Straight from my inbox, a few academic events to keep an eye on:

Social Interaction and Mundane Technologies in Everyday Life.
Theme Issue of Personal and Ubiquitous Computing - Planned publication June 2009

This theme issue is responding to the proliferation and developing constellations of ’social’ and ‘mundane’ technologies in people’s everyday lives. We define ‘mundane technologies’ (Graham and Rouncefield, 2007) as those quite unremarkable technologies that, given the context in which they operate, have been ‘made at home’, have become ‘ordinary’ and, indeed, part of the organisation already in place (Sacks, 1992). These technologies are often simple, minimalist and ‘loose’ and yet support richly layered social interactions which are sustained and develop across time, place, and culture in particular ’social worlds’ (Strauss, 1978). Our assumption is that these ‘mundane technologies’ are at a mature level of adoption, with seemingly well worked-out affordances so that their use has become so tightly entwined with activity and social interaction as to be almost invisible (Weiser, 1991) and thus, difficult to study and to be surprised by.

Automated Journeys
Workshop at UbiComp 2008

Computing technology now pervades those moments of our day when we move through our cities. Mobile phones, music players, vending machines, contact-less payment systems and RFID-enabled turnstiles are de rigueur on our daily journeys. This workshop aims to examine these augmented journeys, to reflect on the public, semi-public and private technologies available to us in them, and to speculate on what innovations might be to come. Taking as our starting point cities such as Seoul, we aim to take seriously the developments in mobile technology as well as the advancements in autonomous machinery and how these mesh with our urban journeys.

Collocated social practices surrounding photos
Special Issue of International Journal of Human-Computer Studies - Targeted publication November 2009

Following the uptake of digital cameras there has been considerable interest from the HCI field in contemporary photographic practices. Recent studies on people’s interactions with printed and digital photos have drawn attention to the novel social practices that continue to emerge in light of technical advances. The ways in which people approach the capture, sharing, storing and display of photos are rapidly changing, and the scope of these changes, along with their social and cultural implications, raises interesting challenges and possibilities for the design of supportive technologies. This special issue aims to build on what has become an established corpus of HCI studies on photography, reflecting past research and bringing together recent technical developments, empirical studies and thoughts on method and theory.

ENTER 2009 - 16th International Conference on IT and Travel & Tourism
IFITT’s Global Travel & Tourism Technology and eBusiness Forum
January 28th – 30th, 2009, Amsterdam, Netherlands

Telecommunications and Travel Behavior Committee of the US Transportation Research Board

The TRB Committee on Telecommunication and Travel Behavior invites papers on a wide range of topics related to the understanding, modeling, and analysis of the interrelation between telecommunications and traveler behavior. We are interested in a broad range of issues relating to the role of emerging technologies and travel, but particularly for the 2009 conference, we are seeking papers addressing the following issues.
-Role of Network Attributes on Telecommuting
-Role of ICT in influencing social networks and the travel implications.
-Role of Information and Communications Technology (ICT) on Value of Travel Time
-Role of Information and Communications Technology (ICT)on Leisure Activities
-Geographical and Occupational Clustering of Telecommuters
-The evolving nature of use of Internet and travel implications

See previous list of Events, Seminars, Workshops on the City, Space and Socio-Technical Systems

After the popular success, some bike sharing systems still suffer from growing pains due to uncertain availability of the service throughout the days and seasons (previously exposed in Barcelona and Paris). The issues have been highlighted in the media these past months such as the official request to perform an external audit of Bicing in Barcelona, and in C’est une impression ou on ne trouve plus de Vélib’ le matin? the list of complains related to Velib’ in Paris. There are several efforts in improving the systems by the providers (JCDecaux and ClearChannel), the local authorities, the users themseves (e.g. from their ideas and mashups) as well as other independent stakeholders in the forms of think tanks (e.g. Espace des Temps in Lyon or The Commons) and “mobility operators” (term inspired by Thierry Marcou) such as Telefonica R&D and their Bicing Usage Survey. Nevertheless it makes me wonder whether they really go beyond the traditional methods of urban and transportation planning. There might be new practices inspired from the worlds of interaction design, evidence-based urbanism and software engineering when it comes to envision and design hybrid urban systems mixing physical artifacts and digital information.

Why do I blog this: Doing some background research on the state of bike sharing systems, for an article (slightly outside the scope of my thesis) on mixed methods research to design future sustainable transport systems based public forms of private transport.

