[Research] What about google scholar?

Google scholar:

Google Scholar enables you to search specifically for scholarly literature, including peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, preprints, abstracts and technical reports from all broad areas of research. Use Google Scholar to find articles from a wide variety of academic publishers, professional societies, preprint repositories and universities, as well as scholarly articles available across the web. Just as with Google Web Search, Google Scholar orders your search results by how relevant they are to your query, so the most useful references should appear at the top of the page. This relevance ranking takes into account the full text of each article as well as the article's author, the publication in which the article appeared and how often it has been cited in scholarly literature. Google Scholar also automatically analyzes and extracts citations and presents them as separate results, even if the documents they refer to are not online. This means your search results may include citations of older works and seminal articles that appear only in books or other offline publications.

[MyReseach] Location-awareness of others

"Knowing where the others are" is the underlying topic of my phd. That is why I did this quick brainstorm during the afternoon:

1. where are my partners/buddies/lover/relatives/colleagues?
• place: home, work, shop, somebody else's place, third place, in transit or waiting (bus stop)
• position: infrastructure (on a bridge, in a high-rise), absolute (GPS coordinates, latitude/longitude, place's name) or relative (close to a place, a landmark, someone, someone's place)
• location feature
• nature/city
• inside/outside
• underground/in the sky/normal
• reachable or not (through tech like phone)
• time matters! when was X where?
• mobile or not (in the train, in the bus or immobile)
• activity: working/chilling/sleeping/shopping/on holiday/attending an event...
• scale: where is someone? the group? a device? an avatar?
• ...
2. how can I know where they are?
• ask him/her/them (through a communication tool)
• ask someone who might know
• location based service
• relying on the partner's schedule (probabilty that he/she is somewhere at a certain time)
• inferring from the partner's habit/behavior/cultural tastes
• social navigation: look at traces/cues left, modified artifacts, notes, smell...
• ...
3. why do I need information about his/her/their whereabouts?
• to join the other
• ask him/her a service only available at the other's location ("Bring the bread")
• surveillance (prison, hospital)... privacy issues!
• aretaking (kids...)
• management (a field team like firefighters, the army...) commanded by a coordinator (no located on the field)
• field coordination: division of labor, adjusting one's behavior, schedule negotiation
• inferring other's actions, intents or strategies
• ...

Of course it is a work in progress, then do not hesitate to comment

[Research] French Ubiquitous Computing Conference

UbiMob2005 is the french speaking Ubiquitous Computing Conference. After the 2004 edition which was held in Nice, this one is in Grenoble.

[Locative Media] this list of locative media is flat coz I'm lazy

Compiled the one from paul and elastic space and regine (by Mjriam Struppeck actually). I had no time to put the link, I feel sorry about that. Just wanted to have a flat alphabetical list to be printed on the fly...

34 North 118 West/Active Campus/Altavistas/Annotate space/Annotated Earth/Area Code/ASAP: another spatial annotation project/ BattleMachine/ BattleMachine/ BotFighters/ Can you see me now?/ CatchBob!/ CitiTag/ City of memory/ Community Mapbuilder/ Conqwest/CreatorMachine/ CrowdMachine/ Cutlass/ Demor/ Audiogame/ Digital Street Game/ Embedded Theatre/ Final Fantasy VII: Before Crisis (mobile phone version)/ Geocaching/GPS/ Stash Hunt/ GeoGraffiti/ GeoNotes/ GeoStickies/ Girlfriend/GunSlingers/HERE/Herecast/ Hidden natures/Human Pacman/Hypertag/I Like Frank in Adelaide/Implementation/Interactive portrait of the Liberties/ InterUrban/ Katumuisti tositarinoita Helsingista [Street memories]/Living Memory LiMe/ Location linked information/ Mad Countdown/ Map Hub/Maptribe/ Mobile Augmented Reality Systems/Mobile Media Metadata/ MobileHunt/ Mogi/ mStory/ MUD London/Murmure/Navigate the Streets/NetAttack/New York Songlines/NodeRunner/One block radius/Operation Urban Terrain/Pac-Manhattan/ Pathalog/ PDPal/ Pirates!/ Psychogeographical Markup Language/ Public alley 818/ Public Play Spaces/ R-Click/ Savannah/ Section/ Soundwalk/ Spatial Annotation with Locative Packets/ Spotcode/ Swordfish/ Tag/ Tag and Scan/ TAG: Scripting Presence/ Take-It/ Talking street/ TeleTaxi/ Texting Glances/ The Blue Plaque project/The Go Game/ The intelligent street/ Thingster/ Touch Tone Tours/ TRACE/Trailblazer/TreasureMachine/ Uncle Roy All Around You/ Undercover/ Urban Challenge/ Urban Tapestries/ Vienen Por Ellas (They come for them)/ Waveblog / Wavemarket/Websigns/Wooster Collective/World-Wide Media eXchange/Yellow Arrow/Zonemaster

