Today I gave a talk at the ICING (Intelligent Cities of the Next Generation) workshop in Barcelona entitled “From Sentient to Responsive Cities” (slides). In this presentation I discussed the deployment of new urban actors as instigators of new types of data at the source of a sentient city. These new technologies should not be perceived as drivers of urban change (like often misconceived), but are rather caught up in complex socio-technical assemblages and evolution. They can be used to solve a problem, but might create others therefore failing to contributing to the health of society. That being said, I showcased the use of digital footprints and digital shadows generated by our interactions with these new actors to reveal the invisible (with still many obscurities). In a near future, their visualizations and analysis could very well complete traditional techniques to understand urban dynamics. The real-time availability of these information and evidences extracted from the analysis of these data could lead services part of a responsive city; a city that observes and improves rather than predicts and accommodates. They provide an opportunity to reveal the imperfections of our chaotic cities (and we love them for that) to promote the appropriation of services that have fluctuant quality. This implies a change of approach from the current design of urban services based on the mythologies of a perfect, uniform informational landscape. This approach has some echo in the practice as a quote from a spokesman of the American Public Transportation Association in the news this week reveals: “If you’re late, the public will forgive you if you can tell them how much and why“.

Thanks to Joan Batlle (Barcelona City Council) and Yuji Yoshimura (Barcelona Ecologia) for their invitation

The launch of Citysense, a real-time social navigation and nightlife discovery application for Blackberry and iPhone confirms the trend of analyzing massive amounts of real-time and historic location data from mobile devices for predictive analytics. The idea is similar to automobile GPS systems sharing and pooling current road speed conditions so that everyone can avoid congestion (see Real-Time Traffic Routing from the Comfort of Your Car). The algorithms behind Citysense indexes the active places in a city and characterized them by activity, versus proximity or demographics, to better understand the context of people behavior. In the same range, using the iPhone’s map and self-location features, as well as information about the prior activities of the user’s friends, Whrrl proposes new places to explore or activities to try. Last year, PARC developed, Magitti, a mobile application that uses a combination of cues to infer her interests. With the time of day, a person’s location, her past behaviors, and even her text messages the application suggests concerts, movies, bookstores, and restaurants.

The recent release of these social softwares is also a signal of a shift from answering “where are my friends” to “where is everybody” or “what is everybody doing” (A theme I discussed in the paper “Leveraging Urban Digital Footprints with Social Navigation and Seamful Design“). But they also raise the questios: are people interested in being entertained with real-time information and can machine learning algorithms provide solutions?

Citysense screenshot on a Blackberry

Relation to my thesis: Sense Networks, the company behind Citysense also developed Macrosense, a direct technology transfer from Sandy Pentland’s work on “Reality Mining” (see Nathan Eagle’s talk at Lift on the subject). It demonstrats the real interest in combining massive amounts of anonymous, aggregate location data to understand people dynamics (see Understanding Human Mobility Patterns). However, for powerful predictions there is still a lot of work to do in 1) understanding what motivates individuals to behave the way they do and 2) how users perceive and interact with the information and recommendation.

In the line of Bruno Latour’s thoughts on the consequences of digital traces on social sciences, the current issue of Nature reports in its editorial “A flood of hard data” on the use of mobile-phone technique as an example of how modern information technologies are giving social scientists the power to make measurements that are often as precise as those in the ‘hard’ sciences:

Social scientists have long struggled with a paucity of hard data about human activities; people’s self-reporting about their social interactions, say, or their movement patterns is labour-intensive to collect and notoriously unreliable. In this case, the researchers obtained objective data on individuals’ movements from mobile-phone networks (albeit without access to any individual’s identity, for privacy reasons).

