[Research] Paper about users needs for location based services

Eija Kaasinen, (2003). User needs for location-aware mobile services Personal and Ubiquitous Computing, Vol. 7, No. 1,pp. 70 - 79

Mobile contexts of use vary a lot, and may even be continuously changing during use. The context is much more than location, but its other elements are still difficult to identify or measure. Location information is becoming an integral part of different mobile devices. Current mobile services can be enhanced with location-aware features, thus providing the user with a smooth transition towards context-aware services. Potential application fields can be found in areas such as travel information, shopping, entertainment, event information and different mobile professions. This paper studies location-aware mobile services from the user's point of view. The paper draws conclusions about key issues related to user needs, based on user interviews, laboratory and field evaluations with users, and expert evaluations of location-aware services. The user needs are presented under five main themes: topical and comprehensive contents, smooth user interaction, personal and user-generated contents, seamless service entities and privacy issues.

[Research] How the Army works

Interesting bunch of resources concerning military stuff: Army Field Manuals.

[MyResearch] ANOVA not suited for the analysis of intragroup

Very interesting point by JAN-WILLEM STRIJBOS in his paper THE EFFECT OF FUNCTIONALROLES ON GROUP EFFICIENCY: Using Multilevel Modeling and Content Analysis to Investigate Computer-Supported Collaboration in Small Groups:

it is important to note the implications of nonindependent observations with respect to the analysis of intragroup collaboration. This issue was only recently raised in CSCL and small group research. In research on cooperative learning, frequently the ANOVA procedure has been used to investigate the impact of an instructional strategy using individual level observations (see Slavin, 1995). This is no exception in some CSCL studies (Reiserer, Ertl, & Mandl, 2002). However, ANOVA appears not to be suited for this type of data. Stevens (1996) points out that the assumption of independence, between scores of members of the same small group, is violated. Students’ perceptions of group performance depends on all other members’ activities. Violation of independence increases as a function of the interdependence in a group, thus yielding a major increase of a Type 1 error. Stevens (1996) suggest either to test with a stricter level of significance (p below .01 or even p below .001) or to use the group average. Bonito (2002) discusses three alternative procedures that take nonindependence into account, with respect to the analysis of participation in small groups: the actor-partner interdependence model, the social relations model, and multilevel modeling (MLM).

Another reason why he advocates for multilevel modeling (MLM) is:

Another point is that, unlike a considerable amount of studies in social psychology, CSCL is not conducted in laboratory settings. Its naturalistic context adds to its ecological validity but simultaneously complicates analysis. Most CSCL studies suffer from a relatively small number of participants, and research designs in general do not exceed 20 participants (see Stahl, 2002). Furthermore, quantitative statistical analyses are rarely used. Analysis focuses on qualitative methodologies to explore intragroup interaction and the level of collaboration.MLMappears to be best suited to investigate questionnaire data that consists of self-report perceptions (cf. Bonito, 2002). However, MLM analyses with a small sample size (less than 50) are not often reported. Therefore, the methodological and analytical considerations will be discussed in more detail in the Method and Results section that covers the MLM analyses.

(Research) Rheingold on Location Blogging

Location Blogging (i.e. location-tagged blogposts for instance) is some serious stuff we are all concerned at our lab (especially Patrick and Mauro). Howard rheingold, in the feature is wondering about whether or not it is going to take off.

Will location-tagged recommendation services emerge from the accumulated opinions of many consumers, Wikipedia style, instead of arriving in a lump like a commercial guidebook? Can time-and-place-tagged media aggregate into a historical record of your activities – and display the activities of any who choose to share their media stream?

Comments also deal with "location-based friendster", location-based games like dodgeball an so forth.

(Research) Good Event: Social Capital: forms of interaction

Nice event: Social Capital: forms of interaction at the Whitney Museum of American Art, NY. I hope there will be some note put on the web :)

This group exhibition brings together contemporary artists who make the complexities of social relations the subject, material, or form of their work. Responding to contemporary societal conditions, some artists consider the influence of new technologies on human connections, while some explore the effects of cultural difference and geo-politics. Others orchestrate situations in which viewers interact directly with the artwork or with one another, forging a community within the space of the gallery. Considered together, the artists in Social Capital present various models of human interaction, encouraging viewers to reflect critically on their own positions within different social networks.

