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.

Next week, I will attend the 2008 Association of American Geographers Annual Meeting in Boston where I will present my work The co-evolution of taxi drivers and their in-car navigation systems at the session Situating Sat Nav 2 (from 4:20 PM - 6:00 PM). Description of the session:

Sat Nav offers technologically sophisticated spatial data models of the world, but the technology quickly sinks into taken-for-granted everyday driving practices, such that its social and political significance is hard to assess. The gadgets themselves take space on the dashboard and windscreens, but also make new senses of space for the driver, well beyond the car. The session will present a range of theoretically informed analyses questioning the social effects, cultural meanings and political economy of in-car satellite navigation.

Other sessions I plan (or wish) to attend are:

Tuesday
“New” Geographies of Mobility and Accessibility: Theory, Modelling, and Policy Implications (from 12:00 PM - 1:40 PM)
During the 1950s, Ullman and Mayer prepared an initial sketch of the areas of knowledge specialization emerging from the intersection of geography and transportation. Their work provided a framework for the development of Transportation Geography. Among the various themes they identified, there was an emphasis on the study of systems, flows, and interactions. Mobility, flows, and the production of capital were physical processes involving place-based production of goods and services, and the physical movement of commodities and people through time and space. Accessibility was a product of location among origins and destinations of those commodities and people. Today our conceptualization continues to evolve in the face of wireless and wired technologies. We are at times both the producers and consumers of our own wares (Toffler, 1980), and increasingly engage in the use of information and communication technology (ICT) to perform obligatory and discretionary activities, and to consolidate and extend our social networks. In the face of the sort of spatial deconstruction offered by what Sheller and Urry (2006) and others have called, “the new mobility”, Transportation Geographers and those in many other disciplines face new challenges and research opportunities as they attempt to come to grips with the relationship between mobility, accessibility, space, and place in the information age. This session will explore recent theoretical, qualitative, empirical, and policy-based discourse and practice surrounding emerging geographical perspectives regarding relationships between technology, mobility, accessibility and daily life.

Wednesday
Urban Geography: Urban Processes and Models (from 8:00 AM - 9:40 AM)

Spatial Data Analysis, Visualization, and Modeling (from 1:00 PM - 2:40 PM)

Time Geography: Emerging Theoretical Developments, Implementations, and Applications (from 1:00 PM - 2:40 PM)
Originally designed to investigate various constraints of human activities in time and space, the time-geographic framework provides an integrated space-time environment to effectively and efficiently investigate the spatio-temporal characteristics of human activities and their interactions. There have been revived research interests in time geography in recent years. These research efforts include extending the time-geographic framework to accommodate the emerging hybrid environment of physical and virtual spaces, providing computational models and representations of the framework, developing GIS designs to implement the framework, and applying the framework to facilitate studies such as travel behaviors, activity patterns, accessibility assessment, urban structure, animal ecology, etc. This session will provide researchers a forum to share experiences and exchange ideas on recent theoretical developments, implementations, and applications of time geography.

Geographies of Play III: Embodied, emotional, sensory geographies of play (from 1:00 PM - 2:40 PM)
Christopher Harker (2005: 59) reminds us “Playing is not (just) kids stuff. Playing is something we all do, albeit to different extents and degrees, and this is something that needs a great deal more investigation”. These sessions respond to Harker’s appeal for more critical attention to be given to the study of the geographies of play. The sessions include papers from a wide range of disciplines and perspectives, to encompass child, adult and intergenerational experiences of play. The papers explore innovative ways of studying the geographies of play and embrace a wide range of diverse theoretical and methodological approaches.

Visualization (from 3:10 PM - 4:50 PM)

Urban Tourism (from 3:10 PM - 4:50 PM)

Thursday
Urbanism and Urban Planning (from 8:00 AM - 9:40 AM)

Agent Based Modeling, Simulation (from 8:00 AM - 9:40 AM)

Spatial Analysis and Modeling: Transport and Spatial Analysis (from 10:10 AM - 11:50 AM)

Cyberinfrastructure-Data and Knowledge Representation (from 10:10 AM - 11:50 AM)
The flourishing developments of shared geographic data, information, knowledge and computing resources have produced many products to facilitate the easy use of geographic resources. For example: 1) Google Earth and Microsoft Virtual Earth have changed how we explore geographic extent; 2) OGC developed multiple web services to facilitate communication among GIS components that are widely used in assembling services, such as spatial web portals; 3) Geographically distributed sensor webs have opened up the possibilities for real-time control of complex systems such as urban traffic; 4) Knowledge representation systems enable the enterprise to accumulate knowledge and make smart decisions. These evolutions adopt cyberinfrastructure to facilitate geographic research, development, and education.