In “Understanding Individual Human Mobility Patterns“, a paper featured in the same issue is an example of this new approach. It reports on the study of movements of 100,000 people following their cellphone signals and found. Quite predictably, it reveals that “most people are creatures of habit”, inclined to move around the same few locations, occasionally given to long hops and despite the diversity of their travel history, humans follow simple reproducible patterns”,

Relation to my thesis: it is rather encouraging Nature reporting on the opportunity that digital traces represent for “It’s not an overstatement to say that these tools are fostering a whole new type of social science — with applications that go well beyond the conventional boundaries of the field.” and their influence on urban planning and the development of transportation networks… and some caution on the new approach that goes exactly in the direction of my thesis and exploring the practice behind the data to better inform the analysis of tourists presence and movements:

The goal of social science is not simply to understand how people behave in large groups, but to understand what motivates individuals to behave the way they do.

Barcelona Visió produced a creative 6 minutes documentary on Tracing the Visitor’s Eye, presented in Catalan by my advisor Josep Blat.

Contemplate the Modernista style of the Sagrada Família, the Pedrera and Casa Batlló in the morning, dine on arròs a la cassola (casserole rice) in Barceloneta and round off the day visiting Plaça d’Espanya and Camp Nou may be one of the preferred routes of Japanese tourists who want to get to know the city of Barcelona. Knowing firsthand what visitors see, when, and how they get around the city would be very useful for shops, restaurants and transport services, so that they could adapt to the real demands. A few years ago, to get this information was an over-ambitious dream. Now, new technology has made it possible. The mathematician Josep Blat, together with Fabien Girardin, explains how they have been able to create a map of the routes tourists take, based on information extracted from the photos tourists themselves post on the Flickr website. Science fiction is history!

UCL’s Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis (CASA) announce the availability of a fully funded PhD studentships on “Measuring and monitoring population diversity and spatial concentration: GeoWeb 2.0 solutions“

Relation to my thesis: Another sign of research getting financed around my thesis topic

The seminal report From Being Human addresses the issues around the explicit and implicit storage of our interactions and activities in public places, while shopping or on the web. The authors question how we will manage and harness the enormous digital footprints and shadows that are being created by and for everyone and cover many subjects are the core of my research.
The scale of the phenomenon

Furthermore, huge amounts of information are being recorded and stored daily about people’s behaviour, as they walk through the streets, drive their cars and use the Web. While much of this may be erased after a period of time, some is stored more permanently, about which people may be naively unaware. In 2020, it is likely that our digital footprints will be gigantic, distributed everywhere, and in all manner of places and forms.

Explicit digital footprints (emptying the shoeboxes)

The decreasing cost and increasing capacity of digital storage also goes hand-in-hand with new and cheap methods for capturing, creating and viewing digital media. The effect on our behaviour has been quite dramatic: people are taking thousands of pictures rather than hundreds each year. They no longer keep them in shoeboxes or stick them in albums but keep them as ever growing digital collections, often online. The use of Web services for photo-sharing is transforming why we take photos by reinventing what we do with them.

Implicit digital footprints (our digital shadows)

Data are also being collected on our behalf or about us for no apparent reason other than because the technology enables it – our digital shadows, if you like. Personal video recorders (PVRs) record TV programmes chosen by the viewer but also automatically store them based on the viewer’s viewing profile or other criteria. Similarly, new devices are beginning to appear, such as SenseCam (see ‘A Digital Life’, below), that can automatically capture all kinds of traces of everyday life, in the form of images, video, conversations and sounds. The same is true for GPS devices which now appear in cars, in mobile phones and even embedded into clothing. All of these are capable of producing and storing large volumes of location data about our comings and goings without any conscious effort on behalf of their owners.

Data are also being deliberately recorded about us by governments, banks and other institutions using technologies such as CCTV, ATMs and phone logging. In the UK, CCTV often generates recorded ‘feeds’ of conversations and actions, as well as logging exactly where these conversations and actions took place. Some workplaces have meeting rooms that capture the content of and activities around discussions held within them. Many public debates are recorded for posterity by editorialising CCTV: in the UK, the Houses of Parliament are captured on behalf of the nation by the BBC, for example. Most people’s financial transactions are logged too, each time a credit card is used. International phone calls from the US are routinely tapped and analysed for suspicious ‘terrorist’ topics (with advanced word-recognition software allowing interrogators to locate possible conversational threads which are then focused on more attentively).