[Research] Call for paper: ‘Space, place and technology: human presence in mediated experiences’

Psychnology Journal invites submissions on the following theme: ‘Space, place and technology: human presence in mediated experiences’.

The purpose of this special issue is to explore the modification in human experience that are brought about by new technologies. In particular, it is increasingly acknowledged that technologies are profoundly connected to the spatial and temporal coordinates of our experience and, by virtue of such intimate tie, they alter the modalities of our ‘presence’ in the world. To better understand this phenomenon, recent contributions from philosophy and human geography, from psychology and urban studies have suggested that human space is not to be treated as an objective, physical, homogeneous dimension, but as ‘place’ , shaped by the meanings, affordances and practices of human inhabitation. We would like to invite contributions from authors that are investigating human space and technology from this standpoint to illustrate the theoretical and methodological implications of a ‘placial’ approach and compare it with more traditional perspectives in a critic and dialectic way. We also invite authors to illustrate technological applications and study findings that adopt ‘place’ as the main framework.Contributions are welcome - but not limited – to the following themes:   • The transformation of ‘natural’ spaces through new technologies • Hybridity of virtual places • Historical perspectives of the impact of technologies on spatial experience • Critical perspectives on mediated places • Methods to analyze digital places and mediated experience of space • Review on theoretical approaches to place • Geographical districts and discrimination  in cyberspace • Meaning of space and its pragmatic roots • Practices of inhabitation in virtual place • The concept of BA, MA and their application to technology • Cognition in virtual places • Space and time as related concepts in technology use • Technology for the organization of space in professional activities 

[Research] Design requirements for location aware community systems

Paper presented at CSCW 2004: Putting Systems into Place: A Study of Design Requirements for Location-Aware Community Systems by Samer Karam, Sukeshini A. Grandhi, Quentin Jones, Loren Terveen and Steve Whittaker. What's is funny here is that they look at supporting lcoation-awareness in different places through the comparison of 2 ways taken from the Harry Potter books: the Weasley clock, a people-centered approach that shows where each member of the Weasley family is at any one time; and the Marauder's map, a place-centered approach that shows a map of Hogwarth and the position of various people inside the school. (via sylvie noel)

A number of innovative location-aware community systems have emerged; however, work to date in this area lacks a firm foundation. To remedy this, we present a conceptual framework and a series of studies into how socially-defined places influence people’s information sharing and communication needs. The first study identified a relationship between people’s place-related activities and their information needs. The second study clarified the connection between social networks, places and people’s interaction and information preferences. A third study, in progress, aims to expand upon and quantitatively assess the validity of our initial findings. Our findings argue that system design must factor in users’ activities and social networks, alongside place.

[Locative Media] IFTF Geoweb experiment in the Feature

Howard Rheingold briefly describes some concept about the geoweb in the Feature as well as telling us the story of geo-freak Mike Liebhold. It also deals with standards to be chosen for the geoweb.

