RTMI ´12 - Proceedings of the 4th Seminar on Research Trends in Media Informatics

Abstract

RTMI ’12 – the fourth incarnation of the seminar Research Trends in Media Informatics – offers a program full of exciting papers covering important research topics in Media Informatics. At this year’s seminars the papers concentrate on three main topics: security and privacy, HCI, and novel networking technologies and paradigms.

Mobile Internet access and wireless communications see an increasing adoption, as do cloud services and cloud storage. Security research is essential to ensure that mobile clients can securely communicate with the cloud. The papers in the security and privacy session highlight new protocols for authenticating clients and authorizing data access, discuss security issues in our mobile communication systems, and address the security and privacy challenges posed by the future Internet of Things.

Building user interfaces that convey important information but do not distract drivers is key for automotive HMI systems. The first paper gives an overview of the requirements that driver distraction avoidance poses on car interfaces. As a contrast, the second paper looks at the emerging trend of gamification. The integration of game elements in the user experience can lead to stronger and longer user engagement.

The trend towards miniaturization of devices and the increasing number of gadgets we carry around introduces the potential of distributed and self-organizing sensor networks. The papers in the networking technologies session discuss two types of such networks that hold great potential. Body area networks connect devices and sensors on the human body to enable health monitoring with higher precision. Flying ad-hoc networks connect swarms of self-organizing micro air vehicles (MAVs) for different purposes.