Research

[MyResearch] 35 ways to find your location!

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Chris Heathcote's presentation at ETCON: 35 ways to find your location: a tutorial about some of the techniques that can be used to find where we are in space. He claims that in 10 years' time, there will be no concept of lost. We have many way to know where we are. He compare those methods (accuracy, availability, reliability / trust, output useful to humans, output useful to computers, requirements for conversion (extra enablers needed) , acquire or refine?).

The methods:

the earth, the time, cultural clues (which cell phone operators available? which wi-fi providers? phonebox operators? phone number syntax? newspapers available? language being spoken?), ask someone, use a map, cell ID, angle of arrival, time difference of arrival (TDOA), observed time difference (OTD), GPS, WAAS/EGNOS and other GPS enhancements, post codes / zipcodes,street names (street corners / intersections, street numbers), business names, landmarks and littlemarks, phone boxes / public transport stops / utility markings, location street signs, geowarchalking, dead reckoning,wi-fi triangulation, broadcast TV/radio triangulation, IP lookup, encoding of location in access point name / location points, local servers / Rendezvous, bluetooth, RFID, who you are near (inference), objects you are near, the road most traveled

I like this very much, because it provides a nice review of cues human rely on. This nice piece of work is a first step for many locative media project :)

[Space and Place] What is Axial Analysis

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Via Analyzing the effects of spatial configuration on human movement and social interaction in Canadian Arctic communities (Dr. Peter C. Dawson - University of Calgary, Canada):

Configurational modeling of urban networks has become a major focus of space syntax studies. Such models are constructed by breaking up the urban layout of a city or town into the fewest and longest lines of sight and access that pass through all possible routes of movement. The resulting axial map can then be analyzed using a number of statistical measures that describe the configurational properties of the network. A measure of how accessible each axial line segment is to neighboring lines can be obtained by simply counting the number of connections per segment (Hillier et al., 1993: 35). In addition to measuring the connectivity of a line segment, the relationship of each axial line to the whole urban system provides an important global measure called integration. The most integrated lines in a network are those with the shortest average “trip” lengths to all other destinations within the grid. In contrast, the most segregated lines are those in which trip lengths vary to a much greater degree. In other words, integration measures the mean depth of every axial line in the grid relative to all other lines (Hillier et al., 1993: 35).

[MyResearch] Spatial Positions and multiple levels of mutuality of knowledge

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A knows where A is located
- A knows where B is located
- B knows that A knows where B is located
- A knows that B knows that A knows where B is located
-… A knows that B is at the library, A can infer B’s activity
- A knows that B is heading to the restaurant, A can infer B’s activity
- A knows that B is in the bus, A cannot talk to B about the investment they intend to do.
- A knows that B is connected, A and B copresent = virtual sense of community
- A knows that B passed here, A can infer B’s activity
- …

[Research] Why this enthusiasm toward collaborative mapping?

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ed mac gillavry claims that

There are four different developments that have led to the evolution of collaborative mapping: 1. Introduction of location-aware devices 2. Emergence of social software 3. Blogging revolution 4. Adoption of Opensource and interoperability

Whereas, space.frot.org/ proposes that:

four more different developments that have led to the evolution of collaborative mapping 1. machine meaningfulness of geospatial data 2. open data, free use 3. the psychogeographic revival 4. echelon for everyone - monitoring and data sharing, privacy and data mining

[TheWorld] Tools for Collective Intelligence

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Nice review (in french) of the tools that support collective intelligence.

La notion d’intelligence collective implique celle de communication, de collaboration et de partage de la connaissance. L’intelligence va émerger des interactions et des réflexions menées par des groupes d’individus.

