Research
"Mobile outskirts: cultural mapping of northern geographical outposts?" 15th-26th of June 2004
The workshop will start with a bus-travel of about 800 km to map part of the distance between south and north of Norway before we get to the Lofoten islands . The ten-day workshop is open to 10-12 Norwegian and international artists and researchers. The workshop will focus on the conditions of a rural area with special resources and conditions.
Interesting paper, though in french, from M. Zouinar, M. Relieu, G. Calvet and P. Salembier about a new methodology to analyze collaborative mobile activities and multimodality. Here it is about some PDA activity.The starting point is that current ethnological methods are not that adapted as depicted by those two pictures:
It is too difficult to preserve the natural aspect of the activity while you are watched by two persons with a digital camera. That is why the authors proposes to use, apart from the logfiles (where all activities done on the PDA are captured), special glasses augmented with a camera. So that researchers could have a subjective view of the user: what he is doing on the PDA screen, with the stylus. They still film the guy doing its activity. Then they have two viewpoints: contextual view (filmed with the camera) + subjective view (filmed with the camera-glasses).
The methdology is hence simple: Analysis/Transcriptions/Coding/Self-confrontation.
Via starhill, Boeing's Combat Survivor Evader Locator;
The Combat Survivor Evader Locator (CSEL) communication system is more than just a hand-held radio. CSEL provides a complete system solution, including secure digital message communications, Global Positioning System (GPS), line-of sight (LOS) voice and the full spectrum of radio and ground equipment interfaces required to work with your existing search and rescue systems.The CSEL multifunction hand-held radio is specially designed for easy, intuitive use. Unique communication and message encryption prevents signals from being intercepted, and 21-day battery life provides crucial contact for extended periods.
The Team Boeing solution is based on a flexible, modular communication architecture providing multiple satellite links for dependable, secure (LPI/LPD) Over-the-Horizon (OTH) communications; LOS voice communications; global geoposition; navigation, and beacon functions. The CSEL architecture meets near-term requirements, while assuring flexibility for future growth, and enhancements, including migration to a commercial satellite solution.
What we want to do is stated by Staging and Evaluating Public Performances as an Approach to CVE Research by Steve Benford, Mike Fraser, Gail Reynard, Boriana Koleva and Adam Drozd (The Mixed Reality Laboratory):
System instrumentation and analysis of logs developers instrument the underlying CVE platform to log (and timestamp) as much data as possible at participants machines and as it passes across the network. This data might include all avatar movements, interactions with virtual objects, audio packets and text messages. These logs can then be analysed statistically in order to uncover significant patterns of user activity (e.g., frequencies, distributions and correlation of movements and communication). The results can support or contradict other observations (participants own reflections and ethnography), can inform models of system and network performance, and can suggest new technical designs and optimisations.
They also say: "of system logs is also more problematic than it need be. At present, there is no agreed format for log data and no readily available suites of analysis tools.", that's something I want to work on: defining way to analysz collaborative mobile activities.
Another article about how RSS and FOAF are intricated. I like this statement:
Efimova writes, "What weblogs create is two way awareness. If I read someone's articles online or check personal pages or "know" a person by reading comment in online discussion, in most cases this is one-way "getting to know": this person is not aware that I'm learning about him or her. Weblogs change it: if another blogger links to your weblog as least ones, he is likely to get on your radar." The relations formed between bloggers is similar to that formed between people in a social network. "This awareness creates something that I don't have a good name for. It's close to familiar stranger, but there is some kind of interaction (or, may be linking is similar to looking at person a physical environment, you don't expect a feedback, but another person is likely to notice that you have looked). I would say that this connection is one degree stronger than 'familiar stranger' connection. And then this connection may turn into something stronger - 'weak-tied' conversations, with one more degree stronger. Then it may result in joint actions and "strong ties" at the end."
The point of the author is that "The idea of FOAF is that it is like RSS for personal identities." : Who I Like is What I Read but...
Such a solution is not comlete, however. For one this, it would need to be incorporated into other tools; the reliance on a specific website to author a FOAF file creates unnecessary complexity. Additionally, this merely pushes back the problem of creation one step: it is still necessary to author an OPML file.
What is to be done:
- Get people to create personal metadata files. FOAF might do the trick, if extended. The personal file contains the usual profile details found on a site like this, plus options to say 'likes', 'hates', 'cool' other people.
