Internet of Things talk in Geneva

Today I gave a presentation about the "Internet of Things" at a foresight meeting in Geneva.I spoke after Lara Srivastava from the ITU who described the ITU's vision about that topic. In my talk, I tried to show an alternative vision, as propelled by artists or researchers. My point was to show through various projects how the Internet of Things can be described: locative media as first incarnation, visualizations of networked communication and above all blogjects.

Notes from Sami Coll's presentation about a sociological perspective on the Internet of Things:

- nowadays, we leave lots of traces (fidelity cards, credit card transactions, cell phone usage...) - sometimes it's possible to access to these traces (it's even possible in Switzerland with supermarket cards) - use of traces: marketing, digital marketing, amazon's propositions... list pirates/terrorists, fight against social abusers - "savoir c'est pouvoir" ("knowing, it's exerting power")

two faces of the same coin: - convenient technologies - "technologies of surveillance": leave traces in the daily experience of users, produce very valuable information. this secondary function is not always conscious to the users.

paradox: we've never give a so important value to individualism (technologies aim at making people free) BUT the individuals have never been tracked that way... production of a new type of knowledge about people. this paradox is very important with regards to consumption practices: liberty but it's also the place in which we produced the most important amount of information.

traditionally, people are very reluctant towards the State (the price to pay so that it can guarantee different things?)

laws (the point in Switzerland = data belongs to whom they concern) transparency and access to the owner right to ask their suppression and people have the responsibility to protect oneself

BUT this responsibility depends upon the sociocultural categories and even when it's perceived this potential of surveillance is not seen as dangerous ("I don't have anything to hide so there is no problem" as Sami's studies showed) and very individualist approach

however...a fact should be acknowledged: modern societies need surveillance surveillance started in 18th century: how to maintain a social order with the demographic explosion (mad people, criminals... prisons...) then in 19-20th century: industrial revolution: surveillance of factories, workers... to optimize production 20-21th century: new problem = we produce more than we consume, then a necessity to exert control on people so that they consume more (ad...growth). surveillance now concerns everyone of us

our daily life in the Internet of things? less "spaces" that are not under control we will leave more traces in places that will be more intimate it will allow to optimize our life (maximize the profit, minimize losses)

do we really need all those technologies and produce all those information to be more free? from what should we be more free? isn't it a way to create a new type of individuals?

Then Olivier Liechti presented some more concrete elements, using great examples such as the life of cows and RFID usage. What attracted me in his presentation was this:

RFID exists for 50 years so why do everyone talk about it nowadays? - standardization (legal obligation + commercial reasons such as Wal Mart asked its suppliers to use them - higher/increasing volume - interoperability - new applications and technologies (sensor networks...) - their cost went down - globalization (use this information in all steps of the supply chain

Steel stealers and consumer electronic recyclers

As an avid city explorer, I am always amazed at the items people trash; loitering and trashing practices is of tremendous interest to me. I am impressed by trash bags, dirty piles of garbages, plastic bags with shredded paper... there's a lot to learn from a culture based on that (I won't enter too much into ethnographical issues related to that). And of course this is something that I document, with pictures mostly. Anyway, the other day I stumbled across this very common landscape depicted in the following picture (seen in Madrid, Spain). "Common" is a sad and pragmatic word to express the fact that in occidental cities I visited I often encountered trashed consumer electronic.

And then... I saw those two guys with trolleys, they were carrying some electric wires and trashed machines left on the street. They're the ones who collect the stuff out of the street but mmhmm they don't wear any city badges or superb uniforms that would make kids want to be like them in the near future. The reason why is that those person collected electronic devices and steel for recycling and selling some pieces on the black market. This is absolutely not uncommmon and I have seen similar behavior in Geneva (where I live).