1. Outils facilitant l’accès à l’information 1.1 Outils de représentation et de modélisation des données 1.1.1. Normes et standards

La création de standards permet de normaliser l’information sur Internet. Les logiciels vont pouvoir traiter des formats de données compatibles. En voici une liste partielle : - Les formats d’enregistrement de données : base de données Sql, Oracle, LDAP, - Les formats de documents : html, xml, xhtml, XPointer, XML Base, XLink, XSL, RDF, SMIL, SVG, WML, OPML, VRML… - Les langages de définition de type (DTD, XML Schema, RDF Schema) - Les langages d’ontologies permettant la représentation de concept (OML, XOL, OIL) - Les langage de "service" : Web services, SOAP, XML-RPC

1.1.2. Outils de cartographie de l’information

1.1.3. Le Web sémantique RDF !

1.2 Outils de recherche de données 1.2.1. Les moteurs de recherche Google, NecResearch spécialisée dans la documentation scientifique ou Aleph, moteur de recherche spécialisé en Sciences humaines, …

1.2.2. Les agents et outils de veille automatique Copernic Personal Agent

1.3 Quelques techniques de pointe Case Based Reasoning

2. Outils facilitant la communication 2.1 Les outils favorisant la communication électronique - Les messages électroniques ou mails. - Les « chats » - Les forums de discussion électronique (newsgroup) - Les forums-projets (par exemple de Tela Botanica) - Les systèmes de Foires aux questions (FAQ) - Les logiciels peer-to-peer de messagerie instantanée - Les tableaux blancs et les systèmes de visioconférence

2.2 Outils au service de la collaboration Groupwares

[MyResearch] Mapping user's location in EPFL

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I finally have a first prototype of what I want to show (in the first place) on my ipaq : my location (in the green part of EPFL) and the location of somebody for instance located in a car park (west part of epfl, in the upper left hand corner). Dots represent people's location.

At the moment, this map is a snapshot of a SVG file where Patrick and I mixed a jpg file (map of EPFL) and people's position (that we're going to get thanks to wifi antenna's position).

[MyResearch] What is a complementary strategy in problem solving

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As I talked previously, "Epistemic actions: physical actions that make mental computations easier, faster ore more accurate". David Kirsh claims that "sometimes the best way to solve a cognitive problem is by adapting the world rather than adapting oneself". He relates this to Backman's work about complementary strategies:

Complementary strategies, therefore, allow agents to compensate for resource limitations in working memory and processing power, and cognitive limitations in categorizing skill, and so on. (Backman et al, 92).

... use of external representation in problem solving... There is a nice example about this in a japanese paper about finger counting (Hiroyuki Nakahara : Finger Counting as a Calendar: a case of distributed cognition).

...Bauer and Johnson-Laird (1993) hypothesised that an external representation can ease deductive reasoning in supporting the subject to keep track of the possible alternatives model (we're here in the 'mental model' theory). They validated this hypothesis and claimed that the subjects do not perform all the computation in their minds but they solve the problem by interacting with the representation... According to Rizzo and Marti, this experiment (from johnson-laird and bauer) is the first ever done to show that external representation is a support of distributed processing between mind and representation.

[MyResearch] Cities viewed as problem solver (heuristics?)

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After having a glance at The Information Architecture of Cities by L. Andrew Coward and Nikos A. Salingaros. I was wondering about the fact that they claim that "Cities can be viewed as information architecture systems". Why not now considering that if space is a resource for collaborative/distributed problem solving, we can hypothesize that cities offer nices features (or heuristics!) for collaborative problem solving ?

[Research] Cognitive Anthropology

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I was wondering about how Cognitive Anthropology deal with this notion of space as a resource used in problem solving for human beings. Cognitive anthropology is a recent sub-field which focused on "cultural knowledge, knowledge which is embedded in words, stories, and in artifacts, and which is learned from and shared with other humans " (D'Andrade 1995). Its methods rely on four basic categories: semantics, knowledge structures, models and systems, and discourse analysis.

[MyResearch] Epistemic action versus pragmatic action

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Kirsh, D. & Maglio, P. (1994). On distinguish between epistemic from pragmatic action. Cognitive Science, 18, 513-549. Epistemic actions: physical actions that make mental computations easier, faster ore more accurate. They are external actions that an agent performs to change his/her own computational state.

Pragmatic actions: actions which create physical states which physically advance one towards goal.

