Dr. Maria Garcia Puyol
Google, USA
When emergency services get a call, they need to know the caller’s location to send help and save lives. Today, over 70% of calls to emergency services come from mobile phones, but locating these mobile callers can be a major issue. Current emergency solutions rely on cell tower location (which can have a radius of several kilometers) and, in some countries, on assisted GPS (which can fail with bad signal reception, in urban canyons, and especially indoors). In this presentation we will cover how Google's Emergency Location Service is delivering more accurate location (computed from fusion of WiFi, cell, GPS and sensors) to emergency services when an emergency call is detected. In addition, location research has mostly focused on estimating a user's latitude and longitude, i.e. their location in the XY plane. However, estimating the user’s location in the Z axis and translating this directly into floor numbers not only provides an abundance of interesting location scenarios such as indoor navigation, but also large benefits for emergency responders in locating people in need of help. We will discuss some of the challenges to solving this problem on a global scale and present how we can provide elevation estimates inside buildings, even in the absence of GPS. There are, however, several difficulties in estimating an accurate location in all situations. Many countries do not have a high density of cellular and local wireless infrastructure, and mobile handsets may be older, less computationally powerful, and lacking more modern sensors. These factors pose great difficulties in estimating an accurate location. Other practical problems that we will cover include misbehaving sensors and moving WiFi access points. Finally, all location research relies directly on dependable statistical evaluation of experimental results. However, in many publications, researchers based their work on relatively small datasets, providing less experimental validation than desired. We will discuss some of our experiences and issues arising from much larger scale validation.
Dr. Maria Garcia Puyol is a software engineer within Google’s Android Location & Context team. Based in Mountain View, California, she conducts research to improve indoor location algorithms for Android devices and she is currently leading the efforts of estimating a user's altitude indoors. Shortly after joining Google Maria co-founded the Android Emergency Location Service, a project focused on helping Android users during emergency calls by sending the location of the users to first responders. The project is now live in more than 10 countries, helping find people in distress much faster. Maria has been actively involved in the field of location for 7 years. Prior to her role at Google, she was a research associate at the Institute of Communication and Navigation at the German Aerospace Center (DLR) where she worked on various research projects related to indoor pedestrian navigation, including "FootSLAM". For that work she received her PhD in Electrical Engineering from the Technical University of Munich, Germany.
Mr. Kazuhiro Sadakiyo
Shimizu Corporation, Japan
Dr. Hironobu Takagi
IBM Research - Tokyo, Japan
Turn-by-turn navigation is widely recognized as one of the ideal navigation interfaces to help people in complex and unfamiliar environments. It is usable for various user groups including people with visual impairments. However, a highly accurate localization system is required to enable it. Therefore, we developed an accurate and scalable localization system by targeting turn-by-turn navigation and conducted an open pilot at a shopping mall in a central Tokyo area, Nihonbashi Muromachi area, in February 2017. Blind, low vision, wheelchair users and foreigners joined the evaluation sessions. In this talk, we will introduce the system, user interface, accuracy we achieved and survey results from participants.
Mr.Kazuhiro Sadakiyo is Chief Research Engineer of the Center for future technology and design at Institute of Technology, SHIMIZU Corporation. He joined Institute of Technology, SHIMIZU Corporation in 1981. He has been investigating Building Automation, Ambient Intelligence, and Smart Building technologies. He is a member of the Research Committee on Information Systems Technology, Architectural Institute of Japan(AIJ) and Technical Committee on Reliable Communication and Control, the Institute of Electronics, Information and Communication Engineers(IEICE).
Dr. Hironobu Takagi is the senior manager of the Accessibility & Aging group at IBM Research – Tokyo. He joined IBM Research – Tokyo in 1999 and received his Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Tokyo in 2000. He has been investigating Web-accessibility, crowd-sourcing, and elderly-care technologies. He currently leads the Human Computer Interaction and Elderly Care initiatives at global IBM Research. He received best paper awards at ACM ASSETS (Annual ACM Conference on Assistive Technologies) 2002 and 2009 and received an achievement award from the Japanese Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology in 2011. He is a member of the IBM Academy of Technology and ACM.