While finishing a journal paper on our initial results of Tracing the Visitor’s Eye, I completed the development of my “Urban Dynamics” software to visualize on top of Google Earth the tourist density and flows. There is an explanatory page with examples of Barcelona, Spain and Florence, Italy available in: 3D geospatial visualization of tourist density and flows

Relation to my thesis: I have been developing “Urban Dynamics” as a tool to analyze spatio-temporal data of field studies. It is also a piece of work that proves that 2008 might be the year of Neogeographer as suggested by Andrew Hudson-Smith at CASA.

People at the Chronos Group digged up the term “chronotope” from the 90s. According to Wikipedia, chronotope can be literally translated as “time-space”. In the context of urbanism, it highlights the temporal features of the city (see Une interprétation chronotopique by Alain Guez). The increasing availability of digital traces allows new perspectives of chronotopic analysis of urban spaces. The chronotopic visualizations (and tools) developed in WikiCity and Tracing the Visitor’s Eye most definitively go in the direction of revealing the “mobilities” not only in space but also over time (history and real time).

A few events I would love to attend in early 2008, but I unfortunately won’t be able to…

The Mobile City conference
Is it still useful or even possible to talk about the city as being only physical? Or about the digital world as purely ‘virtual’ (in the sense of ‘not real’ oimmaterial)? The physical city and the spaces of digital technologies merge into a new “hybrid space”. Hybrid spaces are shaped by the social processes that concurrently take place in digital and physical spaces. What is the influence of these developments on the ideas we have of time, space and place, citizenship and identity?

4th and 5th seminars in the ESRC Research Seminar Series: Rethinking the Urban Experience: the Sensory Production of Place
Seminar on the sensory awareness of urban infrastructure. This seminar will ask questions about the infrastructure that supports urban society. Topics may include sensory experiences of public transport networks, olfactory responses to waste and its disposal, public toilet provision in urban areas. Additionally, the role of hidden infrastructures such as CCTV and underground infrastructures such as utilities networks will be considered in this seminar.

EPFL Choros group “Penser l’espace” seminar with a focus on the “critique de la raison cartographique” and the multiple perspectives to think about space.
Quelles habitudes de pensée sont charriées lorsqu’on cartographie ? Quelles sont les implications de la réduction cartographique de la complexité de l’espace ? De quelle façon peut-on contrôler le passage des données à la carte ou le passage de la pensée à la carte ? Comment cartographier de l’espace contemporain – ce « space of flows » et hyperurbanisé - où la mobilité et la digitalité sont les caractéristiques fondamentales ? Quelles sont les implications du passage de la carte sur papier à la carte sur écran ? Le GPS et Google Earth transforment-ils notre rapport à la carte, et, partant, notre rapport à l’espace ?

Pervasive Persuasive Technology and Environmental Sustainability workshop at Pervasive 2008
The key theme of this workshop around environmental sustainability will be addressed threefold: 1. Providing people with environmental data and educational information, 2. Pervasiveness can easily turn invasive. It has already caused negative consequences in biological settings. 3. digital divide between humans and the environment (e.g. Can the process of ‘blogging sensor data’ (sensorbase.org) assist us in becoming more aware of the needs of nature? How can we avoid the downsides?

Inaugural Research Institute for the Science of Socio-Technical Systems
A science of socio-technical systems is emerging from research in the fields of HCI, social computing, social informatics, CSCW, sociology of computing, and other domains. The Consortium for the Science of Socio-Technical Systems (CSST) is a new organization devoted to advancing research on socio-technical systems. A primary goal of the institute is to build a new cohort of faculty and graduate students who are interested in research on the design and interplay of technology and humans at the level of individuals, groups, organizations, and larger communities.

ifgi Spring School 2008
Two weeks of short block courses with innovative topics in GI such as: geospatio-temporal information: issues in representation and reasoning, usability and user-centred systems, location-aware systems, information visualization & presentation, and research methods

Last Friday, at the Salon ImmoTICs DomoTICs Agora in Sophia Antipolis, France, I was very fortunate to present some of my work in a slot between the french “paleanthropologist” Pascal Picq and the italian architect David Fisher and later the economist/thinker Michel Godet. My talk (in french) entitled “Révéler le pouls de la ville” was a duplicate of what I presented at Mobile Monday Barcelona, with a stronger emphasis on the implications of the use of “digital footprints” by urban planners, local authorities and designer of urban digital infrastructures such as location-based services. The slide are available online: Révéler le pouls de la ville.