So epistemic actions designate a physical action whose primary function is to improve cognition during computation by : -1) reducing cognitive load (space complexity) ; -2) reducing the number of steps required (time complexity) ; -3) reducing the probability of errors (unreliability).

David Kirsh seems to be the guy who is the closest to my research interest in the sense that he studied how distributed cognition rely on external things like use of space, movements and so forth. In another paper (Complenebtary strategies:why we use our hands when we think), he exemplified in which way people encode the state of a process or simplify perception: - pointing - arranging the position and orientation of nearby objects - writing things down - manipualting counters or rulers or other artifacts. - ...

[Research] Is dyad a social structure ?

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Hare, Borgatta and Bales (1966) claims that dyady should not be considered as groups:

since the secession of either participants would result in the destruction of every relationship, dyads do no constitute a social structure per se. On the contrary, groups of three and more people allow their member to have indirect relationships with one another, and can maintain a given organization in spite of personal changes.

-> Small groups are made up of 3 to 20 members

[MyResearch] Use of Space in Problem Solving: David Kirsh

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David Kirsh studies is of interest with regard to my idea of analyzing how space is used in collaboraitv eproblem solving:

How do humans reduce cognitive complexity? How do we maintain control over the structure of our workplaces? How do we encode information in arrangements? How do we lay down cues, constraints and markers to simplify activity? These are a few of the problems I would like to understand.

To explore these issues scientifically is a challenge which my students and I are trying to meet by videotaping people interacting in naturalistic settings, by running controlled experiments in the laboratory, and by building computer models of expertise to explore the strengths and weaknesses of different approaches.

[MyResearch] Locative Packet

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It's strange I did not blog about this locative packet thing which is tremendously interesting because of lcoation/xml/rdf/foaf :) It is about collaborative geoannotation at a Collaborative Mapping workshop at O'Reilly's Emerging Technology 2004 conference in San Diego, CA

The workshop's aggregator will offer a REST interface with a simple RDF/XML format for geoannotations, 'locative packets', with, we hope, the following aims:
- A simple XML serialisation that different applications can produce and consume, without even having to be RDF-aware.
- A shared 'protocol' which different applications can accept and send via HTTP POST, Jabber, ...
- Simple guidelines for RDF vocabularies to use in geoannotation.

Omitting the header which declares XML namespaces, this is a complete locative packet, in outline.

1: <locative:Packet> 2: 3: <geo:long>-0.0104</geo:long> 4: <geo:lat>51.2377</geo:lat> 5: 6: <dc:title>Greenwich Observatory</dc:title> 7: <dc:description>It gets windy up there sometimes.</dc:description> 8: 9: <foaf:maker> 10: <foaf:Person foaf:mbox="mailto:jo@frot.org"/> 11: </foaf:maker> 12: 13: </locative:Packet>

lines 3/4: WGS84 latitude and longitude, in decimal format

lines 6/7: title of, and text description of, your annotatation, using terms from the Dublin Core metadata initiative.

lines 9/11: the annotation is attributed to a person, using terms from the FOAF vocabulary for people.

If you want to annotate a space with more than text, packets can be annotated with media objects of any kind - Image, Sound, MovingImage, InteractiveResource etc. We offer the DCMI Type vocabulary provided by Dublin Core as a way of typing mediafor this purpose.

Here is an example in full of a locative packet with media object attached; it doesn't get more complex than this.

<rdf:RDF xmlns:rdf="http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#" xmlns:rdfs="http://www.w3.org/2001/02/rdf-schema#" xmlns:geo="http://www.w3.org/2003/01/geo/wgs84_pos#" xmlns:foaf="http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/" xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/" xmlns:locative="http://locative.net/etcon2004/loc#" xmlns:media="http://purl.org/dc/dcmitype/" >

<locative:Packet>

<geo:long>-0.0104</geo:long> <geo:lat>51.5722</geo:lat>

<dc:title>Greenwich Observatory</dc:title> <dc:description>A cool but quite clear October afternoon in Greenwich Park.</dc:description> <dc:date>2003-10-15T13:45:31+01:00</dc:date>

