A workshop on Hybrid Design Practices will take place at the upcoming Ubicomp conference. The focus is close to the interplay of methods I applied in my thesis, mixing design science research methods with qualitative and quantitative inquiries:

The focus of this workshop is on hybrid design practices, approaches that draw on techniques from various fields to create novel methods of inquiry. The aims of this workshop are, first, to bring together a multi-disciplinary group of practitioners and researchers to learn from one another’s expertise in choosing and evaluating methods of design practice, and, second, to discuss implications of the underlying methodologies and epistemologies upon which these techniques are built.

The goals of this workshop, then, are twofold; first, to open up a space for reflection on current approaches towards interdisciplinary research and design in Ubicomp, and second, to develop a new vocabulary, both practically and theoretically, for “making” interdisciplinary Ubicomp research, thus, marking the study of hybrid design practice as an area of community-wide inquiry.

Relation to my thesis: My thesis has an unsual aspect characterized by some sort of hybrid design practices that led to the production of “factual” knowledge (such as the urban flows shown in some of the papers) and “design” knowledge (such as the strategies for improving interaction). My thesis also contains methodological novelties when approaching human interactions with ubiquitous geoinformation, such as models and concepts related to implicit and explicit interactions. I believe this diversity that provides complementary sources of evidence, strengthen the support to the results presented
in the thesis (i.e. strengthening the approach through the diversity). This is rather non-standard, but it is hopefully a recognized attempt for for “making” interdisciplinary Ubicomp research.

Writing the conclusion of my dissertation, there is one implication of my research work that I still have not completely gotten my brain around. I will try to layout my thoughts here. I believe that one contribution of my work has been to reveal the new aspects of time with our relation to space through ubiquitous technologies. For instance, I have studied the co-evolution of a community of early adopters with their navigation system, the timely capture of travelers experiences, the potentials of spatio-temporal data shadows such as measuring the evolution of the attractiveness of the space. Each study shows that our relation with geoinformation (and by extension space) has been altered from our interactions with mobile and wireless technologies. The information is accessible and generated ubiquitously, augmenting our roles of sensors and actors of the space. This presence of what Adam Greenfield would refer to, in a more articulate manner, as the Big Now creates an utilitarian fascination to the real-time or the predictability as instantiated in my case study on “Detecting air travel in real time” from a mobile phone implicit interaction wireless networks (in submission). This fascination overshadows the end of our ephemeral relation with space potentially leading to a new version of the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine and the presence of the hard/soft infrastructure design that does not take it into account.

I call it the end of timelessness. The end of the ephemeral, or what Adam Greenfield would describe as the Long Here, is mainly exposed in my work on Tracing the Visitor’s Eye and related. The observations of the presence of the hard infrastructures that deny the Long Here took place around the NYC Waterfalls study and the novel opportunity to define of indicators of the evolution of attractiveness of the space. Similarly, the ubiquitous technologies of the present, fail to accommodate for the Long Here, the change in the city and the implication on the social practices. Wearing qualitative lenses with a taxi drivers in Barcelona, I could observe co-evolutive ballet with their navigation system and extract the implications of the soft infrastructure on the knowledge of the city.

The embedment of urban informatics into the urban fabrics makes the integration of the Long Here in integral part of the design of hard and soft infrastructures. I would argue that this kind of case studies sets stage to the end of the timelessness considerations of individuals interactions with urban infrastructures. A satellite navigation system does not perform the same service the first six months in the practices of a inexperienced taxi drivers compared to a user with 20 year of knowledge of the city. Moreover, they do not, over time, request the same granularity of geoinformation nor do they assess the quality of the information with the same experience of the technology and knowledge of the city. A different kind of “long here” evolution of the presence and practices of that can be analyzed through their interactions with soft infrastructures to assess the quality of the spatial settings. This longitudinal understanding of the evolution of the interaction can then be applied to the design of the urban informatics. For instance, we made sure that our mobile phone algorithm to detect air travel was not perfect, as our system takes advantage of false detections to keep the survey participants with a certain level of involvement.

