Yesterday, I presented at the 2008 Association of American Geographers Annual Meeting, the preliminary results of my ethnographic study on the use, adoption, and appropriation of satellite navigation systems by taxi drivers in Barcelona (slides). The abstract of the paper “The co-evolution of taxi drivers and their in-car navigation systems” co-authored with Josep Blat goes as follows:

In recent years, the relative market success of in-car navigation systems has symbolized the emergence of location-based services for wayfinding. This market success creates the opportunity to learn from real-world use of current location-aware systems in order to inform the design of future applications. With this aim, we are using an ethnographic approach to study the different ways taxi drivers rely on their navigation system. This work describes how location technologies impact the wayfinding practices and also how practices influence the appropriation of navigation systems. This co-evolution goes from the acquisition and setup of a navigation system to mastering the system shortcomings and limitations. Next, we study the reasons upon which a driver selects among the different modes of a navigation system and the other artifacts and tools (e.g. maps, street directories, landmarks) he or she uses for location awareness and wayfinding. Moreover, we analyze the role of context in this dynamics, i.e., where and when a driver accesses location information from the system, the external supports and the surrounding environment. We present the findings that emerged from 12 interviews augmented by in-car observations within the community of taxi drivers of the city of Barcelona, Spain. This community forms a massive population of early adopters of in-car navigation systems with a strong past practice of relying on mobile technologies and maps to support their work.

My paper “Leveraging Explicitly Disclosed Location Information to Understand Tourist Dynamics: A Case Study”, co-authored with Josep Blat, Filippo Dal Fiore and Carlo Ratti, has been accepted for publication in the Journal of Location Based Services. The abstract goes as follows:

In recent years, the large deployment of mobile devices has led to a massive increase in the volume of records of where people have been and when they were there. The analysis of these spatio-temporal data can supply high-level human behavior information valuable to urban planners, local authorities, and designer of location-based services. In this paper, we describe our approach to collect and analyze the history of physical presence of tourists from the digital footprints they publicly disclose on the web. Our work takes place in the Province of Florence in Italy, where the insights on the visitors’ flows and on the nationalities of the tourists who do not sleep in town has been limited to information from survey-based hotel and museums frequentation. In fact, most local authorities in the world must face this dearth of data on tourist dynamics. In this case study, we used a corpus of geographically referenced photos taken in the province by 4280 photographers over a period of 2 years. Based on the disclosure of the location of the photos, we design geovisualizations to reveal the tourist concentration and spatio-temporal flows. Our initial results provide insights on the density of tourists, the points of interests they visit as well as the most common trajectories they follow.

The reviews validate the direction of my theis. They ask me to explore how the insights insight gained from this project can be transferred to other user groups and compare the outcome with the available tourist services. They propose to continue exploring the issues around the quality of the data (i.e. how to reduce the uncerntainty in a bit detailed manner). Finally, I make a case that the visualization validate my hypothesis, but I could also point out the anomalies or unexpected behavior patterns (journalists somehow requested similar outcomes). And, yeah, not to forget the encouraging comment… “This is an excellent paper, covering a very timely and interesting topic“.

Data flow, from data recording, retrieving, storing to the visualizations.

In addition to a first list, here is list of events I won’t attend but should keep an eye upon.

First International Workshop on Trends in Pervasive and Ubiquitous Geotechnology and Geoinformation
Workshop @ the GIScience conference, September 2008, Park City, Utah, USA

The aim of the workshop is to bring together researchers from various fields to discuss trends in pervasive and ubiquitous geotechnology and geoinformation and their impact on the day-to-day application of geography by consumers and geo-friendly industries such as tourism and education. […] In this workshop, we will discuss the issues (both human factors and engineering challenges) surrounding these context-aware systems. While we will include any research topic that relates either to geotechnology or geoinformation, we will focus on the theory behind and application of systems that successfully and rigorously combine the two. Furthermore, we will particularly highlight research that is able to combine the two in a manner that creates a value to the end user that is greater than the sum of the parts. Finally, we will also discuss broader questions related to pervasive and ubiquitous geotechnology and geoinformation. For instance, how will these new capabilities transform the way we experience the world around us? More importantly, how will they alter our interaction with geography?