Participating Artists Include: caraballo-farman  |  Andy Deck  |  Renée Green  |  Ingo Günter  |  Jens Haaning, Emil Hrvatin & Peter Senk  |  Mark Lombardi  |  Mongrel  |  New No York, Lyn Rice, Ben Rubin & Lisa Strausfeld  |  Santiago Sierra  |  16 Beaver Group, Sociable Media Group MIT  |  Luc Steels  |  Elaine Tin Nyo  |  Rirkrit Tiravanija, Fernanda Viégas & Marc Smith

[Research] A definition of 'affordance'

This picture expresses the concept of "affordance", this comes from Kimbro.

"Affordance" is a term used by perceptual psychologists. Affordance is what an object suggests to us. For example, if you see a bench, you might think to sit down on it, or to lay down on it. Some doors have a panel on once side, and a handle on the other. If you see the panel, you think to push it. If you see the handle, you think to pull it. Perceptual psychologists use the phrase "object affordance" to talk about how objects make us think to use them.

Perceptual psychologists ask, "What is it about this object that makes people want to use it this way?" The object must talk to us with some sort of language. If we can understand this language, then we can make tools that tell us how to use them! We can also make tools that recommend some uses, and discourage others.

"Discouraging" sounds sort of odd: Why would a tool let people do something, but then discourage people from doing so?

One reason might be "because we can't do anything about it!" You can throw just about any physical object, even if you don't intend people to.

Another reason might be "because some people will actually need to use it that way." If you have a fire alarm, you want people to be able to pull it. But you only want them to pull it if there's an actual emergency.

The concept of social affordance:

Since Gibson's original idea of object affordances (See: WhatIsAffordance), software designers who create tools for communication and group interaction have come to speak of SocialAffordance. This expands the concept of designing affordances in physical environments to the development of software, and how it can afford certain types of interaction.

The concept hierarchy might look like: - WhatIsAffordance - object affordances o SocialAffordance - tools for communication, from phones to IRC to online communities

(Research) Impacts of Location Awareness

William Mitchell in the feature:

Mitchell: The implications of location-awareness are far from obvious. The technology enables you to reconsider things as fundamental as, say, signage in a city. For example, we traditionally think of a stop sign as part of the fixed infrastructure of the city. But if you have a location-aware automobile, you can shift the stop sign to the dashboard so it pops up when you approach an intersection. If you have whole networks of location aware vehicles, the system becomes more elaborate. Perhaps the stop sign only pops up when there's another car coming from the opposite direction. You could even have elaborate intersection priority schemes.

Most location-enhanced applications connect people with information or each other. But you seem to be focused on ways that the car and the city can communicate?

Mitchell: Take something as simple as knowing where the potholes in the city. Every automobile could have a sensor and wireless device that pings out a signal every time it hits a pothole. That in itself may sound trivial, but extrapolate from there. Once you have location awareness combined with sensing, all of the automobiles in a city can operate as part of a giant distributed scanner that builds a real-time model of the city and keeps it updated.

[MyResearch] Distributed Cognition Methodology

The first step is a cognitive ethnographical description of the activity, Hutchins proposes 3 levels:

DISTRIBUTED COGNITION FIRST LEVEL OF DESCRIPTION: description of the tools and representations "details of how the algorithm and representation are realized physically" Marr, 1982. Description of the Propagation of representational state across a set of physical devices (charts...) + physical activities of the members of the navigation team. This task specification permits construction of the computational level of description for the individuals.

DISTRIBUTED COGNITION SECOND LEVEL OF DESCRIPTION: cognitive requirements of performance of the task. What are the people in the setting doing? What do they have to do in order to do what they do? The problem is that we cannot directly observe their internal organization, nor can we specify the mechanisms of coordination by which representational state is propagated. I will assume that a principal role of the individuals in this setting is providing the internal structures that are required to get the external structures into coordination with one another. description of the subtasks, list of tasks

p157: DISTRIBUTED COGNITION THIRD LEVEL OF DESCRIPTION: who does what, who manipulates which artifacts/representations described in the 2 last levels. MANIPULATION OF THE TOOLs BY AN INDIVIDUAL

The other step Hutchins proposes is the computer model...