At the beginning of the two-day Geoweb and Deep Place Fall Exchange organized by the Institute for the Future, participants in the event rode a bus to Fort Scott and walked around the unoccupied base with tablet PCs equipped with software from Map Bureau ("mapping for the rest of us"). My team happened on the Jerry Garcia geotag at the perimeter of the old base's parade ground at the same time that a large, hawk-like bird perched on a telephone pole in the physical world. We walked as close as we could to the bird and took a picture. We tagged a note to that spot. Later, the photographer could post the photograph online and amend the tag to ask the next people attracted to that geo-info node what kind of hawk it might be. A few hundred yards away, a geotag informed us that we were standing on the future site of the Starfleet Academy. If you've seen the Star Trek movie where Kirk and Spock go back in time to the Starfleet Academy overlooking the Golden Gate, you will recognize where we were standing.

The software enabled us to browse Geographic Information Systems layers that could be toggled on and off, overlaid over the photomap of Fort Scott. We figured out how to overlay topographic or demographic or photographic maps, geonotes and Web searches associated with the locale. We didn't zoom to that level of sophistication immediately, however: my team took ten minutes and a call to the software provider to figure out that we had to turn on the GPS and then reboot the software.

[Research] Learning from Games and HCI

Dyck, J., Pinelle, D., et al. Learning from Games: Hci Design Innovations in Entertainment Software. in Proceedings of Graphics Interface 2003, 2003. (.pdf)

Computer games are one of the most successful application domains in the history of interactive systems. This success has come despite the fact that games were ‘separated at birth’ from most of the accepted paradigms for designing usable interactive software. It is now apparent that this separate and less-constrained environment has allowed for much design creativity and many innovations that make game interfaces highly usable. We analyzed several current game interfaces looking for ideas that could be applied more widely to general UIs. In this paper we present four of these: effortless community, learning by watching, deep customizability, and fluid system-human interaction. These ideas have arisen in games because of their focus on user performance and user satisfaction, and we believe that they can help to improve applications.

[Research] Workshop about colocated collaboration evaluation

An interesting CSCW workshop about colocated collaboration evaluation was set during CSCW 2004 in Chicago. The paper are avalailable here. I hope they will put the folllow up as well.

One of the major challenges researchers in this area face is the difficulty of assessing the impact that the technology has on collaborative behaviour. For example, what measures can we use to understand whether the technology has enhanced or compromised the collaboration? Many researchers make methodological choices based on a specific configuration of an environment, or based on what resources are currently available to them. As such, many of the methods lack the reliability or robustness that would come from established, more general approaches, which could be better validated if applied across a variety of experimentations. In addition, tasks chosen to evaluate co-located collaborative environments are often selected in an ad-hoc manner, dependent on the interests of the researchers or on the appropriateness for a specific environment.

This lack of established guidelines for evaluation of co-located collaboration means that it is hard to calibrate many of the research contributions or truly understand the impact of the technology. This workshop proposes four themes related to evaluation of co-located collaboration behaviour:

1. Impact of technology on group interactions
2. Impact of technology on social dynamics
3. Impact of individual personalities and interpersonal dynamics
4. Choice of appropriate tasks

[Research] Context sensitive telephone

Building a context sensitive telephone: Some hopes and pitfalls for context sensitive computing (.pdf) by by Barry Brown and Rebecca Randell

Although the idea of making technology more context aware is an alluringone, this seemingly simple move hides a great deal of complexity. Evensimple examples such as context sensitive mobile phone which knows whennot to ring, are unlikely to be successful. Any context sensitive technology is likely to make mistakes – like ringing in the middle of a film, or missed an urgent calls. Using three examples from fieldwork of alerting systems (two ringing phones and one medical alarm in a hospital), we suggest three guidelines for context systems which could genuinely assist users. First, we argue that context sensitive computing should be used defensively, where incorrect behaviour is tolerable. Second, that technology can provide structures to which people themselves can add context. Third, that technology can communicate context to users, allowing users to make sense of that contextual information themselves. Lastly we argue for an understanding of the long term use of technology use, dwelling with technology, a process which changes how the world is seen and experienced.