Needed: a simple FOAF management tool, the Blogger of FOAF, if you will, that people can use to create these files. A method for securing and verifying identity, to prevent fake FOAF files. A means of aggregating FOAF (already exists) for use elsewhere.
- Reference to FOAF in other documents. FOAF by itself (like Orkut by itself, or any other sterile SN environment) serves no purpose. Place FOAF links into content metadata (such as RSS) and now the content metadata system and the SN metadata system can interact. Aggregators harvesting both FOAF and RSS have enormous expressive power.
- Extend FOAF, or RSS, or create a new type of format, for individuals with FOAF identities to attach values (like, dislike, loved) content items with RSS identities. Add to the mix. Aggregate.
I also wrote that SSNs work when...
- comments in boards point to profiles created by (and owned by) the people they describe, not isolated centralized islands like Orkut, Friendster, and the 100 or more similar separate sites.
- references to such FOAF (or similar) files - or something similar to FOAF files - are attached to content or content metadata (such as RSS), identifying the author.
- we can go to an aggregator and say, "Find all the articles by people that Clay Shirkey likes." or "Find all the articles about RSS by people who don't like Dave Winer." or "Find all the articles on Google by people who wrote articles that Jon Udell likes."
- when influence is determined not by the number of friends you can sign up, but by the usefulness of results produced by using your profile and preferences in a search.
- when all of this is used to do something, and not merely facilitate chatter.
This morning we had a nice brainstorm about collaborative mapping. With a low-tech prototype, we tried to sketch out possible uses: recommending system (good/bad), help, threaded discussion, wiki-like (to reach a consensus), reminder system, spam/virus/breakdown, I'm late, anchors (like rave party system), synchronous/asychronous use, query (anybody wants to paly tennis here?), crowd scenario...
Thanky roby, this paper explains the future of RSS:
Another change likely to spread through the RSS world over the next few months is the integration of social networking metadata with RSS content metadata. The popularity of such social networking sites as Friendster and Orkut has shown that there is a need for individuals to describe themselves and their relations with other individuals. These descriptions, most commonly found in a Friend of a Friend (FOAF) file, may be referred to by an RSS file using a social networking module. A FOAF file is another form of XML file, and so may be created read by many of the same tools now creating and reading RSS files. Adding social networking information to RSS allows for even more finely grained filtering and searching, as author information may now also be included in the search parameters. (See http://www.downes.ca/cgi-bin/Website/view.cgi?dbs=Article&key=1076791198.)The future leads to
To be sure, RSS will evolve rapidly over the next few years. Its poised to be exposed to a great deal of rhetoric, and is on the verge of being widely commercialized, with the inevitable cycle of hype and disappointment that will follow. That said, RSS is a technology with a strong future, strong because of its simplicity, flexibility, and utility. Although RSS is not the semantic Web originally dreamed of in the laboratory, with finely grained and standardized element descriptions and canonical vocabularies, it is a technology that has proved itself, and evolved roughshod, though the much grittier practice of grassroots development. There is, I think, a lesson in that.
I like this quote taken in cory doctorow's notes from notcon04:
"Ideas rot if you don't do something with them. I used to try to hoard them, but they rotted. Now I just blog them or tell people about them. Sometimes they still rot, but sometimes someone finds them useful in one way or another" -- Edd Dumbill
As usual, I am sorry Mauro for devastating your day by finding research projects that overlap or already did what you want to do in your phd but this is really interesting: Leveraging context for mobile media metadata by Marc Davis , Nathan Good, Risto Sarvas.
The recent popularity of mobile camera phones allows for new opportunities to gather important metadata at the point of capture. This paper describes and demonstrates a method for generating metadata for images using spatial, temporal, and social context. We describe a system we implemented for inferring location information for pictures taken with camera phones. We propose that leveraging contextual metadata at the point of capture can bridge the problems of the semantic and sensory gaps. In particular, combining and sharing spatial, temporal, and social contextual metadata from a given user and across users allows us to make inferences about media content .
Via the register, Galileo (european GPS) is looking for application ideas:
The GALILEO project, Europe's satellite radio navigation programme, launched its second call for research proposals yesterday (Wednesday).In this round of proposals, the European Commission says the Joint Undertaking is looking for ideas for applications in what it describes as "traditional" fields, such as location based services and road, rail and transport applications. It has also indicated that suggestions involving SME's will be particularly interesting.
the economist about "what is published in scientific journals may not be as true as it should be".