(Research) Cognition in MMOG

Via boingboing, a nice but huge pdf file about MMOG, game guilds and distributed cognition written by Constance A. Steinkuehler (University of Wisconsin–Madison). I like her statement about why video game are interesting with regard to cognition.

Despite frequent public dismissals and indictments from the non-gaming community, massively multiplayer videogames (MMOGs) do constitute a complex and nuanced set of multimodal social and communicative practices, tied to particular communities and consequential for membership and identity. As such MMOGaming is participation in a 'Discourse' (Gee, 1999). My research investigates the forms of learning, thinking, and socially interacting that MMOGs recruit from those who play. My dissertation (currently in progress) is an online cognitive ethnography of MMOGs that characterizes the emergent culture of MMOGaming and how participation is constituted through language and practice both within the game (e.g., virtual social interaction & joint activity) and beyond (e.g., the creation of fan fiction & websites). What does it mean to be literate in this social space? How does one become a member of this community? And what import does participation have for the (on- and off-screen) identities of its members? The papers below come out of this body of research.

(MyResearch) Edwin Hutchins: cognition in the wild reading notes

Here are my reading notes about Edwin Hutchins's book 'Cognition in the wild' reading notes.

"cognition in the wild": study of naturally situated cognition, concept dreived from "outdoor cognition" (Clifford Geertz, 1983) and cognitive anthropology. It is about locating cognitive activity in context, where context is not a fixed set of surrounding conditions but a wider dynamical process of which the cognition of an individual is only a part. it is in real practice that culture is produced and reproduced.

[MyResearch] Mutual Modeling Evaluation

Mutual Modeling Evaluation: comparing what player A thinks what B is going to do with what B really does.

(Research) Locative Media Communities

Locative Media Wishlist drawn after the Futuresonic workshop:

Hands-on plus practical application plus interaction works well connecting canadians who didnt know each other before, in manchester "research confabs" new collaborative projects? - more time to work on the same thing a bit more virtual / physical meetings volunteering and exchanging resources? possible connections with academic-industry new media centres biometric mapping projects - christian, rich g base units for mass-accessible biometric collaborative mapping projects workgroups - organise ourselves into common themes, formally or informally • urban planning • e-government / policy intervention • comparison / cross-labelling maps between different cities (DMG) • drawing / GPS art • social networking / metadata / collaboration • wifi - wherefi interconnections • locative literacy / schools projects / awareness hardware, software http://resourceforge.net/ software repository archives, sharing vocabularies locative list / geowanking RIXC publications mapping projects, their state of development, problems they are approaching - compare our shared and different understanding of the works. mobile bristol website - different openguides huddersfield university 'conference' - networking together different locative efforts means of support, local and interproject consume.net revival, mobile networking stuff 'whereami' - placelab, etc presence, both virtual and physical glancing, street-level tools, networking existing physical communities rather than distributed ones ala dodgeball conspiracy theories, paranoia industry interconnections - intel, nokia, etc. academic funding for educational-collaborative projects - links with universities mobile / location - mapping basestations mapping cellids - central database of phone masts collabmapped - open base stations - illegally put-up basestations without planning, identifying - reclamation of public airwave space schools work could be interesting and beneficial for all - specialist domains are often outsourced, if we can identify needs and objectives - but may have to be contained in schools grounds - field trips 'cultural wandering' 35 ways.... this is a big money industry! carving out space for ourselves and providing it to others ... listing interesting institutions - corp, govnt, acad lobbying - finding paths into influence - knowing who knows in the network - rob van k RFID activists

I like the idea of structuring the 'scene' into different workgroups. I think that could be explicited on the locative website. Especially with a publication section and event section (notes taken at event could be put here) as well as an open repository for leaving notes.

[Research] Social Software Mechanisms

Read here (cool primer about social software), the social software mechanisms description. The authors takes AIM as an example.