Applied geostatistics (from 1:00 PM - 2:40 PM)
This session will provide an overview of the state-of-the-art in the application of geostatistics to a wide variety of disciplines.

Subversive cartographies (from 1:00 PM - 2:40 PM)
Subversive cartographies is a series of sessions jointly organised with the Maps in Society Commission of the International Cartographic Association. This first session brings together papers emphasizing the role of the aesthetic in the construction of alternative and artistic mappings. Common themes are the relations between artistic practice and mapping, narrative and (e)motional cartographies, and the politics of design.

Friday
Internet Mapping and Mash Ups (from 10:10 AM - 11:50 AM)

A Conversation with Noam Chomsky (from 2:30 PM - 4:10 PM)
Saturday
Visualization, Cartography, and Cognition (from 8:00 AM - 9:40 AM)
Build it, Mapt it, Web it (10:10 AM - 11:50 AM)

Visualization: Viewing Data in New Ways (from 10:10 AM - 11:50 AM)

So, ok the program for Monday’s Round Table on Real-Time Cities is now set. The informal aspect of the event should make it easy to rearrange it on the fly if necessary.

I will start of by introducing and defining the subject; Mentioning that, cities are by definition real-time, but the deployment of geo-information, mobile, wireless and sensor technologies allow to reveal the global, emerging aspects that can be reacted upon. In other words, a “real-time city” is a city in which system conditions can be monitored and reacted to instantaneously (Townsend, 2000); Making real the narrative of Archigram that suggested that the way the street feels may soon be defined by what cannot be seen with the naked eye “When it’s raining on Oxford Street, the buildings are no more important than the rain”. The visions behind “real-time cities” often refer to “pulsing cloud of data, instantaneous information, seamlessness integration, empowerment of the citizens, enhancement of our perception, reveal the city as we experience it, patterns of behavior, observe and improve“. For instance here and there I could find sentences such as: “Seamless integration of real-time information about events, resources, and personal experience within physical spaces” or “Strengthen our perception of the built environment as a place for social inclusion and collaboration” or “Before transport planning was about predict and accommodate and now it becomes more observe and improve“. This round table takes the opportunity to gather researchers in urban planning, geographic information systems, architecture, computer science, social sciences, and interaction design and share our perspectives on this new object of research. In 3 hours there will probably be no much more time than to break the ice and raise an awareness of the multiple issues inherent to the design, deployment and integration of real-time information systems in cities.

The session will be split in 2 main parts. At a first step, informal presentations and discussion around 3 topics:

Topic 1: New resources to describe cities (talks: Raj Singh, Paul Torrens)
Topic 2: The city as a platform for innovation (talks: Jonathan Raper, Georg Gartner)
Topic 3: Implications of the deployment of ubicomp technologies on the reconfiguration of cities (talks: Adam Greenfield, Carlo Ratti)

Then, in a second part, as long as time allows, discussion on three stakeholder perspectives

Citizens: What is a good real-time city?

Research: How can we define this research object? What drives us?
Practitioners: What are the expertise to design/manage a real-time city? What is the process (action vs. reaction)?

The round table will be directly followed by an MIT open lecture by Adam Greenfield entitled “The City Is Here For You To Use“.

Relation to my thesis: I guess at no other places than MIT, I would have been able to gather such a top set of people to discuss themes at the core of my thesis: digital traces, revealing the invisible, urban modeling and simulations, user-centered datasets and location-based services.

Dan Catt’s talk at the upcoming Where 2.0: Going Places on Flickr: The Significance of Geographical Information in Photos

Every photo has a location—it was taken somewhere. For photo-sharing communities like Flickr, geotagging enriches the database with location metadata and makes digital photos more useful and relevant to users, allowing them to not only easily search and organize their own photos but better browse images from around the world. With nearly 50 million geotagged photos on Flickr, around 32 million of which are public, Flickr senior engineer Dan Catt was able to use Flickr’s open API to create a new feature called Places. Places is a zoomed-in view of a particular location and allows Flickr members and visitors to explore that location through iconic photos.

and at Web 2.0 A Flickr Approach to Making Sense of the World

What do you do when you have well over 50 million geotagged objects? How do you actually do anything constructive with that? With emphasis on the How and constructive parts.