SCIENTIFIC and medical journals, with their august panels of peer reviewers and fact checkers, are not the sort of places many mistakes are to be expected. Yet Emili García-Berthou and Carles Alcaraz, two researchers at the University of Girona in Spain, have found that 38% of a sample of papers in Nature, and a quarter of those sampled in the British Medical Journal (BMJ)—two of the world's most respected journals—contained one or more statistical errors. Not all of these errors led to erroneous conclusions, but the authors of the study, which has just been published in BMC Medical Research Methodology, another journal, reckon that 4% of the errors may have caused non-significant findings to be misrepresented as being significant.
Using GPS to Learn Significant Locations and Predict Movement Across Multiple Users by Daniel Ashbrook and Thad Starner.
Wearable computers have the potential to act as intelligent agents in everyday life and assist the user in a variety of tasks, using context to determine how to act. Location is the most common form of context used by these agents to determine the user's task. However, another potential use of location context is the creation of a predictive model of the user's future movements. We present a system that automatically clusters GPS data taken over an extended period of time into meaningful locations at multiple scales. These locations are then incorporated into a Markov model that can be consulted for use with a variety of applications in both single user and collaborative scenarios.
Thanks outils froids for pointing on this interesting fact:
The soldier is the "smartest" sensor on the battlefield, observed Lt. Col. Steve Iwicki (USA), deputy director of the U.S. Army's Task Force Actionable Intelligence. His task force is looking at "how do we connect the soldier to the network."The Army plans to deploy a hand-held intelligence gathering and communication device that would allow each soldier to receive situational awareness information as well as transmit battlefield reports. (...) Northrop Grumman has developed a prototype of the hand-held device. (...) Based on experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Army has learned a number of lessons regarding the collection and dissemination of intelligence in three areas: tactical information colelction, battlefield reporting and national intgelligence.
That is really true: decentralized situation are interesting task for mobile and locative media studies.
Interesting point in "Towards Augmented Reality Gaming" about the use of games in HCI. This called xploring New concepts through games:
Computer gaming provides a unique prototyping arena for human-computer interactions. Due to the entertaining nature of the gaming interactions, users are willing to explore innovative metaphors, modalities, and hardware even when they are not as apparent or fluid as the designer might have hoped. In addition, there is a certain universality of a sense of play that entices users who would not be interested in testing prototype systems normally. In fact, sometimes researchers have to limit access to their new systems for fear of premature release.Another advantage is that game play can be designed to hide limitations in the current implementation of a system while exploring its potential. In the past, entertainment platforms have been used for explorations in computer supported collaborative work (CSCW) [Evard93], artificial intelligence [Agre87], agents [Foner97], on-line communities and education [Bruckman97], perception [Wren95,Wren99], and synthetic character development [Johnson99,Kline99], to name a few. Currently, computer gaming provides an excellent framework for working in wearable computing and augmented reality. In the constructs of a game, CSCW, HCI, graphics, autonomous agents, mobile sensing and pattern recognition, wireless networking, and distributed databases can be explored in a community of wearable computer users. As infrastructure needs are determined and the infrastructure improved, new metaphors and uses can be introduced. With time, these improvements can be directed towards development of longer term, everyday-use wearable computing.
Agre, P. & Chapman, D. "Pengi: An implementation of a theory of activity." In Proceedings of the Sixth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (pp. 268--272), 1987
Bruckman. A. "MOOSE Crossing: Construction, Community, and Learning in a Networked Virtual World for Kids." PhD Dissertation, MIT Media Lab, May 1997. Evard R. "Collaborative Networked Communication: MUDs as Systems Tools," Proceedings of the Seventh Systems Administration Conference (LISA VII), USENIX Monterey CA, November 1993.
Foner. "Entertaining Agents: A Sociological Case Study." The Proceedings of the First International Conference on Autonomous Agents, 1997.
M.P. Johnson, A. Wilson, B. Blumberg, C. Kline, and A. Bobick. "Sympathethic Interfaces: Using a Plush Toy to Direct Synthetic Characters." In Proceedings of CHI 99.
C. Kline and B. Blumberg. "The Art and Science of Synthetic Character Design." Proceedings of the AISB Symposium on AI and Creativity in Entertainment and Visual Art, Edinburgh, Scotland, 1999.
