Geotec member Joaquín Torres-Sospedra is chairing the 2017 Off-site Indoor Location Competition, to be held during the 2017 International Conference on Indoor Positioning and Indoor Navigation Conference (18-21 September 2017 – Sapporo, Japan). The competition is aimed at bringing together the academic and industrial research communities for evaluating different approaches and envisioning new research opportunities for the indoor localization area, where non-consensus standards exist yet.

Moreover, the papers reporting the results and analyzing the lessons learned from the 2015 and 2016 editions have recently been published in Journal of Ambient Intelligence and Smart Environments (IOS Press) and Sensors (MDPI).

Torres-Sospedra, J.; Moreira, A.; Knauth, S.; Berkvens, R.; Montoliu, R.; Belmonte, O.; Trilles, S.; Nicolau, M.J.; Meneses, F.; Costa, A.; Koukofikis, A.; Weyn, M.; & Peremans, H. A Realistic Evaluation of Indoor Positioning Systems Based on Wi-Fi Fingerprinting: The 2015 EvAAL-ETRI Competition. Journal of Ambient Intelligence and Smart Environments, Vol. 9, pp. 263-279, 2017. doi: 10.3233/AIS-170421

Torres-Sospedra, J.; ; Jiménez, A.; Knauth, A.; Moreira, A.; Beer, Y.; Fetzer, T.; Ta, V.-C.; Montoliu, R.; Seco, F.; Mendoza, G.; Belmonte, O.; Koukofikis, A.; Nicolau, M.J.; Costa, A.; Meneses, F.; Ebner, F.; Deinzer, F.; Vaufreydaz, D.; Dao, T.-K.; and Castelli, E. The Smartphone-based Off-Line Indoor Location Competition at IPIN 2016: Analysis and Future work Sensors Vol. 17(3), 2017. doi: 10.3390/s17030557

The off-site competition permits a coherent evaluation method of the competitors’ estimations, where inside information to fine-tune their systems is not offered, and thus provides, in our opinion, a good starting point to introduce a fair comparison between the smartphone-based systems. The methodology, experience, feedback from competitors and future working lines of the 2015 and 2016 editions are described in the corresponding papers. Finally, organizing the competition has allowed us to extend the research collaborations with other institutions and companies around the world.