And at the same time, I was reading Mike Davis' "Dead Cities: And Other Tales", there is one of the chapter about black economy and immigrants in LA that struck me as very close to those pictures:

"The Sisyphean task of Eduardo and Miguel is to smash up everything in order to salvage a few components that will be set to England for the recovery of their gold content. Being a computer breaker is a monotonous $5.25-an-hour job in the Black economy (...) Miguel is about to deliver a massive blow to the VDT of a Macintosh when I ask him why he came to Los Angeles. His hammer hesitates for a second, then he smiles and answers, "Because I wanted to work in your high-technology economy.""

Why do I blog this? this perfectly describes what happen in our world filled with tech devices, there are practices related to them that are unexpected and can have considerable consequences (in terms of ecology, health, economy...)

Pseudowords and nonwords

People interested in buying weird domain name for website might be interested in list of pseudowords and nonwords. For the record, a pseudoword is "a unit of speech or text that appears to be an actual word in a certain language (at least superficially), while in fact it is not part of the lexicon. Within linguistics, a pseudoword is defined specifically as respecting the phonotactic restrictions of a language" (according to the Wikipedia). Nonwords go beyond pseudowords "in that they are not pronounceable and by their spelling, which could not be the spelling of a real word. For instance, this list of nonwords:

STIPTSE / ZOORPTH / WOLV / FUIKTZ / GNOEPTZ / THEWMTS / DRASPCE / TIERTSE / NOORTHS / THOINNS /GHRALPS / QUIGHV / GHEABD / SPUIDS / DERPHES / THUIXTS / VOORDTH

And uh, these concepts are not useless (or for domain names), they're used in experimental psychology (as described here). Why do I blog this? I had to explain that concept lately to a friend (my background is in psychology, I have to deal with this stuff for a while before shifting to HCI research).

Processing power versus Soul

Last saturday, I had my weekly share of city flanerie (with a digicam) in Lyon, France. I stumbled across weird stuff. Among others, there was this poster:

It says:

My brain is too intelligent for me Auction! Sell brain: - good setting - 15/3 full - accessories not included - slightly overheating Price: 3 francs 6 sous

Why do I blog this? few centuries ago, people wanted to sell their soul to the devil. Now that the epoch is more geared towards efficiency and the computer-as-a-metaphor-for-the-brain, it's processing power in the form of a brain that some folks ironically wants to sell. Each epoch has its own emphasis on body parts/functions...

Death switch to pretend you are not dead has become an art form

In the last issue of Nature, David Eagleman wrote a good paper about "death switches". According to Wikipedia, a death switch is:

"an automated program by which a computer regularly probes a subscriber. The subscriber is required to make a response -- consisting of logging with a secret password -- to prove that she is still alive. When the subscriber fails to make a response for a certain amount of time, the program assumes she is dead and emails out pre-scripted messages to her pre-defined recipients."

Eagleman has several good points about that: he describes some curious practices related to death switches:

It soon became appreciated that death switches provided a good opportunity to say goodbye electronically. Instead of sending out passwords, people began programming their computers to send e-mails to their friends announcing their own death. "It appears I'm dead now," the e-mails began. "I'll take this as an opportunity to tell you things I've always wanted to express..."

Soon enough, people realized they could program messages to be delivered on dates in the future: "Happy 87th birthday. It's been 22 years since my death. I hope your life is proceeding the way you want it to."

With time, people began to push death switches further. Instead of confessing their death in the e-mails, they pretended they were not dead. Using auto-responder algorithms that cleverly analysed incoming messages, a death switch could generate apologetic excuses to turn down invitations, to send congratulations on a life event, and to claim to be looking forward to a chance to see them again sometime soon.

And his point is that there is hence an existingafterlife: So an afterlife does not exist for us, per se, but instead an afterlife exists for that which exists between us. When an alien civilization eventually bumps into Earth, it will immediately be able to understand what humans were about, because what will remain is the network of relationships: who loved whom, who competed, who cheated, who laughed together about road trips and holiday dinners. Each person's ties to bosses, brothers, lovers are written in the electronic communiqués. The death switches simulate the society so completely that the entire social network is reconstructable. The planet's memories survive in zeros and ones.

