Conferator at LWA '10

With Conferator, LWA '10 offers a new kind of conference service to its participants. Its aim is to support the participants of the conference in their social interaction. Conferator features two key functionalities: PeerRadar and TalkRadar.

Get the Android App: Conferator Mobile

PeerRadar

The PeerRadar will show you a history of your social contacts at the conference and provides additional information about them, such as their homepage, facebbok and twitter accounts, contact details (skype, icq, etc.), and their last (public) entries in BibSonomy. After the conference, PeerRadar will thus enable you to recall your social contacts you had during the conference.

TalkRadar

The TalkRadar gives you the opportunity to personalize the conference schedule. You can select the talks that you intend to attend, and can store them in BibSonomy, so that it will be easier to cite them within your next publication. TalkRadar will give you more information about the current talk, such as additional information about the presenter, his or her publications, etc. It will also recommend upcoming talks. Last but not least, TalkRadar stores the talks that you have actually attended.

All conference participants who want to join the service will be provided with an RFID-Tag (see Fig. 1) that is worn like a name tag. The tags communicate to readers that are installed at the walls (see Fig. 2) , and also communicate with each other. In this way, the system can determine the room you are actually in, and the people you are currently talking to (more precisely: the people who are face to face with you). The data is encrypted and transmitted to the conferator server, where they are aggregated. You can access your personalized conferater application from your notebook and your smartphone - so bring your hardware! Two large screens will additionally show where the other participants are currently. If someone else has added you to his or her friends list in BibSonomy, then you will also be able to access his or her current position on your mobile device. In any case, a position history will not displayed on any device.

RFID technology

The hardware technology we use was developed within the Sociopatterns project, whose generous support we kindly acknowledge. At the Sociopatterns homepage, you will find more information about the technology. Similar services were offered at previous conferences by the Live Social Semantics project. Conferator puts a stronger focus on adacemic (rather than on general social) interaction.

Conference Registration

Since all talks are stored as BibSonomy publications, using Conferator requires a BibSonomy account. If you do not have an account yet, you can also create it at the conference desk. There, also the RFID tags will be handed out. Here, you also have to sign the terms of use |Link zu Teilnahmebedingungen|. We kindly ask you to return the tag at the end of the conference. The installation will cover the lecture halls and coffee breaks, as well as the floors in between, plus the student restaurant and the cafeteria. By switching off the tag, it is possible to interrupt the participation at any time.

VENUS Project

Conferator has been developed within the project "VENUS - Design of socio-technical networking applications in situative ubiquitous computing systems". VENUS is a research cluster at the interdisciplinary Research Center for Information System Design (ITeG) at Kassel University, funded by the State of Hesse as part of the program for excellence in research and development (LOEWE). The goal of VENUS is to explore the design process of future networked, ubiquitous systems, which are characterized by situation awareness and self-adaptive behavior. Thus, VENUS focuses on the interactions between the new technology, the individual user and the society. The long-term goal of VENUS is the creation of a comprehensive interdisciplinary development methodology for the design of ubiquitous computing systems.