C. Wren, F. Sparacino, A. Azarbayejani, T. Darrell, T. Starner, A. Kotani, C. Chao, M. Hlavac, K. Russell, A. Pentland. "Perceptive Spaces for Performance and Entertainment: Untethered Interaction Using Computer Vision and Audition", Applied Artificial Intelligence Journal, 1995
C. Wren. "Understanding Expressing Action." Perceptual Computing Technical Report #498. 1999.
Nice things for you Mauro!, I have found it here:
Location-Aware Thumb RatingsPeople have predicted very complex "augmented-reality" systems that might arise in the near future, when many folks will carry around location-aware devices. But how about a simple thumbs-up/thumbs-down rating system?
Here's how it might work: your device includes a green thumbs-up button and a red thumbs-down button, TiVo-remote style. As you move through the city, when you enter a favorite restaurant or club or cafe you click the "thumbs up" button. When you pass that restaurant where you got food poisoning or that stuffy overpriced bar, you click "thumbs down." And if you enter an especially wonderful place, you click "thumbs up" twice to give it two thumbs up.
The key: you don't have to interrupt your daily activities; just reach into your pocket and click one of two buttons whenever you think of it.
Each time you press the button, the device records your geographical location and the thumb rating. Soon you have a little database, a map that shows the spots around town that you love and the spots that you hate.
So what? So nothing, until people share their preference maps. Now you have a powerful concept. You can also form preference groups(...) For certain events you use time-sensitive preference maps with thumb-clicks that fade over time.
What I like here is the simplicity: you have two options: up or down. With a social rating, I don't think you need more. Or you can give a "neutral" rating like in the feature where you can rate +1/0/-1. But sometimes, allowing the neutral point is not so good, it depends upon what you want to do... or let's check in a Lickert Scale Manual...
Read in a comment of the feature:
Thinking of experiences of Norwegian teens, who said in an interview that really huge groups due to spread sms messages were gathering together when two teenagers had some trouble or fight with each other, I do not really want to think into what this is developing with location based appl.
This is indeed a strategy, other than joining a Schelling Point. I am really interested in this kind of behavior/strategy.
Snapshot of Jabberwocky, the Intel project ("familial strangers"). the interface is quite simple, though interesting and usable.
La communauté francophone web sémantique est plutôt bien en phase avec l'actualité. Le wiki websemantique.org est particulièrement actif dans le domaine, notamment en ce qui concerne les émanations les plus courantes que sont RSS et RDF ou encore FOAF. Le site propose des ressources abordables, facile à comprendre pour les néophytes.Le site de la fing propose quant à lui une introduction intéressante à FOAF.
Notes taken at the meeting with my phd advisor: Main topic of my phd: study of collaboration and collaborative processes (CSCW, in mobile settings) -> We want to investigate whether and how spatial information (location?) impacts ONE collaborative processes which is Mutual Modeling (also called intersubjectivity).
The main assumption is that space is meaningfull in terms of mutual modeling: - from the POSITION of his/her partner, one can infer his/her ACTIVITY - from the DIRECTION of his/her partner, one can infer his/her INTENTIONS/STRATEGY
Keywords: mobile computing, awareness, mutual modeling, collaboration, CSCW
The thesis would include three components (that should be perceived as the main scientific contributions): - a semi-controlled experiment - development of innovative methods to analyze spatial interactions, performance as well as group interaction and mutual modelling. - model or ontology of the agents actions + interactions (inter-agents as well as agents/world).
About the model, 2 possibilities: - ontology, classification, structured description, modeling coordination or MM... - predictive modelling (much more difficult)
I see this as EXPERIMENT -> MODEL OF AGENTS (so as to describe the agents + their interactions or to improve the external validity of the model drawn from the experiments...)
Concerning the task we want to adress, there must be a mapping between the REAL SPACE and the PROBLEM SPACE. It could be solving a murder party (cluedo-like where people have to investigate in various rooms to solve the problem) or some diagnostic-like task.
In terms of experimental stuff, the global hypothesis is that SPATIAL INFORMATION impacts MUTUAL MODELING and GROUP MODELLING (improve it). "Spatial information" means here spatial awareness and mainly location + direction awareness.
Hence we can test: - with location awareness tool/without - with synchronous awareness tool/asynchronous (discriminate presence/location/direction) - ...
Notes: - showing that people use schelling point to solve the task ? - from this, we can fairly imagine lots of "laboratory tasks" like showing movies of a person's trajectory on an EPFL map and asking subjects to say what he is doing, where he is heading... some inferences. - the REPLAY dimension is essential ! It would be very interesting to show the participants (of CatchBob! for instance) their trajectory on the map and then ask them to comment it, to describe episodes