Questions on the new challenges for how we design technologies
But digital records are merciless: a silly prank captured on a mobile phone and then uploaded to a photosharing site may haunt someone for the rest of their lives in a way it never did before.

• Will it be possible for people to delete digital memories captured by others? Now that there are digital tools that can record everything we say or do, how will this affect our own abilities and ways of remembering?
• What tools and technologies are needed to effectively manage vast quantities of personal data?
• How can the privacy and security of digital footprints be ensured to prevent misuse but at the same time allow them to be shared with others when needed?
• How do people find out about their digital footprint and what tools should be provided?

Questions of broader impact

• How should society manage the storage and access of human data ethically and responsibly?
• Will people have the right to have information removed from their digital footprints?
• What are the legal implications of a growing digital footprint that maintains a record of our present and past?
• Should people be informed of the information that is being captured about them, who has access to it and how it is being used?
• To what extent do we need to design technology that allows people both control and feedback about what kinds of data are being monitored?

Relation to my thesis: The report address the notions of implicit and explicit digital footprint (with the term digital shadows for the notion of implicit footprint) and the implications in for their management, the privacy of the people generating them and their misuse (in extension to Be Counted! Return Your Census!). However, it does not mention the benefits beyond the individual (storing for memory) and social (life sharing, coordination) interests such as better understanding societies (the massive consequences on social sciences) and cities.

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.

Path Intelligence presentation at the latest Where 2.0 conference drew some attention from the media (e.g. Shops track customers via mobile phone) and legitimate concerns on the derive of reality mining, behavioral tracking, and the type of research on geographically-anchored digital footprints I am involved in. The debate crystalizes around the issues of gathering data from people without their knowledge and the risk to reveal individuals from anonymized and aggregated sensor data. Similar concerns also raised lately from Google Street View vehicles capturing the streets of Rome (and their face-blurring workaround) or the use of Bluetooth scanning to reveal mobility traces. They also apply to my analysis of georeferenced photos and other digital footprints. I make sure to cover the privacy and ethical issues in my publications (confronting this work to my peers’ ethic).

However I try to slightly differentiate myself from these approaches that rely on the deployment of ad-hoc sensor infrastructures. First, my approach innovates in exploiting anonymized, aggregated, publicly available data. Second, I apply the results to the context of cities services (e.g. tourism) and develop tools and techniques for the interests of citizens and visitors. Of course it implies revealing information that are not of primary benefits of each individual who contributes to a census. They can challenge political decisions that were previously taken based on assumptions or limited survey data. For instance it might lead to a decrease in the offering of public transports in a unjustifiably well-connected neighborhood. They can create a new private service such as Google My Location which relies on millions of its Mobile Maps users who happen to have phones with built-in GPS devices to improve the quality of their positioning system.

Traditional contemporary census campaing in Cambridge, MA

That being said, the discussion on linking the behavioral data back to the individual reminds me of the Web 1.0b and the debates around the use of cookies to keep track of browsing behaviors. Back in that days, some arguments were based on legitimate concerns but also on misconceptions of the purpose of cookies. Now in the ubicomp days, I also see my scientific contribution in providing an understanding of the potentials of digital footprints analysis (similarly as the You are Here project) for good or for worse. It comes down to needing to have open discussions about the implications of these things (see Data sharing threatens privacy). The people making policies don’t know what is possible, and they don’t necessarily make policies that are in our best interest. For some reason, I prefer myself or Sandy Pentland (see What Your Phone Knows About You) in raising the awareness on the opportunities and issues than somebody with potential lower ethical standards.

