Research

[Research] Mobiquitous: International Conference on Mobile and Ubiquitous Systems

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Mobiquitous: International Conference on Mobile and Ubiquitous Systems, August 22-26, 2004 - Boston, Massachusetts, USA. The conference seems rather technical than user-centered but it could be of interest to have a glance at the trends. For instance the panels (obvisouly more 'high level') called "Mobiquitous computing and spontaneous networking: are we there yet? Where will we go?", or "services and Mobile Computing (never the twain shall meet)".

[Space and Place] Street Talk: happening event

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Street Talk: An Urban Computing Happening, Friday 16 July 2004 in Berkeley. The programme is great with lots of interesting speaker (Anne Galloway, Howard Rheingold, Antony Townsend...).

Street Talk is a one day event to be held at Intel Research Berkeley focused on understand how the rapidly emerging fabric of mobile and wireless computing will influence, disrupt, expand, and be integrated into the social patterns existent within our public urban landscapes

[Research] Group Behavior in Virtual Reality

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This Jolanda Tromp seems interesting. Se works on "the development of structured methods to collect quantitative and qualitative usability evaluation data for novel artefacts. Involved in developing methods for rapid usability assessment of new technologies. Research involves task analysis, user requirements specification, experimental design, data analysis, study of user behaviour and classification of future technologies"Gotta find these papers: - Tromp, J.G. (2001). Systematic Usability Design and Evaluation for Collaborative Virtual Environments, PhD Thesis, University of Nottingham, UK. - Stedmon, A., D'Cruz, M., Tromp, J.G., Wilson, J., (2003). Two Methods and a Case Study: Human Factors Evaluations for Virtual Environments, in: Proceedings of HCI International (HCII03), Greece.

[Research] Jeffrey Huang

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Yesterday, I met Jeffrey Huang, who is Associate Professor at the Harvard Department of Architecture. We had a interesting chat about my phd and CatchBob. Huang, J., "Future Space: A Blueprint for a New Business Architecture," Harvard Business Review, April 2001. 

Although the Internet is an essential conduit for many business activities, it isn't rendering the physical world any less important, as the failures of many Web merchants demonstrate. People need social and sensual contact. The companies that succeed will be those best able to integrate the physical and the virtual. But that requires a new kind of business architecture--a new approach to designing stores, offices, factories, and other spaces where business is conducted. The author, a faculty member at Harvard Graduate School of Design, provides practical guidelines to help managers and entrepreneurs think creatively about the structures in which their businesses operate. He outlines four challenges facing designers of such "convergent" structures, so-called because they function in both physical and virtual space: matching form to function, allowing visitors to visualize the presence of others, personalizing spaces, and choreographing connectivity. Using numerous examples, from a fashion retailer that wants to sell in stores as well as through a Web site to a radically new kind of consulate, the author shows how businesses can meet each challenge. For instance, allowing customers to visualize the presence of others means that visitors to a Web site should be given a sense of other site visitors. Personalizing physical and virtual spaces involves using databases to enable those spaces to adapt quickly to user preferences. The success of companies attempting to merge on-line and traditional operations will depend on many factors. But without a well-designed convergent architecture, no company will fully reap the synergies of physical space and Internet technology.

[MyResearch] CatchBob Logfiles

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Here is the kind of logfile I have to parse:16:44:18,381|533097;152498|Zeno|refresh 16:44:27,622|532990;152509|Fab|refresh 16:44:32,543|533073;152510|Zeno|refresh 16:44:32,544|533073;152510|Zeno|message|Icon|532929;151726 16:44:32,544|533073;152510|Zeno|message|Fab|532822;152074 16:44:44,039|532947;152530|Fab|refresh 16:44:44,042|532947;152530|Fab|message|Icon|532929;151726 16:44:52,006|533115;152490|Zeno|refresh 16:44:52,010|533115;152490|Zeno|message|Icon|532929;151726 16:44:52,011|533115;152490|Zeno|message|Icon|532929;151726 16:44:52,011|533115;152490|Zeno|message|Fab|532822;152074 16:44:52,011|533115;152490|Zeno|message|Fab|532822;152074 16:45:00,023|533132;152494|Zeno|refresh

[MyResearch] Catchbob under the sun

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We played CatchBob! on this sunny afternoon. It is pretty robust now that we got rid of the VPN problem. Positioning is fine, as represented on the picture, there are few errors but it's OK. The only problem is when we tried to form the triangle to "circle" the object: it is difficult to see the very triangle and to have a real "end condition". We're still working on it. We also have two logfiles (client and sever). I am learning how to use python to parse this so that we can get the expected indexes for the statistical analysis.

