Research

(MyResearch) Using GIS against wild fire

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Firefighters Pioneer Pocket-Sized GIS Collection

Maps are the foundation for fighting wildfires. They are used for communicating operational assignments, potential spread scenarios, and for providing a visual reference for incident team strategy discussion. Maps answer questions such as "What is the topography in and near the fire?" and "What is the jurisdiction of the fire and where is it likely to spread?" Maps help managers deploy resources safely and assess the potential overall damage of the fire. (...) n the early stages of a wildfire, it is difficult to obtain good detailed information from a paper map. Information is often gathered from maps, documents, and technical personnel over several days. Using GIS, all of this information is immediately available and can be easily viewed and understood under extremely stressful conditions. It is now common to see a GIS team assigned to an incident in the planning section. GIS teams provide maps showing transportation, facilities, air hazards, spread prediction, operations, and other geographically related incident management information.As part of suppression efforts at the Viejas fire, a Tactical GIS Mapping team collected and displayed real-time fire perimeter data and documented damage assessment information by flying daily helicopter reconnaissance flights and recording accurate geographic coordinates using a handheld computer. Patterson, who teaches aerial mapping using GPS, was pleased with the performance of this equipment configuration. "Total weight of a Compaq iPAQ Pocket PC and a Garmin GPS III Plus receiver is less than one pound, and the entire GIS data collection platform will easily fit into a flightsuit pocket." Patterson found that the Compaq iPAQ Pocket PC met the demanding requirements for prolonged fire perimeter mapping. The battery lasts 10 to 12 hours, and the color display can be read in bright sunlight. Map data can be stored internally. A Teletype PCMCIA card GPS receiver provides direct connectivity with the computer without a cable. Patterson believes this combination of technologies promises to become a regular fire management tool "as common as the tactical applications of Class A foam." Appleton sees potential for greater benefit using this system with a wireless connection. This would allow data to be transmitted back to the GIS unit from the air. This capability would enhance firefighter safety. "If division supervisors and operations staff know where the fire is and what is going on with the fire they have a better idea where to put the resources and can make sure those firefighters are safe," said Appleton.

[Research] Ben Shneiderman: Human Needs and Mobile Technologies: Small, fast, and fun

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Ben Shneiderman will be keynote speaker at Mobisys

The central thesis of "Leonardo's Laptop" (MIT Press, 2002) is that designers who are sensitive to human needs are more likely to make the breakthroughs that yield new technologies successes. Therefore, a theory of mobile devices would focus on compact devices that support human relationships, provide salient information, and enable creative expression. The foundations are not only the megahertz of connectivity, but also the usability and universality of interfaces. Demonstrations include digital photo applications, personal info, healthcare, and e-commerce.

(Research) research about habitat!

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The creators of Habitat (Chip Morningstar and F. Randall Farmer) now have a blog ! It's really nice to benefit from their experience. Their paper "The Lessons of Lucasfilm's Habitat" should be considered as a primer in research about multi-user environment.

- A multi-user environment is central to the idea of cyberspace. - Communications bandwidth is a scarce resource. - An object-oriented data representation is essential. - The implementation platform is relatively unimportant. - Data communications standards are vital. - Detailed central planning is impossible; don't even try. - You can't trust anyone. - Work within the system. - Get real.

(Research) Augmented Reality Game

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NetAttack is a new Augmented Reality game

NetAttack "is a new type of indoor/outdoor Augmented Reality game that makes the actual physical environment an inherent part of the game itself." In this game, two teams are fighting to destroy the central database of a virtual big company. Both teams have indoor players, who control the game from their laptop computers, and outdoor players, equipped with GPS receivers, trackers, sensors and video cameras.

(Research) A case study of the development of a mobile game based on geolocation

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ICTs and the engineering of encounters: A case study of the development of a mobile game based on the geolocation of terminals, a talk by Christian Licoppe, presented at the Digiplay seminar convened by Dr Nicola Green at University of Surrey

By means of tests and user feedback, designers initially oriented towards the concept of a multi-player role playing game for mobile phones, targeted towards a specific audience, will shift their design strategy. They will gradually grasp the potential represented by the possibility of users “seeing” their mutual positions on mobile screens in order to enter into contact with one another. Their design work will focus on the engineering of encounters, through an innovative geolocalised service which is now oriented towards any mobile phone user (and not only gamers) – a generic device that anyone could use in principle. The design trajectory moves away from the development of a highly scripted, distinctive game towards the development of a generic information and communication technology.