The evolution of the people practices, interactions and frictions with the urban space can be compiled very informally as Nicolas and I compiled in Sliding Friction and related. This kind of approach helps highlighting the reality, its complex dynamics, its subtleties, and its situational particularities. My research work suggests the combinations of more formal data collection and analysis approaches. They took the form of quantitative (reality mining), qualitative (ethno-inspired), mixed research methods to a more active, utility-driven mode with design science research.

New use of Bowling Green, the oldest public park in New York City

Now these approaches strongly contrast with the practice of architecture and urban design that almost utterly ignore this notion of time. For instance, from my understanding, there exist limited methods to capture and evaluate the user experience and the use of the built space. That makes me wonder wether since Stewart Brand’s How Buildings Learn (video of the BBC TV series inspired by the book) any progress has been made to integrate the complexifying intertwinement of hard infrastructures, soft infrastructures and individual/social practices into their design practices. 15 years ago, Frank Duffy explained that “architects have been slow to join the evaluation bandwagon, It’s got somewhat trapped in the academic field, I am afraid“. When considering the hybrid space with real-time elements, asynchronous communications and its logging capabilities of soft infrastrcture, it seems that the human/social elements with their evolution and adaptability find little consideration when in competition with aesthetic.

A bench to relax or work or both? between an ATM and a defibrillator at the cramped part of Logan airport

In consequence, as Steward Brand explains, “More often than not, the pull to conduct evaluations has come from client organizations, not from the architects themselves” also suggesting to collect feedback from facility manager to grasp the dimensions of time and use into building. In contrast, in the digital world, there is a greater tradition of analysing breadcrums to improve the design of web sites. Of course, nowadays, who and where are the facility managers in hybrid spaces?

The lack of consideration of the human in current practices of the designer of the hard infrastructures is particularly striking with the traditional aseptic graphics and medium to communicate them. But the competences to learn from the evolution of the infrastructure do not only require interpretative methods for human and social dynamics, but also for technological/intrastructural counterparts. For instance, 4 years ago, the analysis the players space-time trails in our pervasive game CatchBob! with a custom made “replay tool” necessitated technical knowledge to extract the technological issues of the ubiquitious infrastructures and its evolution. I would not expect this to be otherwise nowadays. This to exemplify that the ability to understand and properly bend the hard infrastructure will naturally come from cross-disciplinary teams that consider time in their practice. For instance, software engineering has been evolving in its practice to check the quality assurance throughout the life of a software (see Software that makes software better). The techniques aim at preventing from the software to break without running it (statistic analysis tools) and also detect when it breaks (dynamic analysis tools).

Consequence of unproper blackbox testing… Maybe an error caused by a 64 bit floating point number relating to the outdoor temperature respect to the wind conditions converted to a 16 bit signed integer

Relation to my thesis: Extract some contribution of my PhD thesis (the end of timelessness) to consider their implications on the evaluation of the evolution of the relation between the hard, the soft and the human in hybrid environments. From my experience, a mix of methods are necessary to grasp a world of fast-moving technology. This methods go beyond the current limited approaches of practitioners of the built space, to the exception of Post-occupency evaluations that introduce the dimensions of time and use into building. On the other hand, the practices of practitioners of the soft and digital world are evolving to take time and evolution into consideration. Of course that should lead to an improvement in: reliability, life-cycle behavior, environmental impact and user acceptance.

My research work sets the stage for tools and techniques to reveal evolution or repetitions, with observations and measures of expectation, initial frustration and delight, adjustment, and long-term adaptivity. I examply some elements in my taxi drivers study, the application of metrics as in new york and the collection of evidences “sliding frictions”.

