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

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.

Meeting to discuss my DEA thesis. We agreed that the focal point of my research shifted from uncertainty to granularity of location information. The first is a problem to solve (while sometimes being an opportunity), the latter is a source for interaction. In my model of the social-technical gap in location aware computing, I intend to define their relations. I hypothesize that uncertainty appears when a location system does not match the granularity of information expected by a user. So I keep the work I have done so far on the reactions (uncertainty) to fluctuating location information, and focus more on the factors influencing people to tune the information. This is what I need to further investigate in my ethno study of the taxi drivers (e.g. the funnel metaphor to access information, their use of neighborhoods, landmarks, addresses). Similarly with my Flickr study I could include the analysis of the textual description (i.e. tags) to understand how the users describe the granularity (for example: city -> landmark). Results of complete studies from different contexts could already be a nice outcome to define key aspect of human interaction with location information granularity in a mobile context. It could open the door to the definition of sub-issues (psycho, social, cultural, gender, …) that would be mostly outside of the scope of my thesis. No decisions have been made on further studies (let’s see what the outcomes of the 2 current studies), but we certainly don’t lack of ideas. The concept of granularity of location information is nothing new. However, it is worth revisiting it since “we use things that did not exist previously”.

As for the DEA thesis, he shared my mixed feelings. I believe I have not achieved a good breadth-depth ratio, trying to cover too many aspects of my research domain. Then I lacked of energy to argument the choice (why a mention to privacy? -> uncertainty as opportunity + studies in spatial cloaking) and linkage of the key concepts. However, I think the breadth of this initial scope will help me in the long run. We discussed that chapter 3 (literature review) was not well self-contained. That is that I did not argue enough for the choice of the topics, the perspectives I chose to cover them, and their relevance to my work. The last section (Discussion) clearly revealed that lack of connection between the concepts described and the future work. I should rewrite that part by focusing and arguing the key elements of my framework and their relations.

Relation to my thesis: Still not quite in the narrow part of the funnel… but working on it.

Karen Martin wrote a nice piece (with great images supporting the text) on Methods for Social Computing based on Paul Dourish’s Where the Action Is. Dourish defines “social computing,” as the attempt to incorporate sociological understandings into interface design. He grounds his argumentation on the idea of embodied interaction that is the notion that physical and social phenomena unfold in real time and real space as a part of the world in which we are situated, right alongside and around us. In consequence, Dourish argues, for the now more common approach of incorporating the understandings of how social practice emerges in the design of systems to fit more easily into the ways in which we work. Karen goes on defining the the methods to support social computing mainly ethnography, ethnomethodology (ethno with “practical sociological reasoning”, that is relying on people’s understanding/knowledge of their reasons for acting) and technomethodology (use of ethnomethodology not only for critique but also for design). The evaluation of the design should rely on similar contextualized methods out of the sterile confines of a laboratory. As Dourish concludes, “the only way to come to a good understanding of the effectiveness of a software system is to understand how it features as part and parcel of a set of working practices, as embodied by a group of people actually using the system to do real work in real working settings”. As Karen mentions, this critique remains at the core of discussion on the validity of HCI studies.

Relation to my thesis: Over the summer I read Andy Crabtree’s Designing Collaborative Systems : A Practical Guide to Ethnography that helped me setup my study of taxi drivers. It completes the more theoretical content of Where the Action Is.

It is called “Towards Reducing the Social-Technical Gap in Location-Aware Computing” and the abstract goes as follow:

Abstract: Along in their history, humans never ceased to create techniques and tools for observing their environment and locate themselves in the physical environment. This attests our necessity to be aware of who and what is where and when – a concept that we term location awareness. Nowadays, the democratization of mobile and wireless technologies increases people’s awareness of their whereabouts. However, it also their interaction with the physical environment and by consequence impacts the social interactions and work practices.

Building ubiquitous applications that exploit location requires integrating underlying infrastructure for linking sensors with high-level representation of the measured space to support human activities. However, the real world constraints limit the efficiency of location technologies. The inherent spatial uncertainty embedded in mobile and location systems constantly challenges the coexistence of digital and physical spaces. Consequently, the technical mechanisms fail to match the highly flexible, nuanced, and contextual human spatial activities. These discrepancies generate a social-technical gap between what should be socially supported and what can be technically achieved. This thesis contributes to the research in the field of Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) and ubiquitous computing by exploring, and hopefully reducing this gap in the context of location-aware systems.

Our preliminary work reports on complementary studies of some of the aspects of the social-technical gap. This preliminary and current work, takes very different perspectives on the use of location-aware applications. These views highlight the role of the spatial context and technological limitations in the use of the systems features. First, we explored the impact of the technical limitations in collaborative tasks experienced in the form of a location-aware game. It allowed us to define the sources of spatial uncertainty perceived by the users while interacting with the system. Then, we investigated the social requirements of linking information to space. In particular, we report on the influence of space in the use of location granularity to share and retrieve photos. Finally, we describe an ongoing ethnographic study of the evolution of taxi drivers practices with the introduction of location-aware and navigation systems in their work. This work reveals the ways positioning technologies influence the work practice of mobile workers. For instance, some drivers access the geospatial information as in a “funnel”. They start a ride with a general idea of an area surrounding the destination. As they enter the targeted area they access detailed information for the specific destination with location-aware application.

The extensive review of the domains of ubiquitous computing and CSCW shows that more of the research in those fields focus on optimizing the accuracy of location sensing and providing seamless interaction. On the other hand, limited work has been pursued to understand the social-technical issued in real-word settings and provide solutions to match the visions of supporting people’s everyday life activities. In consequence, we suggest research perspectives that should contribute to this agenda. Through real-world field studies, we aim at providing solutions for the design of collaborative location-aware systems that take into account the spatial uncertainty inherent to ubiquitous technologies.

Keywords: location-aware computing, spatial uncertainty, CSCW, location-awareness.

Relation to thesis: More than half-way through the PhD… I hope.

Extracted from an inspiring talk “Lipstick on a pig” given by Clive Grinyer at the European Market Research Event.

London Heathrow Airport Terminal 5 forecast that future travellers would be older. Research into older travellers showed they often go into the toilet, so many new toilets were planned.

However, deeper investigation discovered they were going into the toilets….to hear the announcements. It was the only place they could find where they could clearly hear the flight calls! So now the airport is putting new audio areas where you can clearly hear your flight call….

Relations to my thesis: A nice example of the limitations and (sometimes) subjective analysis in user studies. Then it highlights a very interesting adaptation of some people in a very complex and high-tech infrastructure such as an airport.