To start with we’ll take a quick(ish) look at the current state of reverse geo-coding; mapping latitude and longitude to an actual place. And what to do when that place is the wrong place or technically the right place but not what anyone calls it. Why it seems as though it should be simple but in reality it’s all terribly hard and we’re still just at the very start of that one. Geocoding != Maps.

Some of the work on Tracing the Visitor’s Eye, Bicing and at SENSEable has been mentioned these past days in the Spanish media. In the free daily newspaper ADN Juan Freire describes in very accurate terms the Huellas digitales en las ciudades.

El objetivo inicial de este proyecto es evaluar el potencial de la información georreferenciada generada por usuarios para el análisis y la comprensión de los procesos urbanos, lo que permitirá en el futuro convertir las herramientas de visualización y las bases de datos púiblicos procedentes de la web 2.0 en excelentes instrumentos para los responsables de la gestión urbana (desde los planificadores a las empresas de transporte) y para los propios ciudadanos.[…] Un simple vistazo a los videos que resumen este proyecto muestran claramente los patrones de extrema agregación de los turistas y sus movimientos diarios entre los diferentes hitos turísticos de la ciudad. […] Uno de los elementos más sofisticados de este proyecto es que tiene en cuenta la cobertura espacial de las imágenes, que estiman a partir del grado de zoom registrado como parte de los metadatos de las fotografías.

In Internet revela los movimientos de los turistas en las ciudades (catalan: Internet revela els moviments que fan els turistes a les ciutats), published in the catalan daily newspaper El Periódico de Catalunya, Michele Catanzaro focuses more on the potential implication on urban tourism.

Que el Camp Nou o la Sagrada Família están entre los monumentos más visitados de Barcelona no es ninguna novedad, pero los caminos que los turistas recorren para desplazarse entre las atracciones de la ciudad no son tan fáciles de prever. De hecho, oficinas y empresas de turismo gastan abultados presupuestos para predecir los caprichosos deseos de los viajeros. […] Los mapas de Blat y Girardin pueden ayudar a programar mejor los horarios de apertura al público de los espacios ciudadanos, sugerir dónde es mejor colocar las oficinas turísticas e incluso qué áreas urbanas requieren manutención. Pero también pueden ser útiles para los propios turistas.

To which, the daily Catalonia Today requests in “Barcelona tourists stick to well-beaten paths” that

The city needs to promote other worthy destinations, which would also relieve the congestion seen above.

Additonaly. El Periódico briefly reports in Visualizar el uso del Bicing (catalan: Visualitzar l’ús del Bicing) on the idea of implementing a stronger feeback loop in new urban systems supporting mobility, such as Barcelona’s Bicing.

“Si mapas de este tipo estuvieran a disposición de los ciudadanos, quizá se podrían autorregular en sus desplazamientos por la ciudad, optimizándolos en función de las condiciones”, comenta Girardin. Uno de los objetivos principales de la investigación, coinciden los dos investigadores de la UPF, es poner información compleja al alcance de los ciudadanos de la forma más clara posible.

Finally, the magazine on innovation “If… Revista de innovación” interviewed me on digital traces and Bicing: Conocer la ciudad siguiendo nuestras huellas digitales.

Un reportaje sobre las huellas digitales que dejamos inconscientemente en nuestro día a día por la ciudad, a través del Bicing en Barcelona. Un fenómeno estudiado por el ingeniero Fabien Girardin.

2 years after Mobilités, la Clé des Villes, JCDecaux released Les Audiences dans la Ville the second opus of their trendbook serie “cahier des tendances” that collects visions on the world of media, new technologies, urbanism and design from an eclectic crowd of practitioners and researchers. I contributed with a text on the digital traces we leave behind us from our daily frictions with urban infrastructures and services and some implications when they are processed and made public. The concept of traces Nicolas later analyzes as a support for social navigation. Other short essays include Maurice Levy predicting the emergence of the “urban media”, Adam Greenfield on Everyware, Daniel Kaplan on the city as a platform for innovation open to the co-creation between the actors of the city and the citizens, Peter Fleischer on the new opportunities the web and in the city offer people to handle their identities and topic also discussed by Frédéric Kaplan with a spin on traceability, Nathan Stern on hyperlocality, Bruno Marzloff on “ambient sociability” and the citizens appropriation of their time and space.

The content of Les Audences dans la Ville can be accessed online in its entirety.

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.

Neogeography met e-Social Sciences last month at the Digital Geography in a Web 2.0 World Day organized by CASA,UCL and NCeSS. The slides of the presentations are now online.