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.

IEEE Pervasive Computing special issue on Urban Computing is out. The guest editors Tim Kindberg, Matthew Chalmers, and Eric Paulos define urban computing as “the integration of computing, sensing, and actuation technologies in everyday urban settings and lifestyles“. The urban space is a recent ground of investigation because it poses many specific research and deployment challenges: as ownership issues are complex as are the dynamics and density of system participation. Successful integration requires taking several facets of the environment into account at once. Urban settings frame social behaviors. They encompass architectural forms and features that might not be harmonious with given technologies, and they’re variably permeated by wireless networks and fixed and mobile devices.

Urban computing research is still at an early stage with a wide range of opportunities. They range from understanding urban appropriation of pervasive technologies, to producing fully integrated designs specifically for urban settings, and taking advantage of the deployed technologies to augment the understanding of the urban environment. My contribution (in collaboration with Nicolas) to this issue lies in the last category. We briefly describe as a Work in Progress the Tracing the Visitor’s Eye project in which we collect Flickr photos to reveal the movements of people in cities.

Tracing the Visitor’s Eye in Rome

Relation to my thesis: Urban computing is an emerging research avenue at the crossroad of ubiquitous computing and HCI. Definitively a sweet spot of my research focus.

My work-in-progress submission (co-authored with Nicolas) entitled “Tracing the Visitor’s Eye: Using Explicitly Disclosed Location Information for Urban Analysis” has been accepted for publication in the July-Sept. IEEE Pervasive Computing special issue on urban computing. The call for paper was here. With in addition my two weeks stay the MIT Department of Urban Studies and Planning to deliver a proof of concept, the project is now well alive and kicking.

I could not attend the CHI workshop on Mobile Spatial Interaction, but luckily I bumped into the (co-)organizer Peter Fröhlich, as well as participants Will Seager and Zach Toups whos work closely relate to mine.

Will Seager, and Danae Stanton Fraser, User responses to GPS positioning information on a digital map
This paper contributes to demonstrate the need of transparent position carrying the notion of uncertainty in the data. The field study involving a pedestrian navigation task, positioning information supplied by GPS seemed too inaccurate to be useful. Worst still, the inaccuracy could confuse users, especially since the position icons used in commercial products typically give no indication of the degree of uncertainty. One solution to the issue of uncertainty would be to convey the level of certainty to user. If the GPS unit provides sufficient information to estimate the level of inaccuracy, this could be reflected in the position icon e.g. a transparent position icon that grows or shrinks depending on the level of accuracy.

Zachary O. Toups, and Andruid Kerne, Location-Aware Augmented Reality Gaming for Emergency Response Education: Concepts and Development
This paper presents the location-aware game Rogue Signals, deployed to enhance the team coordination skills of participants. The authors relied on an ethnography of fire emergency response practice to inform the design of the game. The study revealed design implications based on building coordinations skills such as leveraging information differential, mixed communication modalities, and utilizing audible clues.

Apparently, I missed Morten Fjeld who presented 3DVN: A Mixed Reality Platform for Mobile Navigation Assistance.

The Imaging the City workshop here at CHI featured a nice set of practices and technologies for representing the urban environment in Human-Computer Interaction. Some of them are strongly related to my current work.

Urban Ritual in Rome: Characterizing the City with High-Resolution Cell Phone Data by Matthew Jull and Carlo Ratti is a follow-up on their work with Real-time rome. Their spatio-temporal analysis show that cell phone activity correlates strongly with the infrastructures and zones of the city (e.g., transportation links, commercial, office, residential zones) and the daily activities (e.g. wake up, commute, work, lunch, dinner, sleep, sports events). These preliminary results suggest that cell phone data can be used to characterize and map urban domains and the cultural signature of its occupants.

The daily activity of people throughout the city is revealed (i.e. wake up, commute, work, lunch, dinner, sleep, sports events etc.)
Personalized City by Continuous Location Logging by Jun Rekimoto and Takashi Miyaki. They propose a city visualization method based on long-term and continuous personal location history generated by WiFi-based location detection methods. Their visualization reveals a person’s “cognitive” map based on the traces left while navigating the urban space. They apply a fisheye-view method to distord the map in order o reflect the person’s location probability density. Therefore, frequently visited area becomes larger on the map. The continuous log of one’s geographical position could be a foundation for various “lifelog” applications, such as memory aid or information organizer (as suggested in Tracing Personal Mobility).

