Message from the Program Chair and Vice Chairs

Welcome to the Seventeenth IEEE International Conference on Pervasive Computing and Communications (PerCom 2019)! After PerCom 2008 in Hong Kong, we finally return to Asia, this time to beautiful Kyoto, Japan's former imperial city with its rich culture and history. Since its beginnings in 2003, PerCom has evolved quite a bit, both in terms of its research topics and its organisation. Where the original concentrated almost exclusively on keynotes and paper presentations (in three parallel sessions), todays conference offers a varied program of two keynotes, eight technical paper sessions, a panel, a poster and demo session, and - for the first time - an industry session, all in a single, highly focussed track. A set of workshops and the PhD forum round out the program.

What has stayed the same is the deep commitment of our community to the conference. More than 80 people from 19 countries serve in our technical program committee (TPC), many veterans from the early days. They have done a tremendous job and invested a huge amount of effort and time to distilling a high quality program from all submissions. PerCom 2019 received a total of 151 submitted papers. All papers went through a rigorous two-phase review process. Every paper was reviewed by at least three members of the TPC in the first round. In the second round, many papers received one or more additional reviews. During and after the second round of reviews, the TPC held a lively on-line discussion of the submitted papers. Finally, the TPC held an in-person meeting in Mannheim, Germany, at which papers were discussed in even more detail to identify those to be included in the program. In the end 26 full-length papers and 4 concise papers were selected to appear in the proceedings and will be presented at the conference in Kyoto, an overall acceptance rate of 19.8%. As always, three papers will compete in the best paper session for the prestigious Mark Weiser Best Paper Award, which will be awarded at the conference banquet.

Putting together the technical program for PerCom is an enormous effort whose success relies on the contributions of many many people. We thank first and foremost the members of the TPC, whose attention to the review process ensures a solid program and a fair evaluation of all of the submitted papers. In addition, we also thank the general chairs and the steering committee for their tireless effort to get any possible obstacle out of the way and to help us to concentrate on the technical program. Managing the review process would be so much more painful if it wasn't for the R scripts (and explanations) provided to us by Christine Julien, TPC Chair of 2017 - thank you so much! Special thanks go to Jadwiga Indulska for her invaluable support with EDAS and for sharing her experience with us. Finally, we also thank the entire PerCom community for supporting the conference, whether by submitting papers or by attending the conference. We hope you enjoy PerCom 2019 and that you find inspiration in the work of your colleagues. Enjoy the conference!

Gregor Schiele - PerCom 2019 TPC Chair; Philippe Lalanda, Lama Nachman, and Hirozumi Yamaguchi - PerCom 2019 TPC Vice Chairs