- Identity | Your identity is shown by a screenname, which remains persistent through time. There are incentives not to change this, like having your list of friends stored on the server and only accessible through your screenname. This acts as a pressure to not change identity. Having a persistent identity is more important than having one brought in from the physical world. - Presence | Presence is awareness of sharing the same space, and this is implemented as seeing when your friends are online, or busy. AIM isn't particularly good at group presence and visibility of communication, although other chat systems (such as IRC and early Talkers) use the concept of "rooms" and whispers. - Relationships | AIM lets you add people as buddies. From that moment, their presence is visible on your screen. This is a relationship, you're allowed them to have an effect on your environment. Not terribly nuanced however. - Conversations | Conversations are implemented as synchronous messaging. There's a difference between messaging and conversations. Messaging is just an exchange of text with no obligation, but conversations have their own presence and want to be continued. AIM does this by having a window for a conversation. It's difficult to drift out of it, it hangs there, requesting you continue. Contrast this with email which often is just messaging, and conversations die easily. - Groups | AIM isn't great at groups. Although you can have group chats, the group is transient. People have more loyalty to a group when there's some kind of joining step, when they've made some investment in it. Entering a window just doesn't do that, and there's no property of the group that exists outside the individual user's accounts. - Reputation | Reputation is used more in systems which allow meeting new individuals. AIM's simple version of this is "warning". Any user may "warn" any other user. A users total "warn" level (a figure up to 100) is shown to everyone they communicate with. Unfortunately, it's not a trustworthy reputation system, and reputation is notoriously difficult -- but humans are great at dealing with it themselves, given certain affordances: persistence identities, and being able to discuss those identities with other people. AIM's simplistic relationship system makes reputation not so important though. - Sharing | People like to share. With AIM, sharing is often as simple as giving a friend a link to follow. Other systems, such as Flikr, are about sharing photographs. These act as small transactions that build genuine group feeling.

Another good reference here.

[Research] Types of behavior in MUDs

Since lots of research concerning social software could be derived from MUD research, I read this nice paper: "Hearts, Clubs, Diamonds, Spades: Players Who Suit MUDs" by Richard Bartle

Four approaches to playing MUDs are identified and described. These approaches may arise from the inter-relationship of two dimensions of playing style: action versus interaction, and world-oriented versus player-oriented. An account of the dynamics of player populations is given in terms of these dimensions, with particular attention to how to promote balance or equilibrium. This analysis also offers an explanation for the labelling of MUDs as being either "social" or "gamelike".

[MyResearch] Listening to Users for good LBS

Nice take in the feature about how the mobile industry should meet users' needs, written by Michael Hulme of Teleconomy.

TheFeature: Don't you think operators are starting to offer attractive and potentially very profitable location services?

Hulme: I think they are still far too simplistic. The operators only think in terms of where the person is located. The operators only think, "That person is near the shops," they don't think any further, and that’s complicated enough. Take an empty location. If it’s a restaurant, people will avoid it because they think it's unpopular. If it’s a bank, people will rush in!

TheFeature: How should the operators start thinking?

Hulme: An individual brings his or her own dispositions, or characteristics, to each location, shaped by their lifestyle and the type of person they are. Teleconomy has identified five such disposition types. These will all vary by the time of day, their mood, whether they are working, type of contact and so on. The actual location is meaningless without looking at the individual and their emotional and behavioral characteristics. These all affect their receptiveness to different types of mobile messages.

TheFeature: Isn't this great in theory, but impractical in practice?

Hulme: Not at all. Look at the retail industry. They develop spider's webs charts to do exactly this sort of thing -- to map their customers' likely behavior. It is a well understood and tested strategy. Look at all the thought that goes into a supermarket – the placing of product, the music, the ambience, the store layout and even the smell. The mobile industry does not think at all in this way.

TheFeature: What's the easiest application along these lines?

Hulme: Probably such areas as management and ordering. Remember the usage of a mobile phone is changing rapidly towards a data device. People use it to develop their own photo album using MMS. We are starting to do a lot of research on the youth market. Not because it is necessarily the largest opportunity, but because it is a great way of understanding future trends. We found that 10- to 12-year-olds don't think of the mobile device in terms of voice at all, but as something to hold their life, such as games, photos and so on. Operators should think about how to help people control their lives using the mobile device. Think in new ways about the space and have areas such as a trash can. Think about such things as disposable services.

(MyResearch) GeoGames on game boy

We already saw that there is a GPS for the game boy.The Feature details the possibilities.