[Research] Kohonen Maps for spatial data analysis

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Read in a cognitive science mailing list. It is about a project at France Telecom. They aim at using Kohonen Maps for data mining. The point is to use it in order to:- detect and visualize individuals trajectories between clusters - to see if their is a segmentation along the time

Using Kohonen Card could be a interesting technique for exploratory analysis of spatial data like in CatchBob.

France Télécom R&D propose un poste d'ingénieur de recherche et  développement en traitement statistique de l'information. Le titulaire du poste devra s'intéresser à l'extension des cartes de  Kohonen aux données spatio-temporelles. Les cartes de Kohonen sont une  des techniques très puissantes utilisées pour retrouver des groupes  homogènes d'individus dans une grande base de données. Elles sont  reconnues pour leur capacité à permettre la visualisation des  corrélations entre variables explicatives (donc des données  "d'espace"). Il est possible d'étendre les cartes de Kohonen au  traitement des données temporelles. Actuellement les données  temporelles sont traitées comme des variables d'espace sans traitement  spécifique. Cette solution est peu satisfaisante même si elle présente  l'avantage de pouvoir conserver les cartes de Kohonen telles qu'on les  connaît. Le problème est que le temps n'est pas une variable d'espace;  cette variable a un comportement spécifique qui n'est pas représenté.  On commence cependant à voir apparaître des études portant sur la  généralisation de l'algorithme de Kohonen de façon à le rendre sensible  à l'aspect spatio-temporel des données. On propose de recenser les méthodes existantes et d'étudier notamment - comment détecter et visualiser les trajectoires d'individus entre  clusters, - comment une segmentation évolue avec le temps, et plus généralement d'évaluer comment ces extensions de la carte de  Kohonen permettent d'améliorer l'analyse exploratoire des séries  temporelles multivariées. Les perspectives d'utilisation de ces résultats sont très importantes,  notamment pour la détection de rupture dans l'analyse des usages.

[Video Games] Game Culture and Technology Lab

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Game Culture and Technology Lab is an interdisciplinary faculty from both the UC Irvine and UC San Diego campuses + partnership with artists and industries. It seems interesting but it is difficult to understand what they actually do.

The mission of the Game Culture & Technology Lab is to expand the notion of how game metaphors, design principles, and technologies can be utilized for alternative content and context delivery. Our focus is on the next generation Internet. Our approach combines theory and practice, science and art, education and entertainment, to create an environment that supports diverse forms of expression in a wide range of applications.

[Research] Augmenting Expectation in Playful Arena Performances with Ubiquitous Computing

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Funny stuff: Augmenting Expectation in Playful Arena Performances with Ubiquitous Intimate Technologies by Alice Bayliss, Simon Lock and Jennifer G. Sheridan.

The inherent freedom of playful arenas combined with intimate ubiquitous technologies has led to a new breed of performance. We draw on theory from computing, performance and club culture to illustrate the Performance Triad model, a method for the analysis, deconstruction and understanding of performance in playful arenas.

[Research] Statistics with R

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This week, I am trying to learn how to use R, a language and environment for statistical computing and graphics (GNU project ). I wrote a kind of awfull tutorial. It is cool to compute statistics and to visualize results. I tried R on an old data set coming from my masters thesis. Here is for instance the depicted correlation of mutual modeling (the way a person infer his/her partner's strategies while performing a joint task) and score obtained at video game:

Position Paper for a workshop about Game Analysis

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Our position paper (.pdf) for the workshop (British HCI conference)Games and Social Network: analysis of multiplayer games has been accepted. Analysis of a Location-Based Multi-Player Game by Nicolas Nova and Fabien Girardin

The growing number of location-based services fosters the creation of multiplayer games that take place in real settings and leaves open the question of how to analyze data generated along the game. We are interested in ubiquitous computing games in order to use it as a platform to study how people rely on spatial features in terms of collaborative interactions. The crux issue here is how to analyze the wide load of data generated by the game in an ubiquitous computing context. How should it be studied? What kinds of data may be captured and what sort of analysis should be conducted?

[Research] Riots, action nodes and Schelling points

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[Via hakank], Interesting paper about riots in LA and Schelling's focal points.

