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.

Presentation of my research on “Uncertainty in Location-Aware Systems” (40MB) at today’s internal mini-workshop.

Relation to my thesis: I am now considering selecting my first sub-question “how certain (cf. taxonomy) do positional and tracking systems have to be in order to be useful and acceptable?” as my main research question. It really fits with my past experiences and with my current interest in the granularity of user experiences in ubicomp (as well as in the accuracy of geotagged images in Flickr).

I blanked on a basic question about the potential applications of my research and started talking about how garbage collectors could profit from it (referring to the Liaison project and my very own thoughts in urban computing) . I am afraid it did not match the audience on that one, but it feels good to get off the beaten tracks (e.g the usual emergency management, fleet and assets tracking) when it comes to location-aware systems.

In the workshop, a talk on the quality of service in networks, made me recall the paper User-perceived Quality of Service in Wireless Data Networks and how I could actually apply the same approach of user-perceived quality in my research.

There is a philosophical level to my research that highlights the mismatches between our needs, expectations and behaviors towards technologies. It relates to Jose Rojas‘ (University of Glasgow) questioning the techno-push in ubicomp and how cultures have a different set of beliefs, goals, aims towards technology.

My PhD research plan has been validated. The current title of my thesis is: “Designing location-aware systems that manage discrepancies between the sensed physical world and its virtual representation“, but it surely will evolve. I summarize my research as follow:

Advances in mobile technologies allowed the emergence of a quantity of applications taking advantage of location. The uses of Location-Aware Systems (LAS) range from car and pedestrian navigation, finding and tracking a person, a group or an artifact, targeted marketing, local search, to the virtual annotation of the physical space (e.g. geotagging and geoblogging). However, most mobile, distributed systems and sensor technologies that deliver location information to these applications have their faults and limitations. These shortcomings create challenges for the designers and users of LAS to successfully use the contextual information promised by such technologies.

This proposal emerges from early work that shows that the uncertainties inherent to location-sensing technologies affect the usability of ubiquitous systems. It stresses on the importance of integrating the limitations of positioning technologies in a real-world use of a large-scale location-aware system.

We aim at answering the challenges enhancing the usability of a location-aware system by handling uncertainty inherent to ubiquitous technologies. Consequently we will investigate how certain a location-aware system should be in terms of location quality, location timeliness and evaluate design strategies to manage sptail uncertainty. We formulate our research question as “How to build a location-aware system that enhances its usability by handling uncertainty inherent to ubiquitous computing technologies?”. To answer it, we will rely on a classical design-science research method with an innovation building approach. We expect the outcomes of this thesis to be in the form of methods (i.e. a set of guidelines to use to manage uncertainty in LAS in order to enhance their usability) and instantiations (i.e. the realization of a real-world LAS that uses guidelines to manage spatial uncertainty).

For that purpose, we plan to use an iterative process to design location-aware mobile platform. We will hence use participatory design and fast prototyping techniques in each iterative phase of the project. The platform will provide a context for series of field studies in which we will evaluate design strategies to integrate the discrepancies of the sensed physical world and its virtual representation

Relation to my thesis: end of first year

Parush, A. (2006): Bridge the gap: Toward a common ground: practice and research in HCI, interactions Volume 13, Number 6 (2006), Pages 61-62.

Via Nicolas. This article underlines the gap between research and practice in HCI. Primarily because practitioners express difficulties in benefiting from research. HCI is a discipline concerned on the one hand with practice (design, evaluation, and/or implementation of interactive computing systems), and on the other, with the research into phenomena associated with this practice. The ability to utilize and benefit from any of the research types depends on how a practitioner defines his practical problem as a research question. The author distinguished 4 tiers in HCI research: usability, comparison, guidelines and theory.

These dimensions differs according to the “level of focus” (”range from addressing questions focusing on a specific product, to comparing between products, to searching and examining guidelines for a family of products, through to general questions on behavioral, social, organizational, and other phenomena“) and “extent of generalization”.

The ability to utilize and benefit from any of the research types depends on how a practitioner defines his practical problem as a research question. The abstraction of the question on different levels can lead one to search and find potentially beneficial research that can be applied in the practical arena.

Relation to my thesis: Currently writing my research plan I wonder how may research could have practical benefits. The 4 tiers are a good help to frame my goals and methods. Usability testing (and participatory design) to get information on the usability of my design, comparative information from literature review, guidelines from field studies (are they real behavioral research methods?), and then try to derive theoretical implications (model for a specific phenomenom?). Things are still fuzzy…

Jacques Pitrat, Comment faire de la recherche en intelligence artificielle, LAFORIA 97/06. Mars 1997

Ce papier donne quelques conseils au chercheur qui commence une thèse en intelligence artificielle basées sur le développement d’un système utilisant l’informatique. Il dégage certains points communs avec ma recherche appliquée en HCI/UbiComp.

Tout d’abord une étude d’IA devrait comporter la réalisation de deux systèmes. Le premier pour se familiariser avec le domaine et ses difficultés, sans attendre des résultats extraordinaires. Après une péridoe de plusieurs mois de décantation (écriture de papier décrivant ce qui a été fait), vient la mise en place du deuxième système, tenant compte des enseignements de la première expérimentation, qui apportera des idées vraiment nouvelles. C’est ce que je tente d’effectuer avec d’abord CatchBob! puis système possiblement un système dans le zone 22@ à Barcelone.

Deux chercheurs peuvent faire davantage de travail qu’un seul, et cela permet de s’attaquer à des problèmes qui demandent la résolution de plusieurs difficultés, chaque chercheur prenant en charge l’une d’entre elle. Je le fais déjà avec Nicolas. Thème abordé à mon dernier meeting.

Il faut savoir aller à l’opposé avec ce qu’enseignent les informaticiens. C’est-à-dire commencer à réaliser un système alors que l’on ne sait pas bien ce que l’on va y mettre (dans mon cas, faire du participatory design). Il se trouve qu’en IA la situation est en général tellement complexe qu’il est impossible de faire une analyse préalable.

Mettre son inconscient dans de bonnes conditions pour travailler. C’est-à-dire lire ce qui a été fait dans le domaine et dans d’autres domaines (trouver des analogies). Ce que je fais en aller gratter dans la géographie, psychology (spatil cognition and navigation), information retrieval, systémique et robotics. Il n’est pas bon de travailler de façon continue. Les repos permettent de digérer et d’assimiler ce qui vient d’être fait. Mélanger des travaux moins prenants aux périodes de réfléxion (littérature, rédaction).

La chronologie de la thèse peut être définie comme suit: Toute une année peut être nécessaire pour définir un sujet satisfaisant et voir comment bâtir un système capable de résoudre les problèmes qu’ils veulent lui poser. Puis la phase de réalisation et expérimentation du système est d’au moins deux ans. Il faut compter trois ans pour la réalisation d’une thèse dès lors qu’elle comporte l’expérimentation d’un système, en supposant que les trois quart du temps y sont consacré. Un pré-soutenance au bout des premières années de thèse est une bonne idée (c’est qui sera le cas pour moi avec l’obtention d’un DEA après 2 ans de PhD). C’est l’occasion de rédiger une description de l’ensemble de ce qui a été fait et de faire apparaître des insuffisancces.

Relation to my thesis: learning while doing