Today I gave a talk at the ICING (Intelligent Cities of the Next Generation) workshop in Barcelona entitled “From Sentient to Responsive Cities” (slides). In this presentation I discussed the deployment of new urban actors as instigators of new types of data at the source of a sentient city. These new technologies should not be perceived as drivers of urban change (like often misconceived), but are rather caught up in complex socio-technical assemblages and evolution. They can be used to solve a problem, but might create others therefore failing to contributing to the health of society. That being said, I showcased the use of digital footprints and digital shadows generated by our interactions with these new actors to reveal the invisible (with still many obscurities). In a near future, their visualizations and analysis could very well complete traditional techniques to understand urban dynamics. The real-time availability of these information and evidences extracted from the analysis of these data could lead services part of a responsive city; a city that observes and improves rather than predicts and accommodates. They provide an opportunity to reveal the imperfections of our chaotic cities (and we love them for that) to promote the appropriation of services that have fluctuant quality. This implies a change of approach from the current design of urban services based on the mythologies of a perfect, uniform informational landscape. This approach has some echo in the practice as a quote from a spokesman of the American Public Transportation Association in the news this week reveals: “If you’re late, the public will forgive you if you can tell them how much and why“.

Thanks to Joan Batlle (Barcelona City Council) and Yuji Yoshimura (Barcelona Ecologia) for their invitation

This week I gave a talk at Nuria Oliver’s recently created Multimedia Scientific Research group within Telefonica R&D in Barcelona. In this presentation, I discussed some of my ongoing research work at MIT and Universitat Pompeu Fabra on “Exploiting digital footprints to describe urban dynamics“.

Thanks to Mauro Cherubini and Nuria Oliver for their kind invitation.

Extracted from Marc Smith’s keynote presentation on “Illustrating Digital Traces: Visualizations of patterns generated by computer-mediated collective action systems” at the Third International Conference on Communities and Technologies 2007:

Traditional observation of people communication behavior on the street, from City: Rediscovering the Center by William H. Whyte (1990)

Issues with relying on explicit and implicit “reputation systems”

A couple of papers studying users behaviors in the context of online photo-sharing. Each has a specific angle on the data: social science (individual and group cooperation practices), data mining (who is looking at a photo) and visualization (understand the notion of place). I use them to inform the analysis of Flickr users practices to georeference and geotag their photos.

Prieur, C., Cardon, D., Beuscart, J.-S., Pissard, N., and Pons, P. (2008). The stength of weak cooperation: A case study on flickr. CoRR, abs/0802.2317.

Objective: Detail the concept of weak cooperation showing the great variety of uses (stockpiling, social media use, myspace like).
Data: 5M users, 150M photos, users, contacts, groups photos, comments, tags and favorites.
Methods: Distribution of flickr functionalities (contacts, comments, favorites); principal component analysis on correlation matrix to represent graphically the relations among nb photos, nb contacts (in/out), nb favorites (in/out); distribution of number of members and photos among Flickr groups, social graph with members of groups as nodes and proximity function between users from the similarity of the tags they use; define the social density of a group from the density of the social graph.

van Zwol, R. (2007). Flickr: Who is looking? In 2007 IEEE / WIC / ACM International Conference on Web Intelligence, pages 184–190. IEEE Computer Society.

Objective: Characterize user behaviors on temporal, social and spatial dimensions.
Data: 1.83M uploaded during 10 days and viewed over a period of 50 days.
Methods: Use a photo’s popularity to identify social networking and photo pooling. Distribution of photos views per bucket (a bucket groups the photos based on the number of views) 0-10%, 10-20%, 20-30%, 30-40%, 40-50% and > 50%. Same for the temporal dimension slices of time, and social dimension (comments, contacts, pools). Geographic distribution defined with two standard deviations (for the longitude and latitude) and a single value representing the geographic spreading of the photos views with the euclidian distance between the two standard deviations. This value is then applied to the slices.

Dykes, J., Purves, R., Edwardes, A. J., and Wood, J. (2008). Exploring volunteered geographic information to describe place: Visualization of the ’geograph british isles’ collection. In GIS Research UK (GISRUK 2008). Manchester Metropolitan University.

Objective: Understand the way language is used to describe landscape with geotagged photos
Data: 340,000 photographs with titles, comments and other metadata, georeference with at least 1km precision
Methods: Interactive and spatial treemaps of terms. Forcus on scene types (e.g. beach, village, mountain, hill) and scene type descriptors. Chi statistic maps of national trends for the selected combination of scene types. Spatial tag clouds to explore local variation in the terms.