Using the inexpensive GameBoy as a platform for non-entertainment applications is a brilliant approach to launch more wireless devices. Perhaps something like PacManhattan could arise from GPS-enabled GameBoys. RedSky is hip to this idea -- they've developed some open APIs for game developers to use the RedSky hardware for their own applications. The device can hold 8 megabtyes of pictures and maps that users can download from their PCs. Maybe in the future people will be downloading GameBoy geo-games? (...) Eric Johnson, their CTO, envisions GameBoy-readable maps of California up at the cash register at a local gas station. His eyes lit up as he described the incredible power of the GBA/GPS combination. Most GPS devices just show you latitude and longitude he points out, but this device presents a color location map, with value-added services like mentioning the nearest restaurant. This geographical spin will be available for a relatively cheap price. "We're going to bring mobile maps to the masses," he said, with a believer's expression on his face.

(Research) 9/11 Draft Reports Say City Rescuers Lacked Coordination

Article in the New York Times about the fact that city rescuers lacked coordination.

The three main emergency agencies that went to the World Trade Center - the Fire Department, the New York Police Department, and the Port Authority Police Department - did not coordinate their responses and frequently did not or could not share valuable information.(...) For example, the staff cited a message from a city police helicopter that the north tower was "glowing" and about to fall that was not heard by firefighters.(...)The Fire Department lost track of units and was unable to communicate with them, according to officials who have been briefed on the contents.(...) The report discusses the lack of reliable communication between firefighters and fire commanders that morning. A fire chief ordered a member of the building staff - not a member of the Fire Department - to operate a key piece of radio equipment, a device known as a repeater that boosts radio signals inside a building. After some tests, the fire chiefs believed the repeater was broken and stopped using it, forcing them to rely on the strength of their hand-held radios to stay in touch with firefighters upstairs. The report suggests that the repeater may actually have been working, though the significance of that finding is unclear.(...) Fire chiefs have maintained that the critical communication gap that day was the failure of any police chiefs to go to the fire command post as required under the city's emergency protocol. Without contact with a police commander, the fire chiefs have told the commission, they lacked critical observations made by police helicopters about deteriorating building conditions. The lack of communication was not absolute, according to the draft, which cites accounts from members of police units who said they checked in with fire personnel as they entered the buildings.

This is not meant to baddly criticize those people but it could be a starting point for a reflection about how is it possible to improve coordination among firefighters.

(Video Games) Workshop about games and social network

This workshop will occur the September 6th 2004 at University of Leeds, organized by John Halloran, Geraldine Fitzpatrick and Barry Brown

This workshop brings together researchers and professionals interested in the social potential of online multiplayer computer games. These games support complex social networks which are both large or small, ad-hoc or pre-organised. This workshop addresses how these networks support connections between players and new forms of social behavior and interaction.

The topics are really interesting:

- What influence do different game genres (e.g. ‘first person shooters’, role-play games, race games) have on social interaction? - How can the emerging mobile and ubicomp games support sociability? - What connections are made between social interactions online and off? - What interactions do games have with the wider culture?  How do games interact with wider social activities? - How should games be studied? What kinds of data capture and analysis are important? What are the ethical issues and how should they be addressed?

I am wondering about some potential contribution...

(Tech) Visualizing Social Software

Vizster is a cool infoviz system

Vzster provides a visualization of such services, providing an interactive sociogram for exploring the links between network members. In addition to visualizing "friendship" linkages, Vizster supports a range of exploratory search features, providing visualization of the rich profile data characteristic of these services, and which traditional sociograms [3] are not designed to communicate. The current application visualizes a "snowball" sample of the popular friendster [4] social networking service, encompassing over 1.5 million profiles and the linkages between them, roughly a quarter of active friendster users...

[MyResearch] iPAQ solutions for Location Based Services

Vijas Fire DepartmentUsing iPAQ Pocket PCs attached to a mobile GPS device, Vijas Fire Department teams flew the fire perimeter in a helicopter mapped its perimeter so fire commanders could quickly and safely deploy firefighting teams.

Firefighting In the US iPAQ Pocket PC helped advance fire-fighting technology with the first-ever digital mapping of an active wildfire using a handheld PC.

Geotechnical Surveys The Hong Kong Geotechnical Engineering Offices integrated Geographic information system (GIS), Global Positioning System (GPS) and wireless internet access on PAQ Pocket PC to perform dangerous slope surveys.

National Park Service The nation Park service obtained a 3D fix and arrived quickly to rescue a stranded climber using iPAQ Pocket PC with a GPS Card.