Since the services they design are based on location tracking, they are particularly interesting from a sociological standpoint. Geolocation embeds issues of space and place directly into the engineering of mediated encounters. Up to now, electronic encounters were a characteristic feature of Internet world, i.e. in situations where actors use a connected personal computer. The development of mobile technology actually introduces original possibilities of exploiting cell phone tracking (in wireless network or through satellite positioning) to engineer disembodied meetings “on screens”. Since mobile phones almost always accompany their owners as they move about, a geographic position (that of their “geolocated” terminal) can be associated with personal electronic identities. The mobile phone screen may become a map of the cityscape, and icons or avatars represent the location of the players that move in it.

[Research] Strategies used for directing and indicating

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Gutwin, C. and Greenberg, S. (1999b). The Effects of Workspace Awareness Support on the Usability of Real-Time Distributed Groupware. ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction (TOCHI) 6 (3), 243-281. Gutwin and Greenberg (1999b) compared people’s performance in two groups of pairs. The first group of participants used simple groupware system and the other used an awareness-enhanced system. In both systems, the medium-sized visual workspace allow people to collaborate by creating, manipulating and organizing artefacts. The participants were given a pipeline construction kit. Each pair had to assembly and manipulate simple pipeline in a shared two-dimensional workspace. In the first condition, participants did not have any awareness tool. In the second condition, a radar view added on the main view into the top left corner showed the entire workspace in miniature. This AT showed the viewport of the current user and the partner’s ; it also shows both mouse cursors. Thus this radar view provided visual indications of the other person’s location, the location of his or her cursor, and the motion of objects that he or she moved. Participants had to complete three different tasks : assembly pipe so as to meet another person at a specified location, constructing two identical structures from two existing stockpiles of pipe sections and finally verbally guiding the other partner in order to add specific sections to an existing network. The authors examined five variables : completion time, verbal efficiency (number of words spoken, classified in categories), perception of effort (questionnaire), overall preference (questionnaire) and strategy use. The authors noticed the following results : the group with AT completed the task more quickly (for task 1 and 3) and more efficiently (with less words spoken). Beside, adding AT to a groupware system seemed to improve people’s satisfaction. They interpret the fact that the use of an AT increase the performance by claiming that the radar view allowed visual communication. For instance, workspace locations were easier to describe in the AT conditions since the user could see exactly where his partner’s view and telepointer were ; they could also provide relative directions based on the partner’s current location. Gutwin and Greenberg also claimed that the AT, by providing continuous feedback (about piece location for example) and feedthrough enables the player to increase their performance. Moreover, the awareness information enabled participants to use different and more effective strategies to perform the tasks. They recorded the strategy used by partners to indicated locations and to indicates pipelines sections. They also identified different strategies subjectively by watching the session videotapes. Participants used a wide range of methods, both verbal and non-verbal for indicating locations and pieces. For instance some gave directions base on the other person’s current location (e.g., “up and left from where you are”), a description of an object at the location or directions based on a previously identified location. Gutwin and Greenberg noticed differences in strategy use between the two conditions that can be partly attributed to the information available in the two interfaces (simple system and awareness-enhanced system). It seems that pairs in the condition without AT used a wider range of strategies than pairs with AT. Furthermore, the two different groups did not use the same strategy. Strategies used for directing and indicating:

Strategy Description
Relative-to-you Directions base on the other person’s current location : e.g., “up and left from where you are”
Describe-location A description of an object at the location: e.g., “the squiggly-looking thing”
Left-right-top-bottom Rough coordinates system dividing the workspace into four blocks: e.g., “next one is in the top left corner”.
Relative-to-previous Directions based on a previously identified location: e.g., “near where we were for the last one”.
Map-coordinates3x3 Directions based on a 3-by-3 grid: e.g., “go to 1,2”
Pipe-tracing Directions to follow a line of pipe: e.g., “follow this pipe along to the right, and then it goes up”
Follow-rectangle One person tracks the other by following his or her view rectangle in the radar
Relative-to-us Directions given when both participants are in the same place: e.g. “now down and a little to the left from here”
Move-piece-to-show One person moves a pipe section to indicate a location through the radar or the overview
1D-relative-and-wait >/td> Directions to move up, down, left, or right, after which the person giving directions waits until success is established
Follow my cursor One person follows the other’s main view cursor
Describe-piece A description of the next piece to be used: e.g., “it’s an elbow section with a medium straight on the end”
Show-by-move The piece is moved back and forth in the storehouse
Show-by-drag The piece is dragged up to the construction area
Show-by-placing The piece is moved to the construction area and placed.

[Research] Counting gesture to analyse collaboration

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In order to analyse collaboration, one should find specific patterns in participants' interaction. I am still looking for a paradigm for counting gestures. Via Multimodality and Gestures in the Teacher’s Communication (Giorgio Merola and Isabella Poggi):

A deictic gesture indicates something in the surrounding environment: a way to set the reference of our discourse, then a way to explain what, in the external world, we are going to talk about. An iconic gesture instead describes the shape, size or movements of some referent we are mentioning; and this description can be sometimes metaphorically extended to refer to some abstract referent. Finally, some symbolic gestures directly mention some object, feature or action.