Why do I blog this? this is a nice example of how tech services can be tinkered in intriguing ways. As the author says "a good-spirited revolution against the grave's silence" :)

Détournement at its best

Russian website fishki offers very intriguing examples of "détournement" (i.e. tinkering/hacks/DIY bricolage) that I found irresistible. Some instances:

Why do I blog this? some material to keep it handy up my sleeve, jut in case Michel de Certeau's concepts comes up in the conversation (creativity of people).

Shoulder-surfing

The practice of "shoulder-surfing": the use of direct observation techniques, such as looking over someone's shoulder, to get information (e.g. where someone watches numbers typed by an ATM user)

The first RADAR

Writing the chapter of my PhD dissertation about Mutual Location-Awareness, I inevitably ran across RADAR (Radio Detection And Ranging) metaphors, which is one of the most prominent model to show people and object's position in space. It seems that the first radar is from 1934 in France:

The patent is very intriguing.

Pens, paper and Disney

An article in news.com about Disney designers highlight the fact that "Designers and animators should learn more about the real world before sitting down to create a fake one".

"Instead of uniting with words, we unite with the objects we're seeing," Rohde said of both kinds of virtual world creators. (...) To prepare for the design of the Expedition Everest thrill ride, Rohde took a team of designers and scientists to study the Himalayan region. In addition to examining the animal species and plants, the teams went from village to village in the surrounding areas and talked to Tibetan and Nepalese people.

Rohde stressed that pen and paper can be as important as modern graphics technology as a way to achieve authenticity. In the past, he said, technological constraints were constructive in some ways because they forced people to be both creative and collaborative, as in elaborate medieval theater. Now we have increased our ability to create and for individuals to have the power to do small things really well on their own, but we are losing the ability to do big things together, he said.

Why do I blog this? summer read.

Experientia report about the new ecology of play

One of my favorite design/foresignt/scouting company Experientia recently produced an insightful report about the latest trends in electronic toys and games. It's called "Play Today" (pdf, 4.7 mb, 71 pages) and is definitely a must-read for people like me in the game-research/industry. It's written by Myriel Milicevic with editors Jan-Christoph Zoels and Mark Vanderbeeken, both Experientia partners).

They present examples of board games, controller toys, electronic friends, educative missions and DYI worlds, location-based games, game activism and romantic encounter.

What is important to me is the underlying rhetoric behind that: 1) due to recent and expected technological advances, boundaries between the game and toy industry is going to fade, then some joint projects, complementarities will be possible 2) the game paradigm per se is more than the individual/system interaction and can be used for different purposes (learning, encounters, urban discoveries...)

Would this be enough to address the slumping sales problem?

Why do I blog this? What I really like in this report, and it's one the approach I am always mentioning when I do seminar about game/toy trends, is the convergence between different industries/domaine: game companies (editors and development studio) and toy company. That is why I like the fact that the report address this issue with no boundary between video games, game controllers, electronic toys and so fort. As they say, it's about "mixing media, mixing worlds".

This is also interesting from the cultural anthropology viewpoint and it makes me think about the work of Mizuko Ito: see for instance her paper about kids participation in new media: a tremendously lively ecology of "media culture" is nascent, based on some media convergence (video games, trading cards in her case), personalization and remix as well as hypersociality of exchange. This Experientia report is really about this new ecology of play which as less distinct boundaries than previously thought.

Technorati Tags: experientia

Food recognition through chewing sounds analysis

It is now possible to detect who is eating what by analyzing the sound of mastication. Researchers from the Wearable Group at ETHZ (Zürich) developed an automatic dietary monitoring system and demonstrated that sound from the user’s mouth can be used to detect that he/she is eating. As described in this paper:

The paper also shows how different kinds of food can be recognized by analyzing chewing sounds. The sounds are acquired with a microphone located inside the ear canal. This is an unobtrusive location widely accepted in other applications (hearing aids, headsets). To validate our method we present experimental results containing 3500 seconds of chewing data from four sub jects on four different food types typically found in a meal. Up to 99% accuracy is achieved on eating recognition and between 80% to 100% on food type classification.