[Locative Media] New Vodafone's receiver Issue

The new issue of Vodafone's Receiver has been released. Content:

• Erkki Huhtamo: Hidden histories of mobile media
• Tim Clark: Mobile communications and the wireless internet – the Japanese experience
• Amparo Lasen: Affective technologies – emotions and mobile phones
• Mike Butcher: Rewind -fast forward-play – mobile Napsterisation
• Barry Wellman: The mobile-ized society – communication modes and social networks
• Drew Hemment: The telephone exchange
• Adam Greenfield: Along the fault lines – designing for deception, dishonesty, and other happy facts of human nature
• Cory Doctorow: Eastern Standard Tribe – a story about love, death and cellular telephony
• John Chasey: The future of mobile gaming – multiplayer games

[Video Game] Supported Non-Verbal Communication in EverQuest

Yes I just kissed a frog: Supported Non-Verbal Communication in EverQuest (.pdf) by Tommy Nordkvist.

With the use of the ethnographical tool participant observation I have studied the mssive multi-player online game EverQuest. Through Erving Goffman’s descriptions on the importance of a well functioning non-verbal forms of communication (Erving Goffman, Behavior in Public Places, The Free Press, New York 1963 and Erving Goffman, Interaction Ritual, Pantheon Books, New York 1967) and through Mikael Argyle’s works on social behaviour (Michael Argyle, The Psychology of Interpersonal Behaviour, Penguin Books, London, 1994) I have constructed a theoretical framework that then is used on the findings from EverQuest. The result proves that there exists a very varied and fruitful use of non-verbal social communications in the game. Not only do the players use the channels that are designed for the communication, but they also use the text chat for the expressions they seem to lack in the pre-designed features. My concluding suggestion is that games in the future should work on getting nonverbal communication better integrated in the games, but at the same time not expect that the players because of that would seize using the text chat.

[Research] HCI forgets about psychology

Interesting post by Rashmi about this fact: new ideas from psychology are hardly reaching HCI.

A few decades ago, there was a rapid influx of new ideas from psychology into HCI. (...) Its like the HCI psychology folk have collective amnesia for research in the 10-15 years (...) Psychology has evolved dramatically in the last decade or so. One of the exciting directions has been the how biological the field is becoming. Ten years ago, there was no field of Social Neuroscience (defined as the study of brain systems involved in social interaction) (...) I predict (and hope) that in less than ten years there will be a field of neurodesign.

Neurodesign... well let's see. IT's true that since I left cognitive science (with hardcore neuro stuff), I did not think a lot about how it could be incorporated into HCI. One of the reason for this is the fact that it's already difficult to put together psychology, linguistics, design and ergonomics, mixed with ethnography and other methods...

[Research] The role of space in socially distributed cognition

Very close to my domain is this publication: Perry, M., O'Hara, K., Spinelli, G. and Sharpe, B. (2003). The role of space in socially distributed cognition: some issues for cognitive engineering. 25th Annual meeting of the cognitive science society (Cogsci 2003), Boston, USA, 31 July - 2 August, 916-921.

This paper explores and identifies cognitive issues that develop out of the use of representational media by collaborating groups of people involved in problem solving. We take the analytic perspective of distributed cognition to examine the role that these artifacts have on information processing activity in augmenting human action and in transforming the problem space. The analysis is further used in identifying issues for cognitive engineering in the design of spatial, augmentative resources to support collaborative problem solving.

[Research] Usage de la cognition spatiale pour localiser les lieux d'activité lors d'une enquête

Usage de la cognition spatiale pour localiser les lieux d'activité lors d'une enquête Origine - Destination par Etienne Girard.

Ce mémoire cerne la problématique de la description qualitative de la localisation d’un lieu décrit en langage naturel. C’est par une approche cognitive qu’est abordé successivement l’apprentissage de l’espace, le stockage de l’information et la restitution de l’information en langage naturel, par l’entremise des concepts de méronymie, de catégories hiérarchiques et de référents spatiaux. De ce cadre théorique, on propose de restructurer une base de données de lieux existants en y ajoutant des paramètres qui permettent de retrouver, d’une description en langage naturel précise ou floue, un lieu sans ambigüité dans une base de données grâce à une interface usager offrant divers modes de repérage spatial.

[Locative Media] Using del.icio.us as a collaborative geo-annotation database

(Via smart mobs) Mikel Maron launched an experiment, using del.icio.us as a collaborative geo-annotation database. The basic idea is to overload the del.icio.us tags with geographic metadata, then visualize using worldKit. The webpage presents this geo.licio.us : geotagging hosted services thing. Nice hack!