Relation to my thesis:  Quantitative methods to understand user practices with online photo-sharing platforms in extensions to works such as Why We Tag: Motivations for Annotation in Mobile and Online Media

The launch of Citysense, a real-time social navigation and nightlife discovery application for Blackberry and iPhone confirms the trend of analyzing massive amounts of real-time and historic location data from mobile devices for predictive analytics. The idea is similar to automobile GPS systems sharing and pooling current road speed conditions so that everyone can avoid congestion (see Real-Time Traffic Routing from the Comfort of Your Car). The algorithms behind Citysense indexes the active places in a city and characterized them by activity, versus proximity or demographics, to better understand the context of people behavior. In the same range, using the iPhone’s map and self-location features, as well as information about the prior activities of the user’s friends, Whrrl proposes new places to explore or activities to try. Last year, PARC developed, Magitti, a mobile application that uses a combination of cues to infer her interests. With the time of day, a person’s location, her past behaviors, and even her text messages the application suggests concerts, movies, bookstores, and restaurants.

The recent release of these social softwares is also a signal of a shift from answering “where are my friends” to “where is everybody” or “what is everybody doing” (A theme I discussed in the paper “Leveraging Urban Digital Footprints with Social Navigation and Seamful Design“). But they also raise the questios: are people interested in being entertained with real-time information and can machine learning algorithms provide solutions?

Citysense screenshot on a Blackberry

Relation to my thesis: Sense Networks, the company behind Citysense also developed Macrosense, a direct technology transfer from Sandy Pentland’s work on “Reality Mining” (see Nathan Eagle’s talk at Lift on the subject). It demonstrats the real interest in combining massive amounts of anonymous, aggregate location data to understand people dynamics (see Understanding Human Mobility Patterns). However, for powerful predictions there is still a lot of work to do in 1) understanding what motivates individuals to behave the way they do and 2) how users perceive and interact with the information and recommendation.

In the line of Bruno Latour’s thoughts on the consequences of digital traces on social sciences, the current issue of Nature reports in its editorial “A flood of hard data” on the use of mobile-phone technique as an example of how modern information technologies are giving social scientists the power to make measurements that are often as precise as those in the ‘hard’ sciences:

Social scientists have long struggled with a paucity of hard data about human activities; people’s self-reporting about their social interactions, say, or their movement patterns is labour-intensive to collect and notoriously unreliable. In this case, the researchers obtained objective data on individuals’ movements from mobile-phone networks (albeit without access to any individual’s identity, for privacy reasons).

In “Understanding Individual Human Mobility Patterns“, a paper featured in the same issue is an example of this new approach. It reports on the study of movements of 100,000 people following their cellphone signals and found. Quite predictably, it reveals that “most people are creatures of habit”, inclined to move around the same few locations, occasionally given to long hops and despite the diversity of their travel history, humans follow simple reproducible patterns”,

Relation to my thesis: it is rather encouraging Nature reporting on the opportunity that digital traces represent for “It’s not an overstatement to say that these tools are fostering a whole new type of social science — with applications that go well beyond the conventional boundaries of the field.” and their influence on urban planning and the development of transportation networks… and some caution on the new approach that goes exactly in the direction of my thesis and exploring the practice behind the data to better inform the analysis of tourists presence and movements:

The goal of social science is not simply to understand how people behave in large groups, but to understand what motivates individuals to behave the way they do.

Barcelona Visió produced a creative 6 minutes documentary on Tracing the Visitor’s Eye, presented in Catalan by my advisor Josep Blat.

Contemplate the Modernista style of the Sagrada Família, the Pedrera and Casa Batlló in the morning, dine on arròs a la cassola (casserole rice) in Barceloneta and round off the day visiting Plaça d’Espanya and Camp Nou may be one of the preferred routes of Japanese tourists who want to get to know the city of Barcelona. Knowing firsthand what visitors see, when, and how they get around the city would be very useful for shops, restaurants and transport services, so that they could adapt to the real demands. A few years ago, to get this information was an over-ambitious dream. Now, new technology has made it possible. The mathematician Josep Blat, together with Fabien Girardin, explains how they have been able to create a map of the routes tourists take, based on information extracted from the photos tourists themselves post on the Flickr website. Science fiction is history!

UCL’s Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis (CASA) announce the availability of a fully funded PhD studentships on “Measuring and monitoring population diversity and spatial concentration: GeoWeb 2.0 solutions“

Relation to my thesis: Another sign of research getting financed around my thesis topic