Last week at Visualizar’08, I presented the long version of my talk From Sentient to Responsive Cities (slides with notes, video). This talk compiles many of the thoughts and works I produced over these past couple of years. It is divided into three parts:

Microscopes and telescopes
I discuss the dynamic data we generate when actively or passively interacting with new urban actors such as wireless networks or RFID systems. The mapping of these data reveal many invisible dynamics of the city and this often in real-time (with Bicing, Velib or Flickr as data sources). Research in that domain have produced beautiful microscopes and telescopes to visualize urban dynamics. Besides their utility in stretching the imagination of stakeholders in the city, they do not allow to understand “what we see”.

Mapping new urban actors

Evidence and loops
New techniques are being developed to transform the massive amount of dynamic urban data into evidences and information that can be acted upon; moving from purely Sentient to Responsive cities. From the dynamic census of a city from its cellular network activity to the definition of indicators to measure the evolution of the attractiveness of places, there are potential to create a new type of urbanism based evidences generated with the analysis of digital footprints actors of a place leave behind them. These evidences can transform the evaluation of urban design and digital urban services with post-occupency evaluations often overlooked in the practice of architecture and urban design. Similarly the communication of the information generated back to actors of the urban space could create a feedback loop in which the analysis of the data impact the activity of people that create new data and so on.

The evolution of the flows of photographers in Lower Manhattan in Summers of 2006, 2007 and 2008.

Taxi drivers
But how to integrate this type of mechanism by taking into consideration the complex socio-technical assemblage of cities? A set of answers can come from the observation of current deployment of ubiquitous technologies in the city. Therefore, I studied of the integration of satellite navigation system into the practice of taxi drivers describes the co-evolution people have with technologies: how they adapt to it and how they adapt it to their practice. The observations reveal the necessity to have a large knowledge of the city judge the quality of the information provided by sat-nav system. Novice taxi drivers were often not trusting system and access the paper street guide and maps to support their navigation and wayfinding; the satnav system becoming a tool among a large eco-system of artifacts.

A taxi driver mixing the use of a satnav and the official street guide of Barcelona.

Relation to my thesis: An attempt to find a coherence in my multiple works. I might have found a good line of thoughts in describing the potentials to transform urban data into evidences and information that can be acted upon. (Paco Gonzalez produced a summary in Spanish)

Today’s New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg announcement of the New York City Waterfalls economic impact marked the end of an intensive project I led over the summer at the MIT SENSEable City Lab. With innovative analysis of digital footprints to describe the evolution of the attractiveness of the Lower Manhattan and Brooklyn waterfront, we contributed to augment a study that used more traditional means (i.e. manual counts and surveys) to quantify who was attracted by the Waterfalls public art exhibit and how much money they spent. Our approach relied on several “indicators of urban attractiveness” inspired from financial indicators and network theory. For instance, in collaboration with Andrea Vacarri, we compared the attractiveness of the main points of interests in New York from the relative strength based on the density of digital footprints; or the evolution of the centrality of the waterfront among the network of points of interest generated by the flows of visitors in the Lower Manhattan area. The mapping of this new type of digital footprint analysis shows the impact of an event to open-up and drive people to new parts of a city over time.

Evolution of the flows of photographers in proximity to the exhibit from the analysis of photos generated between June and October in 2006 and 2007 and June and August 15 in 2008

Besides generating these preliminary research outcomes, there was a lot to learn from running digital footprinting techniques in parallel from traditional studies. The unconventional aspect of this type project leads a city to unbeaten territories where administrative procedure must be created. The data sets and methods must constantly be clearly explained. Liability and privacy issues are the obvious subject that necessitate constant clear descriptions of the data sets and methods used. Of course, in exploratory research that aims at developing the latter, this is not always evident, particularly with tight time constraints. In addition, the applied aspect of this research requests skills to communicate the value of the analysis for the present and the future. A situation I was already confronted in Florence when presenting research results to local authorities and journalists.