The First International Workshop on Location and the Web (LocWeb 2008)
In Conjunction with the WWW 2008 Conference. April 22

This main objective of this workshop is to look into the fields of how to extract, index, mine, find, exploit, mashup, and visualize Web content with respect to its location semantics.

Space = Interaction = Discourse
Aalborg, Denmark from 12th - 14th November 2008

The aim of this conference is to bring together researchers who investigate space, mediated discourse and embodied interaction from different perspectives. The conference will highlight interdisciplinary research that explores how embodied and virtual social actors communicate, interact and coordinate their activities in complex multimodal environments, with a special focus on place, mobility and the body.

Summer Institute of the The Vespucci Initiative for the Advancement of Geographic Information Science
With a 1-week session in Tuscany, Italy on the Geo-Sensor Web with the presence of YDream’s Antonio Camara and UCSB’ Michael F. Goodchild

Geospatial information increasingly is being produced not only by central mapping agencies but by diverse and dispersed collections of sensors. How does this new data collection and dissemination paradigm affect the geospatial community, and vice versa? Sensor Web and citizen participatioon: what happens when citizens are able to deploy and exploit their own sensors? If the Sensor Web becomes as ubiquitous and successful (within its realm of influence) as the WWW, in what ways might it change the way we do things? What areas of high-inertia might be reduced? What as-of-yet unforeseen applications might emerge?

The meeting to report on my first results on tourist activities in Florence provided the opportunity to further plan my year at the MIT SENSEable City Lab. Prior to moving here, I extracted the keywords of my research: feedback loop, manual location disclosure, digital traces, granularity, uncertainty and co-evolution. Instead of finding complete coherence, its seems that now the completion of my thesis could take two separate avenues each related to some of these keywords:

Leveraging digital traces
In the first, I can build further upon the Tracing the Visitor’s Eye project and consider the analysis of digital traces or volunteer generated information to understand how they can be helpful to tourism (or more in general mobility?) and support decision making. It could be about forging new ways to describe tourism with a validation through second order analysis with other dynamic data such as cellphone data (flickr 70% and 30% cellphone data). Analysis could take place in Florence or Rome (better for statistical validity). Part of the analysis would focus on the accuracy of the data at hand and highlight the shortcomings and potentials. It would be about how flickr users (and maybe another dataset) describe the space (semantic analysis of the flickr dataset). The outcome would be a set of interactive tools and visualization to analyze the data and why not a model that could simulate the mobility of tourist from the flickr and cellphone datasets.

Research questions: How digital traces (or in a narrower way “volunteer generated information”) can enhance current tourism (or in a more extended way mobility) observations? With potential sub-questions as follow:

• What new information on mobility and tourism do these data bring? -> traces, scalability, richness of the explicit act of disclosing information, peope-defined area of influence of points of interests, people’s area of attention (digital footprints to improve the virtual representation of the space), geographic relevance
• How can we validate these data? -> use techniques to calibrate the flickr dataset with other mobility databases.
• What are the data quality (accuracy, noise, …) issues in volunteer generated information? This would be about revealing some factors that influence people’s decisions when they georeference information. ->In addition to Flickr data, I could setup a field experiment in Florence or as part of the WikiCity Rome project.
• How does automatic positioning influences location disclosure? Retrieve users who georeference automatically and study the semantic descriptions they use to disclose the information.
• How to visualize uncertain location information? This might involve setting-up an experiment with practitioners in urbanism/tourism or observe their current practices.

