The 1st International Workshop on Learning from Failure in Ubiquitous Computing (UBiFailing 2025)
Co-located with UbiComp/ISWC 2025 in Helsinki, Finland
“Learn from the mistakes of others. You can’t live long enough to make them all yourself.” - Eleanor Roosevelt
Failed experiments and negative results often remain unpublished and underexplored, leading to a lack of knowledge transfer and missed learning opportunities. This workshop aims to emphasise sharing negative results, lessons learned, and experiences of failed experiments in the area of ubiquitous computing and provides a platform for researchers to openly discuss and analyse them.
As a negative result, we consider studies run correctly (in the light of the current state of the art) and in good practice but fail to prove the hypothesis or come up with no significance. The “badness” of the work can also come out as a properly but unfittingly designed data collection, an unconvincing evaluation, simulation, or lapses of hindsight in measurements.
This workshop aims to promote a culture of transparency and constructive learning. When presenting the negative results and lessons learned, we aim to prevent other researchers from working on similar problems to avoid certain pitfalls and avoid wasting time and energy on approaches that do not lead to fruitful results.
We welcome papers that are not only honest with their “negative” results but also highlight possible steps that should be taken to avoid future failures. Overall, the workshop will provide researchers studying all areas of ubiqutous computing with essential insights into risks due to research methodology design choices.
The research community thrives on success, but failure is an essential part of innovation. The UBiFailing, co-located with UbiComp/ISWC 2025, provides a venue for researchers to share and discuss negative or unexpected results in ubiquitous computing, enabling the community to learn from setbacks, refine methodologies, and improve future work. We invite original submissions that highlight failed experiments, unexpected outcomes, or non-replicable results in ubiquitous computing and related fields.
Topics include, but are not limited to:
We also welcome submissions from experienced researchers that recounts post-mortem of experiments or research directions they have failed in the past (e.g. in a story-based format). With this workshop, our aim is to normalize the negative outcomes and inherent failures while conducting research in ubiquitous computing, systems and networking, and provide a complementary view to all the success stories in these fields.
Paper submission: July 4th, 2025
Author notification: July 20th, 2025
Camera-ready due: July 26th, 2025
Workshop date: October 12/13th 2025
Submissions should be made electronically through the Online Submission System (PCS). Papers must be in PDF format and contain 6 pages maximum (including references). Shorter papers are also welcome. All papers need to be anonymized. Follow the formatting and templates described in UbiComp/ISWC 2025 submission guidelines.
Accepted papers will be published in the ACM Digital Library as part of the UbiComp/ISWC 2025 Adjunct Proceedings. At least one author of each accepted paper needs to register for the conference and the workshop itself. During the workshop, each accepted paper will be presented briefly by one of the authors in person.
Please contact us (peter.zdankin@uni-due.de or eileen.becks@uni-due.de) if you have any problems or questions when preparing your submissions.