Thanks to Dominique Thibault for the kind invitation.

Relation to my thesis: testing my ideas + practicing public speaking (it is definitively either in my mother tongue) + getting in touch with french academics who do not always communicate outside of the boundaries of the “hexagone”.

Last night, I participated to the Mobile Monday Barcelona event on Location-Based Services. My talk entitled “Mapping of City Dynamics” covered some innovative ways to use mobile and wireless technologies to sense the city and reveal its pulse (i.e. its activity in space and time). I also discussed their underlying concepts (real-time, history, feedback loop, implicit and explicit acts, experience of the city, consequences of our activities) and their implications in relation to the design of location-based services that raise. Finally, I exemplified these ideas by introducing the ongoing project lead at the SENSEable City lab, named WikiCity, that aims at offering an instrument for city inhabitants to base their actions and decisions upon in a better informed manner.

Thanks to Rudy and Carles for the invitation! (Flickr set of the event)

The slides with my notes are available: Mapping of city dynamics

Relation to my thesis: Pushing the ideas on urban computing and the design of LBS (granularity, areas of influence/relevance, uncertainty) and getting good contacts to understand the partitioners perspectives. and past experiences. I will do a similar talk on Friday at the ImmoTICs DomoTICs Agora event in Sophia Antipolis.

Humans think and talk about regions imprecisely in terms of vague concepts (e.g. downtown). While administrative regions such as area codes and land parcels have sharp boundaries imposed on them, other regions concepts used by people are more fuzzy. The use of vague spatial concepts in geospatial communication have been studies for many years (see for instance Daniel Montello’s Where’s downtown?: Behavioral methods for determining referents of vague spatial queries). However, the understanding human’s perspective of the space hardly translates to its digital definition stored geographic information systems. As a consequence, the local search and location-based services industry has invested a large amount of energy and money in obtaining neighborood expertise. Companies such as Urban Mapping sells its extensive user-centered neighborhood datasets to major search engines. New approaches profit from people submitting their own version of the boundaries for the same neighborhood. WikiMapia is an example of this kind of community editing. It defines specific areas (roads, parks) with polygonal entries (see Matt Jones’ Wikimapia Invades Google Earth!. Similarly, the Intelligent Middleware project at the MIT aims at providing a mechanism for accumulating local knowledge about neighborhood-scale land use. This people-generated content helps re-interpreting the administrative datasets and develop customized analyses of neighborhood conditions.

A classic Neighborhood areas & census block groups (2000) by the Seattle City Clerk’s Office neighborhood map atlas (right). People-defined neighborhoods and areas of Barcelona in Wikimapia

Nowadays, there are new sources to implicitly reveal the crowd “mental maps”. This has mainly been done by via tag maps such as the ones generated by WorldExplorer. In Tracing the Visitor’s Eye, I am currently taking this idea a bit further and try to generate the “area of influence” of monuments and points of interest. This work should reveal a spatial relevance of geographic objects as zones (i.e. neighborhoods) instead of administratively-defined points or rectangles (like the ones provided by GeoNames). Inspired by Jonathan Raper’s concept of “Geographic relevance” (match between area of attention and area of influence). For instance, areas defined implicitly by people’s behaviors (mobility, digital traces) and activities (geotagging) could help provide more relevant answers to queries based on monuments and proximity such as “what is close to the Empire State Building?”

A crowd’s mental maps of Barcelona in WorldExplorer

Update: I forgot about the The Neighborhood Project (mentioned previously), as an attempt to map what street addresses people on Craigslist consider to be within certain neighborhoods. One problem with, though, it is that Craigslist provides a certain list of neighborhood names and they aren’t necessarily the same ones that people use in real life.

Neighborhoods defined by people using Craigslist.

Jonathan Raper’s Geographic Relevance presented at LBS2007

Relation to my thesis: Exploring the relationship between people’s perception of neighborhood and the concept of location information granularity.

On the kind invitation of Juan Dürsteler, I contributed to the InfoVis.net newsletter with a text on current approaches to visualize urban activities and their evolution through space and time: “Visualising the Pulse of the City” and in Spanish “Visualizando el Pulso de la Ciudad“.

