e.g., HoloLens Microsoft Dynamics 365). However, some AR/VR applications are network and compute intensive, often exceeding the acceptable latency for interactive systems (app dependent).

Since the speed of light limits network communication, merely creating faster networks with more bandwidth will not solve this problem. Instead, we need to find new solutions to improve collaborative systems when using AR/VR, especially when the systems are interactive.

This workshop will bring together researchers and industry practitioners to discuss and experience the future of three-dimensional distributed collaborative interactive systems and their challenges. We invite authors to submit 4-6 page research and position papers on any of the following topics:

• AR/VR remote collaborative applications

• AR/VR latency improvements or challenges (e.g., Network Latency) dealing with collaborative systems.

• Interaction techniques for remote collaborative applications

• Object ownership and ownership transference techniques for collaborative environments

• Multimodal and unimodal recognition for AR/VR remote collaborative applications (e.g., Gestures, speech, Gesture + speech).

• Machine-learning techniques to lower latency (e.g., prediction) in collaborative systems.

• Open-source projects that support remote collaborative applications

• Software-engineering and Systems topics that support AR/VR distributed collaborative applications.

• Security and Privacy topics related to remote collaborative applications.

• Ethical concerns about the use of AR/VR remote collaborative applications

• New networking architectures and protocols to support next-generation collaborative systems

• User studies evaluating the above topics.

Submission guidelines:

All submissions will be reviewed by experts in the areas listed above. At least one author of each accepted submission must register for the workshop and IEEE VR 2021 conference. Authors of accepted papers will be expected to give a 10 minute at the workshop, and encouraged to give a demonstration of their research as a video. Proceedings will be submitted for inclusion in the IEEE Xplore Library. We will also host the papers on this site.

Papers should be submitted via PCS: https://new.precisionconference.com

Submissions must be anonymized and in PDF format, in the VGTC format: http://junctionpublishing.org/vgtc/Tasks/camera.html

All submissions will be reviewed by experts in the areas listed above. At least one author of each accepted submission must register for the workshop and IEEE VR 2021 conference. Authors of accepted papers will be expected to give a 10 minute at the workshop and encouraged to give a demonstration of their research as a video. Proceedings will be submitted for inclusion in the IEEE Xplore Library. We will also host the papers on this site.

Important Dates:

Submission Deadline: January 23, 2021 (AOE)

Notification Deadline: February 2, 2021 (AOE)

Camera-Ready: February 12, 2021 (AOE)

Keynote Speakers: TBA

Panelists: TBA

Acknowledgments:

We will like to acknowledge that National Science Foundation (NSF), Award NSF CNS-2016714.

Organizers:

• Francisco R. Ortega (fortega@colostate.edu) is an Assistant Professor at Colorado State University and Director of the natural user interaction lab (NUILAB). Dr. Ortega earned his Ph.D. in Computer Science (CS) in the field of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) and 3D User Interfaces (3DUI) from Florida International University (FIU). He also held a position of Post-Doc and Visiting Assistant Professor at FIU between February 2015 to July 2018. Broadly speaking, his research has focused on multimodal and unimodal interaction (gesture centric), which includes gesture recognition and elicitation (e.g., a form of participatory design). His main research area focuses on improving user interaction by (a) multimodal elicitation, and (b) developing interactive techniques. The primary domains for interaction include immersive analytics, assembly, and collaborative environments using augmented reality headsets.

• Adam Williams (AdamWil@colostate.edu) is a Ph.D. candidate in computer science at Colorado State University. His research focuses on developing multimodal interaction techniques for use in augmented reality environments. In particular, gesture, speech, and mid-air pen multimodal interactions for immersive analytics in augmented reality.

• Nathaniel Blanchard (nathaniel.blanchard@colostate.edu) joined the Computer Science Department at Colorado State University as an Assistant Professor in the Fall of 2019. He has published 20 papers, including a CVPR paper “A neurobiological evaluation metric for neural network model search”. Building on this foundational work, he defended his dissertation “Quantifying Internal Representation for Model Search” in March 2019. He is currently funded as a Co-PI by CCRI: Collaborative Research: Planning: Low-Latency for Augmented Reality Interactive Systems (LLARIS). He is particularly adept at utilizing machine learning in real-world contexts.

• Spyridon Mastorakis (smastorakis@unomaha.edu) received his M.Eng. degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the National Technical University of Athens, Greece in 2014 and his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science from the University of California, Los Angeles in 2017 and 2019, respectively. Since August 2019, he has been an Assistant Professor in Computer Science at the University of Nebraska at Omaha. His research has been published at premier conferences and journals, including the IEEE International Conference on Computer Communications (INFOCOM), the IEEE International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems (ICDCS), the IEEE Internet of Things Journal, and the IEEE Transactions on Industrial Informatics. He is currently serving as the tutorials co-chair of the 8th ACM Conference on Information-Centric Networking (ACM ICN) 2021, while he has also served as the Technical Program Committee (TPC) chair of the 1st ACM CoNEXT Workshop on Emerging in-Network Computing Paradigms (ENCP) 2019 and as a TPC member of IEEE GLOBECOM 2020. Furthermore, he is currently serving as a Guest Editor for the IEEE Internet of Things Journal. He is a member of the IEEE and ACM, and his research interests include network systems and protocols, Internet architectures, IoT and edge computing, and security.

• Susmit Shannigrahi (sshannigrahi@tntech.edu) is an Assistant Professor in Computer Science at Tennessee Tech. He received his Ph.D. from Colorado State University, Fort Collins, Colorado, US in 2019. His research interests are next generation networking, networking for big science data, 5G mobile network, and software defined networking. He runs the Next Generation Networking Lab (ngin) at Tennessee Tech.

• Daniel Szafir (daniel.szafir@colorado.edu) is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science and the ATLAS Institute at the University of Colorado, Boulder. He holds courtesy appointments in the CU Aerospace Engineering Department and the Department of Information Science. Dr. Szafir’s research, which spans the fields of human-robot interaction (HRI) and human-computer interaction (HCI), explores how emerging interactive technologies, such as mixed and virtual reality, may improve human-robot collaborations in domains including collaborative work, education, and space exploration. He is currently serving as a Program Committee Chair for the 2021 ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) and has previously organized 5 workshops across HRI and RSS. He completed his Ph.D. in Computer Science at the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 2015 and was named to the Forbes 30 Under 30: Science list in 2017. His research support has included NASA, the National Science Foundation, Google, Intel, and Mitsubishi Heavy Industries.

• Rajiv Khadka (rajiv.khadka@inl.gov) is a Visualization researcher in Applied Visualization Laboratory (AVL) at Idaho National Laboratory (INL) and an Adjunct Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the Idaho State University. He received his Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Wyoming in 2019. His research interest lies around virtual and augmented reality, HCI, data visualization, immersive analytics, remote telecollaboration, and 3D user interfaces. He has a proven track record of researching and creating cutting-edge user interaction methods, visual analytics applications, and tools that improve scientific workflows within Virtual and Augmented Reality environments. He is also a dedicated and passionate educator, delivering engaging lessons and providing mentorship to his students, while also writing successful proposals and furthering research.

• Zahra "Faezeh" Borhani (zahra.borhani@colostate.edu) is a Ph.D. student in computer science at Colorado State University. Her research focuses on collaborative immersive analytics in augmented reality. Specifically, she studies the effects of modalities, such as eye gaze, gesture, and speech, in collaborative tasks for AR environments.

Please contact fortega@colostate.edu for any questions.