[Research] Cell phones and social interactions

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Via the feature

Perhaps most people wouldn't want to use their phones to coordinate play with strangers. Nalini Kotamraju is a PhD candidate at UC Berkely, a sociologist specializing in the everyday uses of information technology. In her ethnographic studies with teenagers from the United Kingdom and the United States, she observed that people primarily communicate with people they already know, from pre-mobile circumstances. The bulk of people's relationships come from their class, their schooling, their established social group. Mobility has not immediately disrupted those patterns, she asserts. New technologies like mobile phones and their ever-evolving communications applications present new modes of interaction, new ways of courtship, she acknowledges, but within the existing framework of social mores. And social mores take a long time to evolve.

The article in the feature discuss the way mobile devices impact chances of "hooking up".

[Research] The Secret's in the Schedule

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Video Games website Gamasutra proposes a brief on schedule, time and team management, a crux issue in software/video game development.

The Mythical Man-Month is a seminal work on not just software engineering but the psychology of human interaction inside a team environment. (...) Creating a schedule first requires building a task list, which is in fact an expression of your design document. Are you building a racing game? Do you need a four-point suspension system? Do you need a flight control model? Is water surface dynamics critical to the boat level? Do you need a custom lightmapper? These game features need to be filtered into independent engineering, art, and level-construction tasks. The resolution of these tasks is dependent on where you are in the timeline of your project. We begin with system-level tasks during pre-production and constantly refine these as milestones are started, progressed, and completed. By the time you reach production with the major unknowns resolved, you should be able to make a valiant effort to refine the entire schedule down to days, but don't. Tasks should initially be timed at a resolution of about a week. Anything that needs to be completed in the next two months should be resolved down to days. Refining the resolution too much, too soon will be work wasted since the dynamic nature of a schedule will lead you to redo it anyway. (...) The next stage is understanding your team's manpower. You should begin by identifying the type of developer (any team member including programmers, artists, level designers, and so forth) each person on your team is. One simple way to do this is to analyze how they fall into four basic types, based on combinations of skill and dedication. These types can be represented on a simple 232 matrix with their skill level on one axis and their dedication on the other. (...) Once you understand your team, you can successfully begin to assign people from your pool of talent to the task list you have built. Assign the highly skilled but poorly motivated people first. Give them the systems their skills match and they are interested in building. If you run into conflicts such as too many physics programmers all wanting to own the system, try to exchange these resources with other teams. You do not want highly skilled, poorly-motivated people working on systems they don't want to. If you do this they will most likely start dragging their feet or sending out resumes. Next, layer in the superstars who most likely can do almost any system you assign to them. These people have written graphics, physics, sound, AI, and most everything else so skill matching should be less important. After they have been placed, the first two groups of developers should cover every major system, leaving the eager rookies to round out the corners and fill in the gaps.

[Research] Evolution of Cooperation and Labor Division in Artificial Ants

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Some people here works on ant simulation. I like the idea of studying division of labor of cooperating agents/ants.

Perez-Uribe, A., Floreano, D. and Keller, L. (2003) Effects of group composition and level of selection in the evolution of cooperation in artificial ants. In Proceedings of the 7th European Conference on Artificial Life ECAL'2003, Springer, LNAI 2801, pp. 128-137. [pdf]

Ants compose about 15% of the animal biomass in most terrestrial environments. Two key features of their enormous success are the ability to cooperate and to perform efficient division of labor. These features, which allow ants to perform complex tasks in a variety of different environments, would be of great benefit for artificial intelligent systems, such as software agents and autonomous robots.

Relatedness is known to have played a major role in favoring the evolution of altruism in social insects, therefore, we would like to determine whether the role of relatedness can be experimentally demonstrated with artificial agents such as robots.

Moreover, this will enable us to infer some guidelines for the design of autonomous agents (robots) capable of cooperation and task self-allocation.

(Research) (area)code: location awareness app

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Things at futuresonic seems to be more and more appealing. This application named (area)code is promising. It is an sms mapping system which reveals personal memories and the hidden histories behind 5 key sites in Manchester city centre.

(area)code is one of the first systems to use sms and the ubiquitous mobile phone to locate information in specific places. (area)code invites you to collect and reflect upon your immediate environment, and enables new forms of engagement and information exchange between person and place, Developed for Future Sonic (area)code aims to inspire comments about the affect of urban regeneration in the city. Manchester has been an important trade centre since the Industrial Revolution through to today’s manifestation as a retail and leisure boomtown. How do such changes affect our lives? Do we feel involved in the decision making process or do you find your life has to alter to fit these new urban spaces?

[Research] Firefighters goes wireless!