Technosocial Revolution?

Re-reading Is it OK to be a luddite by Thomas Pynchon (The New York Times Book Review, 28 October 1984, pp. 1, 40-41) made me wonder about technosocial revolution:

But the Industrial Revolution was not, like the American and French Revolutions of about the same period, a violent struggle with a beginning, middle and end. It was smoother, less conclusive, more like an accelerated passage in a long evolution. The phrase was first popularized a hundred years ago by the historian Arnold Toynbee, and has had its share of revisionist attention, lately in the July 1984 Scientific American. Here, in "Medieval Roots of the Industrial Revolution," Terry S. Reynolds suggests that the early role of the steam engine (1765) may have been overdramatized. Far from being revolutionary, much of the machinery that steam was coming to drive had already long been in place, having in fact been driven by water power since the Middle Ages. (...) In 1779, in a village somewhere in Leicestershire, one Ned Lud broke into a house and "in a fit of insane rage" destroyed two machines used for knitting hosiery. (...) it's important to remember that the target even of the original assault of l779, like many machines of the Industrial Revolution, was not a new piece of technology. The stocking-frame had been around since 1589

Why do I blog this? when it comes to observing the influence of technologies, I am not a great believer in technosocial revolution, that's why I find this facts interesting.

Quote from JPod

"So you're like the Internet then - except you're a real person"Douglas Coupland (inJPod).

Strawjet: Natural building material from straw

Mailtribune reports on this curious invention called Strawjet:

Developed mainly by Ward in his backyard shop and relocated to big shops in Talent last year, Strawjet Inc. produces a machine that gleans waste straw from fields, weaves it into cables, then, using a clay-cement material, binds the cables into building materials, such as blocks and beams. (...) The invention of the Strawjet has special significance, Palombo said, because it's a major departure from existing technology, because it creates strong building materials from abundant waste.

Why do I blog this? when it comes to machines, it's always curious to think about machines that create stuff out of straw.

Rhetoretical politics in Pierre La Police

I am a huge fan of french comic writer Pierre la Police. Fabrice Leroy happened to write an essay about it: « C'est tout mal fait, pardon »: The Rhetoric of Politics in Pierre La Police's Comics ("it's all badly done, sorry").

In a recently published article, Livio Belloï and I examined Pierre La Police's parody of media representation, his ironic stance toward mass culture in general, and his reflexive deconstruction of the comics medium, as a network of complex and consistent semiotic structures. At the encoding level, Pierre La Police highlights the systematic distortion and oversimplification of reality usually found in print and television news media, which tend to mythologize (in the Roland Barthes sense) their referent for public consumption. At the decoding level, he relies on his reader's awareness to gauge the ironic transformation of real people and events into nonsensical ones.

The article then explores syntactic and semantics constructions (discursive shortcut, lexical malapropisms , slang, adjectival misuse) that are at stakes in the comics. Reading La Police's stuff, I am always amazed by some of the structures like: " "Des chômeurs empêchent Lionel Jospin de prendre son bain, ils ont essayé de lui casser le magnétoscope mais l'armée il les a empêché" ("Jobless people prevent Lionel Jospin [france prime minister at that time to take a bath, they tried to break his VCR but the army he prevent them from doing that", with a mistake on purpose).

These morphosyntactic distortions ironically imply that the news tends to reduce political reality to an infantilized oversimplification, and that news consumers in return process information at a most simplistic, and sometimes ridiculously transformative level (as recent electoral campaigns proved to many observers).

About infantilization, Thomas Lélu is also doing good. Why do I blog this? I am very often intrigued by oversimplication and infantilization in media production, Pierre la Police nicely makes fun of this in today's world.