The appropriation of location information
The second avenue aims at building a coherence (a story) from the outcomes of CatchBob! and my taxi driver study and the semantic analysis of the flickr dataset. The main theme/question would be to better understand how do people relate to space (and its multiple spaces) through location information with a set of evidences each study would bring. CatchBob! indicated that technologies representation of the physical environment is uneven and fluctuant leading to feelings of uncertainty. Observations of taxi drivers revealed the importance of the prior experience of the space to appropriate a satnav system and the pitfalls of the discrepancies revealed in CatchBob!. In addition, current satnav systems do not fully support the practices of taxi drivers who need to access different levels of granularity of location information during a journey (trunked access to the information as if it was process through a funnel). This is for the reading/accessing part of location information. So what happens when we let people write and describe space. How does that translate to the different levels of granularity of multiple spaces (spatial semantics)? The semantic analysis of the flickr dataset could help understand how people manage multiple space. I could add a field study in Florence to bring another perspective to that question. The outcome of this research avenue could consist in a list of evidences revealing the issues around the granularity of information, a tool to study people-generated content. The sub-questions could be:

• What factors influence uncertainty in the use of a location-aware application? How is that related to the management of granularity and the reference to multiple spaces?
• What are the influence of automatic positioning on the the practice of manual location disclosure?
• How can people-generated content help define multiple spaces and different levels of granularity?
• …

Relation to my thesis: Avenues to discuss with my advisor, then take a decision, stick to it, trim and polish the research plan. I would love to integrate some of the velib and bicing data analysis to any research avenue, but it seems that for the moment it will stay as a parallel (fun) research endeavor.

Hardey, M. (2007). The city in the age of web 2.0 a new synergistic relationship between place and people. Information, Communication & Society, 10(6):867 – 884.

In this paper Michael Hardey examines how the development of Web 2.0 resources is providing new ways of seeing, experiencing and understanding the city. A particular focus is on the increasing role of user-generated geolocational data and the opportunities this affords to reimagine and experience the metropolis with mobile technologies acting as a conduit. It considers the raise of ‘citizen media’ and ‘new cartography’ as ways to map and visualize the city through images and narrative descriptions. These new services of the city might help people base a decision about whether or not to move home. It could be informing long-term choices such as deciding where to live or what school children should attend, and the more everyday such as which park or shop to visit may be shaped by a mesh of user-generated and other data.

Michael Hardey describes this emergence of digital traces in the city and the feedback loop they generate as follow:

As Sheller and Urry (2003) observe, ‘individuals increasingly exist beyond their private bodies. Persons leave traces of their selves in informational space, and can be more readily mobile through space’ (p. 116). Indeed users of social networking sites may always be immersed within them, as they and others are dynamically geolocated. This marks the emergence of new ways of experiencing and living in the city as people make nuanced choices about places to avoid, visit, live or work. Such choices can be increasingly fleeting, unplanned and dynamic as mobile technologies deliver personalized data about places and people. There is a potential rapid feedback loop here as locations in the city may experience sudden flows of visitors or customers as people follow lines of information or seek the presence of those from their social networks.

Relation to my thesis: This text consolidates well the claims supported so far in Tracing the Visitor’s Eye. However, I am rather dubious about the wisdom of citizen media to support decision making in the city. As explained in I rather believe in the richness of implicit traces people leave in using web 2.0 and mobile systems to understand the city and places as expressed in Leveraging Urban Digital Footprints with Social Navigation and Seamful Design

This Associated Press story, GPS locators map out paths with online photos, describes geotagging potential and its utility, along with current methods. “But relatively few photos are posted with location information yet — Flickr estimates 5 percent“.

Via The Map Room.

Relation to my thesis: collecting information on the trends driving the potentials of Tracing the Visitor’s Eye.

Sliding Friction: The Harmonious Jungle of Contemporary Cities is now publicly available online. Enjoy the content on walabab.com or download the PDF.

