MELT 2015 workshop report: the fifth ACM SIGSPATIAL International Workshop on Mobile Entity Localization and Tracking in GPS-less Environments (Seattle, Washington, USA - November 3, 2015)

After a decade of research and development for GPS-less localization and tracking, there has been significant progress in location-awareness and location-based services around the world. Almost all cell phone platforms, Android, iPhone and Windows phones, have localization and tracking facilities. In addition, special hardware and infrastructure (e.g., RFID, UWB and BLE or sensor tags) have been developed and deployed for tracking people and merchandise. The advances in cameras and computer vision make it possible for cheap simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM). However, there are still many challenging problems to be solved, such as accuracy, power management, effective sensor fusion with increasingly powerful embedded computation and resourceful parallel computing backend, learning, transmitting and storing individual trajectories and spatial environment representation, labor-less environmental survey or infrastructure establishment for location-awareness, crowd computing or collective intelligence for map creations, and big data analytics of real-time and historical semantic locations that helps improving efficiency for both consumers and businesses.