A nice comparison of WiFi in GPS location accuracy in a urban setting

Person’s “cognitive” map based on location history. Fisheye-view to reflect the person’s location probability density. Frequently visited area becomes larger on the map. To be useful in a local search task, it might be more useful to distort the map to reveal the less know areas. I have this experiment using anamorphosis maps in mind for a while now…

How We Watch the City: Popularity and Online Mapsi by Danyel Fisher. He developed Hotmap, a tool that visualizes how people have used Microsoft’s maps.live.com to reveal what parts of the maps they find most compelling. The results show that the vast majority of hits are focused on a fairly small area, following population, suggesting that largely, users currently find use of the tools for looking at natural scenery less compelling then they do city imagery. This work could be extended by show how people “query the city” (e.g. what are the keywords. Something I wanted to find out more about at Urban Mapping). Knowing more about the types of searches and the areas of interests could help the local search community to go beyond the classic, yet irrelevant “closest Starbucks” scenario. Categorizing the different types of granularity in space and time embedded in the queries could help understand how people query space.

The Big Picture: Exploring Cities through Georeferenced Images and RDF Shared Metadata, by Carlo Torniai, Steve Battle and Steve Cayzer. They present a prototype system by on Flickr geotagged images to discover geo-related pictures of a same city taken from different users. The browsing interface, based on different levels of relationship between pictures metadata, allows users to explore cities according to the relations discovered. An extension of the work can be found in Sharing, Discovering and Browsing Geotagged Pictures on the Web”.

My paper for the Pervasive 2007 Doctoral Colloquium has been accepted. It is an extended version of the CHI’07 submission.

Bridging the Social-Technical Gap in Location-Aware Computing

Abstract. 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. My research aims at exploring, and hopefully reducing this gap in the context of location-aware computing.

Relation to my thesis: I am pretty glad that people like Shwetak Patel (Supporting Location and Proximity-Based Studies in Natural Settings) and Leif Oppermann (Extending Authoring Tools for Location-Aware Applications with an Infrastructure Visualisation Layer) will also present their work. Hopefully Leif will also talk about his location based mobile phone game Love City. Pervasive 2007 will take place on May 13-16 in Toronto, Ontario, Canada.

My paper (co-authored with Mike Blackstock and Nicolas Nova) for the workshop on Common Models and Patterns for Pervasive Computing (CMPPC) at the Pervasive 2007 conference has been accepted. All the accepted position papers are available online.

Issues from Deploying and Maintaining a Pervasive Game on Multiple Sites (pdf)

Abstract. In this paper we present the lessons learned from the deployment of a collaborative pervasive game on two different sites. We emphasize on the practical aspects of getting a pervasive systems deployed without any extra special infrastructure. Based on our experience, we describe the issues providers and administrators must take into consideration to deploy and maintain pervasive environments. In this perspective, we highlight that ubiquitous technologies must be consciously attended, as they are unevenly distributed, unevenly available.

Relation to my thesis: a paper I can link to whenever I mention the issues around deploying and maintaining CatchBob! Pervasive 2007 will take place on May 13-16 in Toronto, Ontario, Canada.

My paper for the CHI 2007 doctoral consortium has been accepted.

Bridging the social-technical gap in location-aware computing

Abstract. Building ubiquitous applications that exploit location requires integrating underlying infrastructure for linking sensors with high-level representation of the measure 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. My research aims at exploring, and hopefully reducing this gap in the context of location-aware computing.

Relation to my thesis: “In total, we received 96 submissions and 15 were accepted to participate at the conference”. This is a clear sign that the definition and expression of my ideas have matured. CHI 2007 will take place in San Jose, CA between April 28 and May 3.

Davies, N., Landay, J., Hudson, S., and Schmidt, A. Guest editors’ introduction: Rapid prototyping for ubiquitous computing. Pervasive Computing, IEEE 4, 4 (Oct.-Dec. 2005), 15– 17.

The authors suggest that, as in earlier HCI efforts, the progress in prototyping methods and tools is central overcome the barriers to widespread development and deployment of ubicomp. Rapid prototyping techniques can partially solve the current dilemma of researchers and developers who must concentrate on their specific area to advance technology rather than expend effort on broad system-implementation issues. Low-fidelity prototyping can adapt to the pervasive computing requirements and proves to be an essential means to address the questions about user performance and user acceptance.

This paper serves as introduction to Prototypes in the Wild: Lessons from Three Ubicomp Systems.

Relation to my thesis: A useful ref for my “in sitiu” approach of location-aware system evaluation. Actually, the authors describe it as:

Research shows that prototyping and deploying systems for study is important to understanding how systems fit into the user’s world and how they can be used effectively. Designing, building, and deploying systems help both researchers and developers better understand a particular application domain’s key issues. This issue provides a rich body of experience in issues associated with prototype deployment.

