Awarded research with impact

TECO alumni and employees receive 10 Year Impact Award for smartphone research

Ten years is a long time, considering the rapid technological development and the life cycles of new technical achievements. In 2010, for example, mobile phones with physical keys were still widespread and one of the top smartphone models advertised with a 1Ghz processor and a screen diagonal of 10 cm. Today, borderless displays with a diagonal of 15 cm and more are the measure of all things and many smartphones work with over 2Ghz - per processor core, mind you. It is therefore something very special that a development has such a lasting influence on technological progress that this influence is still felt a decade later. TECO researchers around Prof. Michael Beigl have succeeded in doing so with their paper "ActiServ: Activity Recognition Service for Mobile Phones". For this they received the 10 Year Impact Award at the leading wearable conference, the International Symposium on Wearable Computing (ISWC) 2020.

The paper is about an open source system for mobile devices that can identify and distinguish context and activities of the user with high accuracy. The approach is based on a recognition architecture that classifies activities on the basis of fuzzy inference mechanisms - mechanisms for logical inference from fuzzy sets. The system trained with the help of large amounts of data from other users, but - and this was revolutionary - cooperatively partly directly on the end device itself, and partly on a server - this is now known as Edge-Cloud-Machine Learning. In order not to have to constantly recalculate the distributed AI models completely, they used a previously novel approach that allowed the addition of new model parts and the forgetting of old ones, today known as continous learning.

With their system, lead author Martin Berchtold and his co-authors Matthias Budde, Dawud Gordon, Hedda R. Schmidtke, and Michael Beigl have laid the foundation for today's wearables and apps for tracking movement and activities available on the market and deservedly received this year's 10 Year Impact Award of the Top Conference for Wearable Computing.
In his laudatory speech, Prof. Kai Kunze from Keio University (JPN) emphasized that the paper was ahead in both selection criteria for the award - either the highest number of citations or the greatest impact on science and industry.

TECO at KIT has been researching since 1993 with a number of partners from research and industry on topics such as ubiquitous computing, mobile computing, HCI, sensor/actuator networks (especially CPS), big data analytics, and context-sensitive AI systems.
To cover research-related teaching, TECO is linked to the Chair for Pervasive Computing Systems within the Institute of Telematics at the KIT Faculty of Informatics.
Together with other partners, TECO/KIT operate the Smart Data Innovation Lab (SDIL) of the Federation and Baden-Württemberg's Smart Data Solution Center (SDSC).