Welcome Message form the General Chairs

On behalf of the Steering and Organization committees, we are delighted to welcome you to IEEE PerCom 2019: The Seventeenth International Conference on Pervasive Computing and Communications. PerCom is an annual conference providing a forum for researchers and practitioners to exchange new achievements and discuss future developments in pervasive computing and communication research and technologies. Following the success of previous conferences, PerCom 2019 is being held in Kyoto, Japan. PerCom 2019 offers a rich program to its audience over five days. In addition to the main conference research paper track, PerCom2019 includes keynote speeches on robotics and future pervasive communications, a "new" industry paper track, demos, workshops, a Ph.D forum, and a panel on impact of privacy regulations on pervasive systems. The excellent program is a result of the collective efforts of many people and organizations. First, special thanks go to Gregor Schiele, the Program Chair and his team of Vice Chairs (Philippe Lalanda, Lama Nachman and Hirozumi Yamaguchi) and Program Committee members who have done an outstanding job in carrying out the paper review tasks. Second, we are deeply grateful to Paul Havinga - Industry Session Chair, Nabil Alshurafa - Industry Sponsorship Chair and Industry Track TPCs who worked very hard by reviewing and selecting high quality papers in a short period for successfully organizing the industry track for the first time in PerCom history. Third, we would like to express our appreciation of the contributions of the Workshop Chairs, Takahiro Hara, Delphine Reinhardt and Nirmalya Roy. We also thank the important work of the PhD forum chairs, Jin Nakazawa and Vana Kalogeraki, the Work-In-Progress Chairs, Takuya Maekawa and Peizhao Hu, the Demo Chairs, Susumu Ishihara and Salil Kanhere, and the panel chair, Claudio Bettini. We are delighted to have Kevin Fall and Hiroshi Ishiguro as the keynote speakers. Claudio Bettini is moderating a very exciting panel. Our special thanks go to Mohan Kumar - the steering committee chair, Jadwiga Indulska for managing the EDAS system, Tadashi Okoshi, Hassan Ghasemzadeh and Stefano Braghin - the publicity chairs, Arei Kobayashi and Hiroki Ishizuka - the finance chairs, and Hirohiko Suwa - registration chair. The Publication Chairs Damith Ranasinghe and Matthäus Wander outstandingly handled the difficult task of the PerCom proceedings preparation. Thanks are also due to Takuya Yoshihiro, Kazuya Murao and Daisuke Kotani, the Local Organisation Co-Chairs. Last but not least, we would like to thank Kei Hiroi, the conference website chair, for maintaining the web site.

Behrooz Shirazi and Keiichi Yasumoto - PerCom 2019 General Chairs