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According to the feature, a research team is working to integrate wireless technology into firefighters' helmets, providing them with mobile information to help save lives.

Someone in the Chicago Fire Department (CFD) read a newspaper account last year about a high tech motorcycle helmet that had been developed by a couple of Wright's grad students. Designed for hands-free use, the helmet allows riders to control a music player, talk on the phone, and use GPS for navigation. The helmet has a heads-up display (HUD) that lets riders see caller IDs and the speed at which they're traveling, along with other information. Would it be possible to modify this helmet for firefighting purposes? The CFD called Wright and he jumped at the idea.

At first, some firefighters balked at the idea. They don't use computers at the scene of a fire. They already carry 30 pounds of stuff on their backs and they saw little reason to bring one into an inferno. But with recent developments in smart dust technology, wireless networks and wearable computing, which would make it possible for them to navigate through smoke-filled buildings and provide critical information that could save lives (including their own), they agreed to cooperate with the Berkeley team. (...) Because things happen fast at the scene of a fire, it's easy to lose track of where firefighters and equipment are inside a building. Regular roll calls must be issued, which are necessary, but take time away from fighting the fire. Also, if a firefighter falls, it's possible that no one will find out until the next roll call, and by then it might be too late to save the firefighter. Wright's team developed a computer screen, called the Electronic Incident Command System (EICS), to replace the Incident Coordinator's greaseboard and eliminate the need for roll calls. The EICS displays the electronic floor plan and the locations of each firefighter, because they'll be wearing a wireless tag that transmits vital statistics, such as heart rate, to the IC. If there's trouble, the firefighter's icon on the EICS will flash a warning.

Most firefighters use radios to communicate, but as the researchers discovered, voice communication is often limited by noise. "There is a lot of noise on the fire ground," a firefighter explained to a grad student. "You’re inside; the fire is burning; it makes noise; there’s breaking glass; there’s chain saws above your head where they’re cutting a hole in the roof; there’s other rigs coming in with sirens blaring; lots of radio traffic; everybody trying to radio at the same time." Instead of relying on sound to convey information, the modified helmet could display text messages sent from the IC, such as orders to evacuate. When a firefighter needs to speak to someone else, he'll use a special microphone that adheres to the outside of his neck, which cuts down the background noise significantly.

[Research] Locative Media Workshop

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I am considering going at Futuresonic:

Locative Media

2pm, April 30th Panel - One area that is perhaps generating the most excitement, and that has caught the imagination of a new generation of artists, programmers and DIY technologists, is the emergent field of Locative Media. Assigning data with spatial coordinates so that it can be accessed from particular points, Locative Media explores how networked mobile devices, when combined with positioning technologies such as GPS, may be used for social communication and organisation, or for artistic interventions in which geographical space becomes its canvas. Anthony Townsend (US) Anne Galloway (CA) Marc Tuters (CA) Ben Russell (UK) In association with Locative Media Lab Click here for text by Marc Tuters. PDF/79kb

[MyResearch] Trace Diagrams + Numerical measures of collaboration

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After my previous post about the use of trace diagrams to analyse collaboration between human agents, I read Joiner R. & Issroff, K. (2003). Tracing success: graphical methods for analysing successful collaborative problem solving. Computers & Education, 41, 4, 369-378.

In this paper, the experiment consisted in a collaborative foraging task in a MOO environment.

The authors went further by combining the visual analysis of trace diagrams with numerical measures: - Task division is calculated by adding the number of rooms that one participant only searched to the number of rooms that the other participant only searched. - Overlap is calculated by counting the number of rooms both partners searched -Backtracking is calculated by adding up the number of times one partner entered a room they had already entered.

They then correlated those number with a performance index. This allowed them to find that there was a significant and negative correlation between task division and number of moves taken(r=-0.72, P<0.05): the greater the task division, the less moves a pair took to solve the problem. There was a significant and positive correlation between overlap and the number of moves (r=0.77, P<0.05): the greater the overlap, the more moves taken to solve the problem. There was a significant positive correlation between backtracking and number of moves (r =0.92, P<0.05): the more backtracking, the greater the number of moves.

[MyResearch] Common Tasks In Multi Agent Systems

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Read in the paper "Communication in Reactive Multiagent Robotic Systems" by TUCKER BALCH AND RONALD C. ARKIN:

Our research focuses on three tasks: foraging, consuming, and grazing. Foraging consists of searching the environment for objects (referred to as attractors) and carrying them back to a cen-tral location. Consuming requires the robot to perform work on the attractors in place, rather than carrying them back. Grazing is similar to lawn mowing; the robot or robot team must ad- equately cover the environment. Of these three, foraging has been the most widely studied to date

I put this stuff here because with the location based game developed here, we also want to simulate the activity of the participant with a multi agent thing...