We are also pleased to announce that Grigorios Anagnostopoulos successfully defended his PhD thesis: "Addressing Crucial Issues of Indoor Positioning Systems"!

Grigorios Anagnostopoulos has successfully defended his PhD Thesis entitled: "Addressing Crucial Issues of Indoor Positioning Systems".

Thesis Summary:

Over the last decade, the proliferation of Location-Based Services offered by smartphones has created the growing need for indoor positioning systems (IPS), in an increasing number of environments. Visitors of hospitals, airports, shopping centers and museums are being guided indoors, enjoying services related to their indoor location. Location-Based Services assist users not only in orienting themselves indoors and finding their destination, but also utilize the location of users as context to support a wide range of possible services. The quasi-ubiquitous presence of position estimates indoors is offered by modern indoor positioning systems.

The goal of this Thesis is to propose novel methodologies to address crucial issues of indoor positioning systems. The problems addressed in this work are met throughout the whole life cycle of an IPS conception, realisation and operation, from designing innovative positioning methodologies to defining novel evaluation and tuning methodologies.

Therefore, this Thesis initially investigates and reports the user needs and requirements concerning the wayfinding problems at a relevant and important use case: Geneva's University Hospitals (HUG). Following, it proposes innovative solutions that construct a robust indoor positioning system, along with ways of seamlessly switching from indoor to outdoor positioning. In order to strengthen the robustness of the system and reduce the required calibration effort, algorithms of automatic recalculation of the system are proposed and analyzed, addressing the problems of device and environment diversity.

Moreover, well-defined methodologies of evaluating, comparing and optimally tuning positioning systems are proposed, addressing the most trending issues of the indoors positioning community. More specifically, an evaluation methodology for indoor positioning systems is proposed, as well as formal procedures for optimally tuning a positioning system, in an automatic way. Lastly, multiobjective optimization techniques are introduced in order to offer generic tunings based on a more holistic evaluation.

In this way, the proposed methodologies of this Thesis define a complete roadmap for designing an innovative IPS, from designing and creating a robust indoor positioning system, to optimally tuning it in an automatic way and producing precise performance reports.

Jury:

• Prof. Gilles Falquet (President of the Jury, GSEM, University of Geneva)
• Prof. Dimitri Konstantas (Thesis co-director, GSEM, University of Geneva)
• Dr. Michel Deriaz (Thesis co-director, CUI, University of Geneva)
• Prof. Jean-Henry Morin (SdS, University of Geneva)
• Prof. Jose Rolim (Science, University of Geneva)
• Prof. Marios Angelopoulos (University of Bournemouth)

We wish him all the best for his next steps!