People generating digital footprints and digital shadows this summer in proximity to the NYC Waterfalls

Relation to my thesis: Research outcomes of this work will fit to the core of my dissertation. The overall experience of leading a digital footprint study to quantify the evolution of the attractiveness of an urban space fit with my interest in developing mixed methods to perform post-occupancy evaluations in the future. Unfortunately, in this project I could only rely only on very little qualitative observations.

After a summer of dense project coordination and urban data analysis, time is slowly coming to frame the content of my PhD thesis dissertation. I plan to submit it in March 2009 with a timeline composed of 3 months to complete the current “deep dig” analysis of digital breadcrums followed by another 3 months early next year of compiling and writing the dissertation. Discussions with my PhD advisor led to the agreement that the dissertation should cover the extensive work I have been leading in the aspects of implicit and explicit human interaction with pervasive geoinformation. In practice it implies framing my analysis of pervasive user-generated content as a core element alimented with more qualitative studies on the perception and generation of location information (with an emphasis on location quality and uncertainty) and the co-evolution of humans with location information. It creates the challenge to keep a flow of thoughts between the different studies, but it allows me to build on the approach to mix quantitative digital footprints analysis enhanced with descriptions from qualitative observations. A mixed approach I would like to document and ponder for my post-academic life.

The next step is to staple my paper together and write a chapter that summarizes the contribution for each work. Then from each contribution see what kind of linking is necessary. My work addresses a few questions created by the increasing amount of implicit and explicit interaction people have with digital infrastructures in the (urban) physical space:
1. How do we co-evolve with the pervasive availability of geoinformation?
2. How do we manage (interpret and generate) the fluctuating quality of geoinformation?
3. How to take advantage of these novel massive amount of pervasive user-generated geodata?

My thesis addresses these question first by describing how the location information provided by pervasive appliances impacts our work practices, a theme I cover in The co-evolution of taxi drivers and their in-car navigation systems (and other more complete paper still in progress). The very different appropriation of the systems raises the issue of the user interpretation of location quality that I categorize in the experiments on CatchbBob! summarized in Getting real with ubiquitous computing: the impact of discrepancies on collaboration and Issues from Deploying a Pervasive Game on Multiple Sites. A fluctuating location quality is part of humans practice of generating and sharing geoinformation as highlighted in Place this Photo on a Map: A Study of Explicit Disclosure of Location Information and Assessing pervasive user-generated content to describe tourist dynamics. I still need to finish my study and publish on the practices of geoannotating and georeferencing information. Despite the imperfections of sensors-based and user-generated geoinformation constantly generated implicitly or explicitly, their aggregation and analysis (following privacy regulation and ethical guidelines) provide novel perspectives on understanding urban dynamics and particularly tourism. I covered the opportunities from the development of softwares to the application of data analysis techniques that I entitled “digital footprinting”. The contributions include the collection, visualization and analysis of digital footprints that reveal tourist dynamics in Leveraging explicitly disclosed location information to understand tourist dynamic: a case study (Journal of Location Based Services) and the analysis of digital shadows and their correlation with digital footprints in Digital footprinting: uncovering the presence and movements of tourists from user-generated content that reveals the complementary perspectives of each data set. Other data analysis techniques on digital shadows allow to Quantifying the presence of visitors from the mobile phone network activity they generate (International Forum on Tourist Statistics, in print) and develop indicators on the urban space that perform Measures of urban attractiveness based on the analysis of digital footprints (in progress). While these approach focus on aggregated data and crowds, specific mobile software developments allow to perform mobility panel studies on a world-wide scale with system that perform World-wide air travel detection (in progress).

Relation to my thesis: Setting a deadline to finish in 3.5 years and framing the work done so far under one umbrella. The challenge will be to link the multiple contributions under a common umbrella. Equality important will be to keep a scientifically honest piece of work that is accessible to people on the edges of academia. For instance, I was advised not to hesitate in referencing to my blog and acknowledge it is a research tool (inspired by Anne Galloway’s PhD disseration).