The objective to metamorphose the LIFT conference from its grassroot and “groups of friends” origins to become a perfectly ran organizations has been widely achieved. While building a professional profit-generating event, the organizers did not forget about the keys to their previous success: openness (no VIP treatments, nor reserved areas), rely on the community (I only heard positive feedbacks from the workshops and the open stages delivered their pleasant surprises), commercial free, and magic formula of mixing the right amount of entrepreneurs, researchers, designers, artists, journalists and activists.

I attended the conference digitally naked with a pen and pieces of papers as instruments to record notes and thoughts and the archived videos to support my memory:

Bruce Sterling launched the conference in the role of a near-future futurist. Predicting the future is about moral boosting. The main reason people prosper is because they are willing to get out of the bed. Showing up is 90% of the job.

His talk focused on how we can deal (i.e. analyze the driving forces and get on with our own life) with a phenomenon we are certain to be confronted in 2008. He exemplified a foresight method (”you cannot predict the future but you can describe it“) with a recent black swan, the wedding of model Carla Bruni with french president Nicolas Sarkozy . An event that defines the character of our time (especially in Europe). An event that, if we do not have the proper analytical tools, we will be overwhelmed, confused and sicken by it. However, If you we understand the driving forces that guide what is going on we will be able to anticipate the developments. “Like an american who learns the rules of soccer, you probably still won’t like it very much, but you will understand why it matters to people, you’ll be able to put into a useful perceptive and get on with you own life.“
Paul Dourish (video) how we can understand what ethnography can teach us (talk in the following up of his implication for design paper). We miss disciplinary power relationships: ethnographers might regularly be asked what implication for design are, whereas it is not possible to ask a computer scientist the impact of his/her work to social theories. The relevance of classical ethnography in the context of mobility, presence and absence. Symbolism of to define mobility different from the technological perspective (location, coordinates) and the ethnographic perspective (dispora, nomad, asylum). There are different ways to represent space that is not about the cartographic representation (aboriginal vs western, history of the place, identify, different account of space). Particularly relevant to my current project with the senseable city lab (reveal the digital traces) and my taxi driver study (the impact of satnav system on mobility and practices)

Genevieve Bell talked about the armed race of digital deception (quoting James Katz), for every device that aims to tell the truth such as GPS there is a service available to deceive (e.g. alabi service). Technology changes faster than people do (culture, practice). How do we act in social practice with the act of lying or withholding information, the notion of white lies and good lies. Lie is about negating the real, but not about negating the truth (Peter Stiegnitz). Playful act through the rules of the world (how we choose to present ourselves, depending on the knowledge of the lookers). With secrets, we keep safe from what we choose to withhold. With lies, we shape our own realities .”Twitter is making an art out of the form of confabulation“. Particularly relevant to my work on people’s disclosure of location information in Flickr and the granularity they use (attaching a coarse-grained location information can be considered as a good lie). It also touches my taxi driver study as Genevieve points out in the very end of the talk: what do we do if technologies also start to lie such as satnav systems giving a bad direction?

Tom Taylor (video) how to use social network to inflect behaviors in the context of sustainable development. He advocated for the use of positive peer/social pressure. The positive approach goes through the engagement of individuals in groups via social softwares and let people expose their behaviors. In the future we will be able to capturing data from different sources (such as Nike+) and expose them where you do not expect it (Measure, visualize and expose in a social graph). As using a Wattson to monitor the electricity consumption in a house. Tom stated that exposing actions can have a massive effect on the way people behave. In the light of the recent works on persuasive computing, this still needs to be proven (specifically how to make that happen). This work reflects well the intention of WikiCity, its feedback loop, and the use of digital traces for social navigation. An aspect to study would be analyse the spiral of: influencing behaviors that influence the data that influence behaviors the influence the data…
I had a pleasant discussion with Rafi Haladjian on creating innovation and services from the technological constraints. In his career he created success from constraints in the network administration for the Minitel (the importance was not about creating a density of traffic, but by spreading of the day so that line would always be used), the Internet (bet on the physicality of server hosting, the unique link that is not virtual and therefore fragile) and the internet of things (play and take advantage of the positive aspect of immature technologies).