After 2 years of doctoral school and the defense of my DEA thesis (pdf), I guess I now hold a Master of Philosophy in Computer Science and Digital Communication. The slides of the defense are available here.

Relation to my thesis: The defense ended up being a bureaucratic formality. One feeling I have after having presented the same slides a few times this year is that I now drag and try to combine too many concepts together. To move forward, I will need to make choices and trim my scope and get more depth in the details.

I am in Hong-Kong for the 4th International Symposium on LBS and TeleCartography where I introduced two different works in the Mobile Users Analysis track. First I presented my paper “Understanding of Tourist Dynamics from Explicitly Disclosed Location Information” that describes the early results of the Tracing the Visitor’s Eye project based with data collected in the Province of Florence. I intended to communicate the complementary perspective new types of digital footprints can bring to mobility, urban and travel studies. The content of other presentations in the session (mainly Ahas Rein’s Mobile Positioning: New Perspective in GIS and Geographical Studies. Ahas chairs an upcoming workshop on social positioning method) that are based GSM network data, helped situate the originality of my approach based on act of communications “I was here” instead of passive, implicit mobility data. It means also no issues of scalability, infrastructure and negotiations with operators. I suggested the idea the explicitly disclosed location data can help inform the design of LBS (e.g. help define area of attention of people, the area of influence of objects, and the granularity of information). Finally, of course, I mentioned the feedback loop generated by people’s past interactions with the urban environment and infrastructure that become recommendations and impact the perception of the space.

Understanding of Tourist Dynamics from Explicitly Disclosed Location Information (slides in PDF)

Later, I presented (on behalf of the WikiCity team) the main concepts and design of the MIT SENSEable City Lab current project WikiCity. Without getting into the technical details, I stressed the importance of developing a real-time mapping of city dynamics for people to become actuators and prime actors of the cityspace. The scenarios of WikiCity is based on the fusion of 3 elements agents (individuals, companies, local authorities…), the environment (architecture, infrastructure, climate…) and technology features (opportunities and limitation positioning and sensing technologies. A main challenge is to provide a common format for interchange of realtime location-based data and to communicate the information to multi-modal interfaces (close to the person such as mobile/fixed devices, embedded in the infrastructure, vehicles (public transport, individual cars).

WikiCity: How can a city perform as an open-source real-time system (slides in PDF)

In his presentation at Open Plan in 2005, Bill Gaver implicitly mentioned a few concepts I am currently focused on. First he presented the The Urban Pollution Monitoring Project that provides some sort of feedback loop to residents in providing resources to reason themselves about fluctuating pollution in the city space. The system providing information about the content, but also about the infrastructure providing the content (i.e. a sort of seamful design). Then he highlighted the notion of “over time” with a project by Richard’s Swinford’s use of GPS traces and their use of satellites to carve out the boundaries of the physical space. It shows that the model of the phisical world can be created in a bottom-up fashion (implicit digital traces) and reflect reflect “over time” of individual’s knowledge on the local space. In other words, there is a connection between the system produced and the places they inhabit that grows and can can be appreciated over time for instance in a game or to support social navigation. The data of this spatio-temporal use come from the technologies themselves or the experience of the people using them. OpenStreetMap (evolution in London and Great Britain), courier activity and cabspotting are clear examples of the former.

Realising the extensions of man by llistening to the user: model the neighborhood in 3D by using GPS and the satelites. The model gains in accuracy with the use of the system. Source: Richard’s Swinford. I guess it uses the same kind of data at the Anthony Steed’s GPS Availability Visualization.

Later in his talk, Bill mentioned Ben Hooker and Shona Kitchen project called Edge Town done in 2004 that aimed designing interfaces with the flows of electronic data that run through our cities so that “they can be experienced as an enriching complement to other, more ‘earthly’ phenomena”. I was fascinated by then (and still am) by their Sensor park aimed to be situated in tumultuous landscapes, such as directly underneath the airport’s final approach flight paths. The structure of the sensor park provides support for a host of screen-based and electromechanical displays, which offer numerical representations of the data collected from the sensors. This type of information would be provided to Edge Town resident and experienced for their week-end recreation.

Sensor park in the Edge Town project

Relation to my thesis: Tagging with concept names a 2-years old message… I got to know Bill Gaver from his Ambiguity as Resource for Design.