As we saw in the case of Los Angeles, riots do not occur everywhere at once. Most of the homes and businesses in south-central L.A. and Koreatown (which cover a number of square miles) were untouched by the riot. Damage was concentrated at certain intersections and along certain strips, what we call ``action nodes.'' How did the rioters know where these action nodes were?(...) We cannot say how a resident of South-Central L.A. might go about selecting a focal point. In fact it seems consistent with Schelling's experiments that there would have been a number of focal points, although substantially fewer than there were residents. For example, any of several major intersections, parks or schoolyards may have seemed the natural place for a large number of riot-disposed people to gather following the acquittals in People v. Powell (the original Rodney King beating case), which amounted to a Schelling incident at least in part because for weeks it had been advertised as such by TV and newspaper accounts of the trial.

[Research] Jeffrey Huang's talk

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Today at the epfl summer seminar: "Designing Interactive Systems for Knowledge Sharing" by Jeffrey Huang. My notes are here

This talk addresses problems associated with the development of interactive systems for knowledge sharing. I will present recent projects in my research group at the intersection of physical architecture and information systems that make use of visual, metaphorical and spatial structures to facilitate effective externalization of knowledge, increase transparencies of knowledge location, and provide incentives for knowledge exchange. I will discuss the design methodologies used and the prototype systems we developed to solve the problems from a user-centric perspective.

[MyResearch] Distributed Cognitive System Analysis

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Ioannidou I. & Dimitracopoulou A. (2004). Young Children Collaborating to use Maps during Technology based Distributed Learning Activities. In proceedings of 6th International Conference of Mathematics Teaching, October 2003, Volos, Greece. In this paper, the authors describes how they analyzed a distributed cognitive system. They classified minimal cognitive actions carried out by each subgroup (for instance formulating a place via wlakie-talkie) and put them in a sequence chart, which is interesting to find recurrent actions or patterns. The following chart depicts two different groups (made up of subgroups):

[Researc] NATO research

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NATO is of course doing research about location technologies and warfare... I am NOT into this war stuff.RTO-MP-093 Emerging Military Capabilities Enabled by Advances in Navigation Sensors:

This symposium was organised to bring together experts in the field of navigation sensors and integration technology to present emerging systems to the NATO community. The presentations identified new uses of these advances and the potential benefits to military operations and future operational concepts. The topics covered included projection of performance improvement, decreased cost, size and weight for sensors to enhance the military capabilities of precise targeting, situational awareness, navigation, flight path guidance stabilization and control, smart munitions, tactical missiles, robust sensor platforms and other applications including personal navigation systems.

The keywords are:

Advanced weapons - Atomic clocks - Data fusion - Global positioning system - Gyroscopes - Inertial navigation - Integrated systems - MEMS (Micro-Electro-Mechanical System) - Microelectronics - Military applications - Missile guidance - Navigation satellites - Navigational aids - Precision guided munitions - Radio navigation - Requirements - Situational awareness - Surveillance - Tracking (position)

[Research] Ontology-based queries

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Just came back from the lab seminar this morning: Logics for Information Modelling and Access -- or -- How to Use an Ontology" by Prof. Enrico Franconi (from Free University of Bozen-Bolzano). My notes are here

In the talk I will first argue that good conceptual modelling and ontology design is required to support intelligent information access and to allow for semantic based information integration. Then, I will show which are the technical consequences of such choices, and how the problems to be faced are non-trivial. The arguments are based on the use of Description Logics as a formal tool for the framework, and I will make use of languages and examples taken from the database field. This talk is based on the material found at .

[Research] Using While Moving: human computer interaction issues

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A valuable paper: Using While Moving: HCI Issues in Fieldwork Environments by JASON PASCOE, NICK RYAN, and DAVID MORSE (University of Kent at Canterbury)

“Using while moving” is the basic ability fieldwork users require of a mobile computer system. These users come from a wide range of backgrounds but have in common an extremely mobile and dynamic workplace. We identify four specific characteristics of this class of users: dynamic user configuration, limited attention capacity, high-speed interaction, and context dependency. A prototype is then presented that was designed to assist fieldworkers in data collection tasks and to explore the HCI design issues involved. The prototype was used in an extensive field trial by a group of ecologists observing giraffe behavior in Kenya. Following this trial, improvements were made to the prototype interface which in turn was tested in a subsequent field trial with another group of ecologists. From this experience, we have formulated our resulting ideas about interface design for fieldworkers into two general principles: Minimal Attention User Interfaces (MAUIs) and context awareness. The MAUI seeks to minimize the attention, though not necessarily the number of interactions, required from the user in operating a device. Context awareness enables the mobile device to provide assistance based on a knowledge of its environment.