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Acknowledgments
I would like to sincerely thank all people that contributed in various aspects to the
successful completion of this dissertation.
My sincere gratitude goes to my adviser and co-worker, Prof. Bernt Schiele, for his
guidance and motivation throughout this thesis. Whenever I had ideas and con-
cepts to discuss he devoted time to critically discuss and elaborate on those ideas.
Thereby, he also taught me how to streamline and organize my thoughts in order
to put them into scientific articles. I am very obliged for this constructive and pro-
ductive cooperation where I could benefit from so much. In numerous meetings and
discussions, he managed to both free me when being stuck in too many details and
to keep me focused when trying to solve several major challenges in Ubiquitous and
Wearable Computing simultaneously. Furthermore, he provided me with great fund-
ing resources, which enabled me to construct and test various research prototypes
and to visit various conferences and workshops.
I am also very grateful to Prof. Friedemann Mattern for the interest in my work and
for his helpful comments concerning this dissertation thesis. In particular, I honor
his willingness to review my thesis at very short notice.
Special thanks also go to my undergrade-students from the Department of Computer
Science at ETH Zurich, Peter Matter, Erich Crameri, Janneth Malibago, Frederic
Despont, Franco Hug and Ramon Wicki. With their diligence and persistence, they
successfully completed semester projects and master theses, for which I am very
grateful.
I also want to thank Prof. Utterback and Prof. von Hippel who introduced me to
the field of innovation research in their lectures which I was very glad to visit at the
MIT Sloan School of Management in Spring 2000.
The three and a half years at ETH would have been boring without the crew of the
PCCV (Perceptual Computing and Computer Vision) Group. Thanks to Bastian
Leibe, Julia Vogel, Hannes Kruppa, Martin Spengler, Nicky Kern, and my o ce-
mate Stavros Antifakos for fun during group retreats and for interesting, not solely
research-related discussions during numerous lunch and co ee breaks. I am very
grateful to Nicky Kern for his hardware support and for his assistance during the
development of the wearable medical assistant. Special thanks to Stavros for stim-
ulating discussions, his infinite patience, and the never-ending help with hardware
problems, especially during the last months.
This work partly funded by the Smart-Its project, funded by the Commission of the
European Union under contract IST-2000-25428, and by the Swiss Federal O ce
for Education and Science (BBW 00.0281). Thanks to all Smart-Its members from
Play Institute Gothenburg, Lancaster University, TeCo University of Karlsruhe and
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