A discussion with Nicolas reminded me of a text that have been lying forever in my absurdly oversized stacks of papers to read. In “The trouble with ubiquitous technology pushers or: Why We’d Be Better Off without the MIT Media Lab” (part 1, part 2, and part 3 - written in 2000) Stephen L. Talbott summarizes quite well why I have a hard time following the decontextualized celebration of wireless, sensor and mobile technologies, and enjoy grounding my work on the organic complexity of cities and people; a rich context that multiple approaches such as sociology, geography, urban planning or architecture have a tradition in observing and shapping.

In these texts Stephen Talbott makes 2 main complaints on ubiquitous technology pushers:

A technology-focused consciousness — and you could fairly say that our society is becoming obsessively technology-focused — is a consciousness always verging upon emptiness. It is a consciousness whose problems are purely formal or technical, with precisely definable solutions. They can be precisely defined because they lack context, they have no significance of their own.
[…]
technology pushers too often fail to recognize the difference between solving a problem and contributing to the health of society. Solving problems is, in fact, one of the easiest ways to sicken society. A technical device or procedure can solve problem X while worsening an underlying condition much more serious than X.

A brainstorm meeting at the SENSEable inspired me to draw a simplified innovation process of my research work.

It start at a design level by developing systems that senses the hybridization of the digital and the physical in the city (currently digital traces in the form of photos, interaction with bike sharing system). Then, a fast prototype visualizations to provide a quick support for visual synthesis and preliminary investigation of digital traces. This phase also contributes in stretching the limits of the data with a creative “what if” exploration that leads me to generate research questions. I address these question through methodologies that imply observation methods (mainly data-mining), modeling techniques and the validation of the data and models through second order analysis with types of data and simulation. Finally these assessed results completes a feedback loop that should inform the design of future hybrid (digital/physical) systems in city.

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.

Last Wednesday, I gave a 20min brownbag talk at the giCentre at the City University in London. The presentation was divided in several parts. First, I define the shortcomings in location-aware computing and their consequences that generate a socio-technical gap. I continued by highlighted that the problems do not necessarily lay in the immaturity of technologies, but also in the failure to match people’s own perception of space (granularity, multiple-spaces). Then I detailed the evidences of this gap from my studies and observations of the appropriation of location-aware applications (CatchBob! and Satnav in Taxi). That lead me to describe an approach that leverages digital traces to tailor location information and define user’s the area of attention and their perception of area of influence of points of interest. In that context, I described the Tracing the visitor’s eye project and briefly introduced the context of future experiments (WikiCity and the Wireless City). The slides are online (5.5MB).

The presentation generated lively exchanges with Jonathan Raper, Jason Dykes, Aidan Slingsby, David Mountain, Jo Wood that benefited me to frame of my thesis. Besides arguing on the potential of volunteer generated information (VGI), the discussion centered on the influence of the presentation of location information on the behavior of people (the difference in the communication in CatchBob! (passivity), multiplicity of the sources of information and location-information trunking for taxi drivers) and these behaviors influence the data (feedback loop in WikiCity, geotagging in Flickr). I was in fact advised to focus on how the co-evoluation between location-aware systems and their user’s practices/behaviors (data influencing the behaviors influencing the data).

Relation to my thesis: This week’s trip in the UK is about testing my ideas and approaches with a verity of experts from different fields (I got the pleasure to meet UCL’s Jon Reades to discuss urban planning and urban computing). I must admit that it is a truly rewarding experience to pick the brains of geographers, geovisualization experts and social scientists and have them criticize my work. Presenting and arguing on the current state of my research work should help me create a “meme” and that everybody starts to believe my “story”. Many people have now advised me to get back to my different experiments and (re)define what there is to study for each of them. Categories or research thems and specific question should help me focus on 1 specific aspect and help me find the gaps in “my story” (e.g. thesis).

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