<foaf:maker> <foaf:Person foaf:mbox_sha1sum="c43ff6d043d3f72a7e94640aa036f654eaed804b"/> </foaf:maker>

<locative:media> <media:Image rdf:about="http://iconocla.st/photo/2003/10/12/img_0299-m.jpg" dc:format="image/jpeg"/> </locative:media>

<rdfs:seeAlso rdf:resource="http://iconocla.st/photo/2003/10/12/img_0299.html"/>

</locative:Packet> </rdf:RDF>

[Research] Reading Notes about Activity Theory

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(taken from Activity Theory by Liam Bannon) AT is based on Marxist philosophy and soviet psychology that consider the “principle of unity and inseparability of consciousness and activity”: mind comes to exist, develops and can only be understood within the context of meaningful, goal-oriented activity). Rubinshtein and Vygotski claimed that human action is a unit of psychological analysis. Leontiev developed the conceptual framework known as AT.

At is not a theory strictly speaking, it is rather a set of basic principles that constitute a general conceptual system. Review of those principles below. - The concept of activity implies that there is an agent who acts (individual or collective). Activity mediates interaction between subjects (agents) and objects (things).

- Object-orientedness: human beings live in a reality which is objective in a broad sense; the things which constitute this reality have not only the properties which are considered objective according to natural sciences (physics, biology...) but social/culturally defined properties as well.

- Activity Theory differentiates between internal and external activities. The traditional notion of mental processes corresponds to internal activities. Activity Theory emphasizes that internal activities cannot be understood if they are analyzed separately, in isolation from external activities, because there are mutual transformations between these two kinds of activities: internalization and externalization.

- Internalization, i.e., transformation of external activities into internal ones, provides a possibility for human beings to simulate potential interactions with reality without performing actual manipulations on real objects.

- Externalization, i.e., transformation of internal activities into external ones, is often necessary when an internalized action needs to be "repaired" or when a collaboration between several agents requires their activities to be performed externally in order to be coordinated.

- The Activity Theory emphasis on social factors and on interaction between agents and their environments explains why the principle of tool mediation plays a central role within the approach. Tools shape the way human beings interact with reality. And, tools usually reflect the experiences of other people who have tried to solve similar problems at an earlier time and invented/ modified the tool to make it more efficient. On the one hand, tools expand our possibilities to manipulate and transform different objects, but on the other hand the object is perceived and manipulated not "as such" but within the limitations set by the tool. Tools are never used in a vacuum, but have been shaped by the social and cultural context where the use is taking place.

- Leontiev's version of Activity Theory is often associated with a three-level scheme describing the hierarchical structure of activity. The central level (or, rather, group of levels) is that of actions. Actions are oriented towards goals, which are the objects of actions. This top-level goal, which in Activity Theory is designated as "motive", is the object of a whole activity. herefore, activities, which are driven by motives, are performed through certain actions which are directed at goals and which, in turn, are implemented through certain operations.

[MyResearch] Space as a Resource for Action

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I am glad to find support for my idea of "space a cognitive resource for action". At the "JOURNÉE SCIENTIFIQUE "ESPACE, INTER/ACTION & COGNITION"", Anna Spagnolli (Istituto di Psicologia, Università di Padova), Bernard Conein, (Dép. de Sociologie, Univ. de Lille), Eric Laurier (Department of Geography, University of Glasgow),Duska Rosenberg (School of Management, Royal Holloway Univ. London). The workshop was organized by Lorenza Mondada.

I like Eric Laurier's claim:

Emailing one another in the lead up to this workshop Lorenza and myself were saying how we might go about dropping ‘the bucket’ theory of space. That is, the bucket theory is a vague general way of treating space as merely the container for our activities. Nor equally would we want to treat space as a passive backdrop or flat terrain which provides a base and unchanging co-ordinates which it is our job to interpret. Nor even, perhaps, would we want to set up space in the phenomenological arrangement: the ‘figure/landscape’ pair so central to Merleau Ponty’s notions of the depths of space (Wylie, 2003). As the outline for the session makes clear, space is there as a resource for, and, as a product of a myriad of practices.