Still to come… the foresight session with Scott Smith, Bill Cockayne and Francesco Cara.

We collected very valuable content from picking up the brains of the 70+ participants of our workshop Ubiquitous computing: visions, failures and new interaction rituals. The feedbacks were rather positive: Mark Meagher, Hannes Gassert, Michele Perras, Vincenzo Pallotta, and Tom Hume.

Group activity at the workshop

My visit of the Mixed Reality Laboratory at the University of Nottingham, allowed be to exchange with some of the finest researchers active on the edges of CSCW and ubicomp including: Steve Benford (we discussed the potential uses of “trails” to reveal the “wrong” behaviors, replay is often a request of participants of pervasive experiences, but also the challenges to raise the credibility of HCI research in the industry), Martin Flintham (developing and deploying pervasive experiences), Leif Oppermann (uncertainty visualization and tools to develop pervasive experiences), Holger Schnädelbach (evaluation in architecture and hybrid worlds, presentation of cospaces), Stefan Egglestone (feedback look with bio sensors, stress sensing, see telemetry in theme parcs), and Adriano Galati (delay tolerant ad-hoc networks).

In the effort to build more coherence in my research focus, I took the opportunity to present my work and try to highlight and test the key evidences that emerged from my first studies. In the discussion after my talk, Leif Oppermann and Chris Greenhalgh suggested that, in the light of the outcomes of CatchBob! I should have a closer look on how people who atomize the georeferencing of their photos. Do they follow the same practice as in CatchBob! (i.e. become more passive in disclosing the location information, do they “annotate”/communicate less as well?

Stumbled across an essay of Bruno Latour entitled “Beware your imagination leaves digital traces” published in Times Higher Literary Supplement, 6th April 2007 in which he describes the massive consequences for social sciences to get access to digital traces:

The situation is entirely different with the digitalisation of the entertainment industry: characters leave behind a range of data. In other words, the scale to draw is not one going from the virtual to the real, but a scale of increasing traceability. The stunning innovation is that every click of every move of every avatar in every game may be gathered in a data bank and submitted to a second-degree data-mining operation.
I am sure that this accumulation of traces has enormous effects for the entertainment industry, for specialists in marketing, advertising, intelligence, police and so on, but another consequence is worth pointing out. The precise forces that mould our subjectivities and the precise characters that furnish our imaginations are all open to inquiries by the social sciences. It is as if the inner workings of private worlds have been pried open because their inputs and outputs have become thoroughly traceable.
[…]
The ancient divide between the social on the one hand and the psychological on the other was largely an artefact of an asymmetry between the traceability of various types of carriers: what Proust’s narrator was doing with his heroes, no one could say, thus it was said to be private and left to psychology; what Proust earned from his book was calculable, and thus was made part of the social or the economic sphere. But today the data bank of Amazon.com has simultaneous access to my most subtle preferences as well as to my Visa card. As soon as I purchase on the web, I erase the difference between the social, the economic and the psychological, just because of the range of traces I leave behind.
[…]
Dozens of tools and crawlers can now absorb this vast amount of data and represent it again through maps of various shapes and colours so that a “rumour” or a “fad” becomes almost as precisely described as a “piece of news”, “information”, or even a “scientific fact”.
[…]
The consequences for the social sciences will be enormous: they can finally have access to masses of data that are of the same order of magnitude as that of their older sisters, the natural sciences. But my view is that “social” has probably become as obsolete as “natural”: what is common to both is a sort of new epidemiology that was anticipated, a century ago, by the sociologist Gabriel Tarde and that has now, at last, the empirical means of its scientific ambition.

Relation to my thesis: Bruno Latour mentions the emergence of digital traces coming from the “virtual world” (sticking with the descriptions of second world and amazon’s social navigation). I would add that some of these traces are intrinsically important because they are general through the interaction with digital means within a physical context.