Identity crisis of ubicomp?

The rapid growth of the Ubicomp field has recently raised concerns regarding its identity. These concerns have been compounded by the fact that there exists a lack of empirical evidence on how the field has evolved until today. In this study we applied co-word analysis to examine the status of Ubicomp research. We constructed the intellectual map of the field as reflected by 6858 keywords extracted from 1636 papers published in the HUC, UbiComp and Pervasive conferences during 1999--2013. Based on the results of a correspondence analysis we identify two major periods in the whole corpus: 1999--2007 and 2008--2013. We then examine the evolution of the field by applying graph theory and social network analysis methods to each period. We found that Ubicomp is increasingly focusing on mobile devices, and has in fact become more cohesive in the past 15 years. Our findings refute the assertion that Ubicomp research is now suffering an identity crisis.