This worldkit app is an experiment in using del.icio.us as a collaborative geo-annotation database.

To annotate: activate the map by mouse click. Hold "i", then click location to annotate.

The del.icio.us tags field is overloaded and stuffed with arbitrary key/value metadata; in this case, "geo:lat=* geo:long=*". This map pulls all del.icio.us entries with the additional tag geolicious. So any entry published with these tags will be plotted. Tags are published in the RSS 1.0 feed in . worldKit has been modified: now parses RSS 1.0, and will accept geotags in the dc:subject.

geo.licio.us could be like a collaborative geourl, though I'm sure proximity search would bring it to a crawl. Another problem is that the RSS feed only lists the last 30 entries.

This is a hack, but it's motivated. To get geo-annotation moving, have to go to where it's already super easy to publish. Majority of people opt for hosted services to publish links,blogs,photos. These places aren't extendable by plugins (wonder if there's any safe way to allow this) to enable clean arbitrary metadata publishing (Metadata publishing could be built in, but I'm not on the inside). So hack it. del.icio.us has tags. flickr has tags .. but they don't publish the tags in the syndicated feeds (why not flickr?). flickr geo-annotation would allow easy photo maps. typepad has a "keywords" field, but you can only directly edit the syndication feed templates at the Pro level. blogger? no idea. Come on services, let the metadata flow!

[Research] Presence awareness still on board

Boxes and Arrows more and more deal with locative media. They have a paper by Jonathan Grubb and Shawn Smith called "Location and Presence in Mobile Data Services". The authors advocate for the importance of presence awareness (added to location-awareness feature). They then propose ideas for "designing for presence":

When designing presence into applications, designers need to understand the two basic types of presence: system-generated status and user-set status. “Online” and “idle” are examples of system-generated status. Location is another. “Busy,” “bored,” and “invisible” are examples of user-set status. System-generated status is important because it ‘s accurate, reliable, and objective, but it risks revealing things the user does not want to reveal. Therefore, the system, should give the user the ability to suspend, change, or override system-generated status unless there’s a compelling reason not to do so.

In general, systems should not use presence data to set limits that second-guess the user. Rather, systems should use the data to enable the user to make informed choices. For example, even if a user has set her status to “EXTREMELY BUSY,” the system should not prevent someone from calling her.

Designing for presence in general makes for an interesting discussion, but presence has especially profound implications for the design of mobile data services.

[Locative Media] Mobile communication and social changes

Mobile communication and social changes is a conference about how mobile communication impacts social behavior. It was held in Seoul (South Korea) in october. According to the program, it seems interesting. Especially this one "Personal Portable Pedestrian : Lessons from Japanese Mobile Phone Use" by Mizuko Ito.

[Locative Media] Pervasive and Locative Arts Network

Pervasive and Locative Arts Network is definitely something that you (we) should be part of if you are interested into locative media stuff /we do). Soundz promising, let me write my position paper.

A new international and interdisciplinary research network in pervasive media and locative media has been funded as part of the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) Culture & Creativity programme. The network will bring together practicing artists, technology developers and ethnographers with the aim of advancing interdisciplinary understanding and building consortia for future collaborative projects. It will be of relevance to people working in the arts, games, education, tourism, heritage, science and engineering.

[Research] Embodiment!?

Finally, I found somebody clarifying the very concept of embodiment. It's amazing how many papers deal with this concept without giving a proper definition. The definition is rather robot-design oriented (than an interaction design twist) but it still of interest.

Despite the fact that exploiting embodiment offers real opportunities to those who would design and build robots, the term is typically used without being directly defined. A significant initial assumption in almost all cases is that to be 'embodied' is 'to have a physical body.(...) A system X is embodied in an environment E if perturbatory channels exist between the two. That is, X is embodied in E if for every time t at which both X and E exist, some subset of E's possible states with respect to X have the capacity to perturb X's state, and some subset of X's possible states with respect to E have the capacity to perturb E's state.