Investigating collaboration in ubiquitous computing research

With the rapid development of mobile internet and smart devices, ubiquitous computing is experiencing a huge change. As direct progress reflection of the field, collaboration among scholars has been increasingly important and facilitating a few emerging applications, e.g., collaborator recommendation. In this paper, to further figure out how the contributors collaborate with each other, we explore two representative conferences in ubiquitous computing research field, UbiComp and Pervasive (merged with UbiComp in 2013). Papers collected from the two conferences are data set to examine collaboration from three perspectives: (1) Collaboration overview: we construct collaboration network and conduct analysis from aspects of author, institution, and nation respectively, and shed light on progress of the field. (2) Collaboration Evolution: by segmenting the whole time period of collaboration into two distinct stages, we identify different kinds of collaboration patterns in terms of collaborator and research topic. (3) Collaboration Quality: we propose a new method to quantify the actual quality of each kind of collaboration patterns. Furthermore, we propose some suggestions to development of ubiquitous computing according to our findings.