Reboot 8 Friday morning

Jesse James Garrett (from Adaptive Path) talked about user-generated information architecture ("Beyond Tagging"). The problem designers have today is that they can't always know the words people will use or the groups people will prefer. Card-sorting techniques is a primitive low-tech way to do the job. In the last few year, new approaches were used: instead of buidling architectures, build systems for users to build their own architecture (explicit activity): tags (user-defined keyword metadata), navigation devices (expose other people's keywords). BUT there are problems: insider language, "everybody use this tag" is a poor substitute for controlled vocabulary, is the most popular tag, by definition, best? Besides, the tag relies on people good well and sometimes the system is undermine with tag spam (tag things with irrelevant but popular tags), tag bombing (mistag content to make a statement about it.

So how can this could be improved? Amazon defies the conventional wisdom about information architecture (theh fact that users create mental maps of sites as they navigate (formulaitng their own classification system)). Amazon process an enormous amount of data: it knows everything you do with their website and they're able to generate architecture for you, to connect you affectively with their content.

The next step is to make this algorithm transparent to the users; to do that we need better data: about content that we are serving and about the users. The second one require another approach than usability testing ("usability testing are canes for the blind"): we need to treat EVERY visit into a usability test and every user in a test subject (to track effectiveness of their algorithm). And more sophisticated analysis of stats are needed to lead to more meaningful results than just most accessed directories. Unfortunately, the presenter did not go further explaining how this could be achieved, and the discussion stayed at the information architecture level (I know that's the topic of the talk but I would be interested into deeper things such as practices investigation or queries analysis over time).

Then, Bruno Guissani started by saying that he is tired that old media will be killed by new media or that journalists are not reliable. To him, the discussion should be more about where both will converge. This is something I fully agree with (old media does not disappear but have a peculiar relationship with new media such as blogs).

He presented the example of the swiss magazine "L'Hebdo" which, during the french "banlieue" riots in 2005, instead of sending journalists there and quickly getting back home; they sent almost every journalist on a weekly rotation (sth like 10 days per person) and they reported news/interview/insights on a blog. They rented a small studio on the groundfloor in the "banlieue". This impacted the way journalists worked (reconnecting journalism and field investigation) and also how others newspaper looked at this experience (and in the end tell their stories ina better way). But it also impacted the city itself, and now people from the city voluntereed to take care of the blog: it's the first media in this city now (there were no newspaper there previously). The whole thing is financed through a book that compiled the stories coming from the blog.

Boundary objects

According to Birger Hjørland's definition:

Boundary object is a concept originally introduced by Susan L. Star and James R. Griesemer (1989) to refer to objects that serve an interface between different communities of practice. Boundary objects are an entity shared by several different communities but viewed or used differently by each of them.

Star, S., L. & Griesemer, J. R. (1989). Institutional Ecology, 'Translations' and Boundary Objects: Amateurs and Professionals in Berkeley's Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, 1907-39. Social Studies of Science, 19, 387-420.

Why do I blog this? this is an important concept, and I am often trapped in conversations in which I have to struggle between disciplines and communities. For instance, talking about "locative" with my former linguistics teacher is very different than talking about locative media with LBS designers.

Update: Fabio has a good blogpost about this very concept. He has a good take about it:

I am more convinced than ever that disciplinal purity will unlikely ever be a defining characteristic of our practice, but that this has to be seen under a positive light, as an opportunity to shape theoretical frameworks around fluid, relational models, rather than striving for monolithic, all-encompassing paradigms.

Ito on kids participation in new media culture

Cultural anthropologist Dr. Mizuko Ito recently published a draft about Kids' participation in new media cultures which is very worth reading. She addresses the question of how young people mobilize the media and the imagination in everyday life andand how new media change this dynamic. Some excerpts I found intersting:

Our contemporary understandings of media and the childhood imagination are framed by a set of cultural distinctions between an active/creative or a passive/derivative mode of engaging with imagination and fantasy. (...) Scholars in media studies have challenged the cultural distinctions between active and passive media, arguing that television and popular media do provide opportunities for creative uptake and agency in local contexts of reception. (...) new convergent media such as Pokemon require a reconfigured conceptual apparatus that takes productive and creative activity at the “consumer” level (...) The important question is not whether the everyday practices of children in media culture are “original” or “derivative,” “active” or “passive,” but rather the structure of the social world, the patterns of participation, and the content of the imagination that is produced through the active involvement of kids, media producers, and other social actors. This is a conceptual and attentional shift motivated by the emergent change in modes of cultural production. (...) New technologies tend to be accompanied by a set of heightened expectations, followed by a precipitous fall from grace after failing to deliver on an unrealistic billing. (...) technologies are in fact embodiments, stabilizations, and concretizations of existing social structure and cultural meanings, growing out of an unfolding history as part of a necessarily altered and contested future. The promises and the pitfalls of certain technological forms are realized only through active and ongoing struggle over their creation, uptake, and revision.

She then describes 3 important constructs:

contemporary media needs to be understood not as an entirely new set of media forms but rather as a convergence between more traditional media such as television, books, and film, and digital and networked media and communications. Convergent media involve the ability for consumers to select and engage with content in more mobilized waylateral networks of communication and exchange at the consumer level. (...) These changing media forms are tied to the growing trend toward personalization and remix as genres of media engagement and production. Gaming, interactive media, digital authoring, Internet distribution, and networked communications enable a more customized relationship to collective imaginings as kids mobilize and remix media content to fit their local contexts of meaning. (...) described the kind of social exchange that accompanies the traffic in information about new media mixes like Pokemon and Yugioh as hypersocial, social exchange augmented by the social mobilization of elements of the collective imagination

Why do I blog this? I met Mizuko last month at the Netpublic conference and was very interested in how she's taking another stance regarding kids engagement in new media culture, especially what she was explaining about convergence and hypersociality. I find particulary pertinent the way she rephrase the question of the kids participation into something broader and - in the end - much richer. These constructs are important to me, both as researcher in the field of emerging technologies and also when working with game designers to make them understand the implications of their creations.

TV test pattern / test card

A test card is (according to Wikipedia):

A test card, also known as a test pattern in North America, is a television test signal, typically broadcast at times when the transmitter is active, but no program is being broadcast (often at startup and closedown). Originally, all test cards were actually physical cards at which a television camera was pointed, and such cards are still often used for calibration, alignment, and matching of cameras and camcorders. Test patterns used for calibrating or troubleshooting the downstream signal path are nowadays generated by test signal generators, which do not depend on the correct configuration of (and presence of) a camera. (...) Most include a set of calibrated color bars which will produce a characteristic pattern of "dot landings" on a vectorscope, allowing chroma and tint to be precisely adjusted between generations of videotape or network feeds

Some examples:

Why do I blog this? first because I like their odd design; second because it's an artifact that belongs to the past. What's the equivalent of the test pattern for the Web?

100 most influential works in cognitive science

For those who want to keep in touch with cognitive sciences, let's have a look at the one hundred most influential works in cognitive science; here is just the top10:

• Syntactic Structures Chomsky, N. (1957)
• Vision: a computational investigation into the human representation and processing of visual information Marr, D. (1982)
• Computing machinery and intelligence Turing, A. M. (1950) Mind, 59, 433-460.
• The organization of behavior; a neuropsychological theory Hebb, D.O. (1949)
• Parallel distributed processing: Explorations in the microstructure of cognition Rumelhart, D. E., McClelland, J. L. (1986)
• Human problem solving Newell, A., & Simon, H. A. (1972)
• he modularity of mind: An essay on faculty psychology Fodor, J. (1983)
• Remembering: A study in experimental and social psychology Bartlett, F. C. (1932)
• The magical number seven, plus or minus two: Some limits on our capacity for processing information Miller, G. A. (1956) Psychological Review, 63, 81-97
• Perception and Communication Broadbent, D. (1958)

Why do I blog this such ranking is weird but interesting, I was wondering whether there could be more diachronic representations, both for research work and paradigm: a Kuhn-esque ranking would be curious.