Rogers, Y. Moving on from weiser’s vision of calm computing: Engaging ubicomp experiences. In Ubicomp (2006), pp. 404–421.

This paper urges for an alternative agenda in ubicomp research that shifts from Weiser’s calm vision to engaging people (i.e. proactive computing, persuasive computing, engaged living). Yvonne Rogers acknowledges that research in context awareness, ambient intelligence and monitoring/tracking have been somehow fruitful. However they have yet failed to reach Weiser’s world. Indeed, there is an enormous gap between the dream of conformable, informed and effortless living and the accomplishment of UbiComp research. In fact, the fundamental stumbling block has been harnessing the huge variability in what people do, their motives for doing it, when they do it and how they do it. While it has been possible to develop a range of simple ubicomp systems that can offer relevant information at opportune moment, it is proving to be much more difficult to build truly smart systems that can understand or accurately model people’s behaviors, moods and intentions. This makes it difficult, if not impossible, to try to implement context in any practical sense and from which to make sensible predictions about what someone is feeling, wanting or needing at a given moment. Therefore, ubicomp technologies should be designed not to do things for people but to engage them more actively in what they currently do. Rather than calm living it promotes engaged living, where technology is designed to enable people to do what they want, need or never even considered before by acting in and upon the environment. Examples include extending and supporting personal, cognitive and social processes such as habit-changing, problem solving, creating, analyzing, learning or performing a skill.

The author mentions the problems of calm computing in the most prominent ubicomp research themes (i.e. context-aware computing, ambient/ubiquitous intelligence and recording/tracking and monitoring).

Context-awareness
Key questions in context-aware computing concern what to sense, what form and what kind of information to represent to augment ongoing activities. Many of the sensor technologies, however, have been beset with detection and precision limitations, sometimes resulting in unreliable and inaccurate data. While newer technological developments may enable more accurate data to be detected and collected it. However, people often behave in unpredictable and subtle ways in their day-to-day contexts. Therefore, it is likely that context-aware systems will only ever be successful in highly constrained settings.

Ambient and Ubiquitous Intelligence
While there have been significant advances in computer vision, speech recognition and gesture-based detection, the reality of multimodal interfaces – that can predict and deliver with accuracy and sensitivity what is assumed people want or need – is a long way off. In consequence, when a ubiquitous computing system gets it wrong – which is likely to be considerably more frequent – it is likely to be more frustrating and we are likely to be less forgiving.

Recording, Tracking and Monitoring
Much of the discussion about the human aspects in ubicomp has been primarily about the trade-offs between security and privacy, convenience and privacy, and informedness and privacy. This focus has often been at the expense of other human concerns receiving less airing, such as how recording, tracking and re-representing movements and other information can be used to facilitate social and cognitive processes.

Yvonne mentions 2 goals of my research, one being to use ubicomp technologies in the wild, the other to evaluate how to present data and information:

In addition, more studies are needed of UbiComp technologies being used in situ or the wild – to help illuminate how people can construct, appropriate and use them. With respect to interaction design issues, we need to consider how to represent and present data and information that will enable people to more extensively compute, analyze, integrate, inquire and make decisions; how to design appropriate kinds of interfaces and interaction styles for combinations of devices, displays and tools; and how to provide transparent systems that people can understand sufficiently to know how to control and interact with them.

Currently, the more engaging approach is beginning to happen through the areas of playful and learning practices, scientific practices and persuasive practices.

As already mentioned in Comparing AI’s Failures with Ubicomp’s Visions, Yvonne Rogers concludes on “strong” and “weak” UbiComp.

Just as ‘strong’ AI failed to achieve its goals – where it was assumed that “the computer is not merely a tool in the study of the mind; rather, the appropriately programmed computer really is a mind”, it appears that ‘strong’ UbiComp is suffering from the same fate. And just as ‘weak’ AI2 revived AI’s fortunes, so, too, can ‘weak’ UbiComp bring success to the field.

Relation to my thesis: I would argue that current “strong” UbiComp problems not only lays on modelling people and their activities, but also in the integration ubicomp systems in the real-world (e.g. co-existence of systems, real-world constraints). I enjoy the difference between what is “relevant” and what is “smart”, as I find the word smart or intelligent are widely (over)misused. Finally, the agenda proposed in this article, goes in the direction of my research: in sitiu (out of the lab) studies, investigate the playful approach of ubicomp and how to present relevant information rather than seeking the seamlessness utopia.