Finally, the discussion and my work exemplify the shift from large-scale top-down big brother to more local bottom-up little sister types of people monitoring as coined by Jan Chipchase in Big Brother / Little Sister:

“When it comes to surveillance most people think of big brother, but increasingly its your (early adopting, tech savvy, sensor loaded) little sister. Which makes the whole notion of opting out of technology adoption one of whether to opt out of society”

The Economist also has a piece on with in its article on A world of witnesses and the concept of “sousveillance”:

Does this trend give any cause for concern? To some people it suggests a coming surveillance state, as all sorts of titbits about people’s personal lives that used to be private become input for new services such as traffic maps, health warnings or security alerts. Those worries, evoking an earlier era of top-down control by a Big Brother, are mostly misplaced, claims Mr Verclas. A neighbourhood-watch community with global reach is a better metaphor. Instead of surveillance, watching from above, society will rely on a new and opposite concept, sousveillance, watching from below. Such arguments may make more sense in California than in China.

Relation to my thesis: My thesis will certainly include a thorough ethic and privacy issues section. Looking for an angle from the current discussions on the topic. Part of my contribution will be to discuss the implications of sousveillance raised by the analysis of digital footprints.

The round table on Real-Time Cities that took place last month ended up being quite a success. The aim of this event was to gather experts that influence the visions of real-time cities and discuss about the issues, promises and implications inherent to their development. About 25 scholars, practitioners and students from the fields of urban planning, social sciences, architecture, geography, cartography, computer science, interaction design, industrial design and digital media filled the room. We asked 6 main speakers (Georg Gartner, Adam Greenfield, Jonathan Raper, Carlo, Raj Singh, and Paul Torrens) from different disciplines to talk about their work and the resulting implications to real-time cities.

I have summarized the interventions and discussions into 8-pages report now available on the event web page. I mixed Andrea Vaccari’s details transcripts with Bernd Resch and Jon Reades notes with my own recollection of thoughts generated by this afternoon. It covers the key themes presented and discussed: new information resources for cities, describe real-time dynamics of the city, smart environments (the example of wayfinding), ambient information (the example of Location-Based Services), the city as a Real-Time Control System, and the vision on the opportunities and their implications.

The introduction to the topic of the round table goes as follows:

A city is, of course, by default real-time as exemplified by the street sell of umbrellas when it starts to rain in Barcelona (Figure 1). However, people moving and acting in a city base their decisions on information that is, in most cases, not instantaneous as rain drops and not synchronized with their present time and place. In recent years, the increasing deployment of sensors and handheld electronic devices environments has reshaped these processes and impacted the urbanization of the city. In a real-time city, citizens can be aware and react to events that they can’t see in their immediate vicinity or that took place days before. While humans still set the boundaries, more and more of the critical life support systems of the city are instrumented to both sense and make sense of the world around them . Or as in the “Synchronic Society” envisioned by Bruce Sterling every object worthy of human or machine consideration generates a small history. These histories are not dusty archives locked away on ink and paper. They are informational resources, manipulable in real time .

In the literature on ubiquitous computing and urban planning, the descriptions of the real-time city often employs the terms: pulsing cloud of data, instantaneous information, seamlessness integration, empowerment of the citizens, enhancement of our perception, reveal the city as we experience it, patterns of behavior, observe and improve. They highlight the revolution in urban informatics that gets embedded in the fabric of our lives and giving us the ability to show previously invisible urban processes. Moreover, real-time data have the ability to reveal a city as a whole, instantaneously, in excruciating detail, but for the first time also alive. This information become crucial to monitor the urban system and react to its conditions instantaneously.

In addition to a first list, here is list of events I won’t attend but should keep an eye upon.

First International Workshop on Trends in Pervasive and Ubiquitous Geotechnology and Geoinformation
Workshop @ the GIScience conference, September 2008, Park City, Utah, USA

The aim of the workshop is to bring together researchers from various fields to discuss trends in pervasive and ubiquitous geotechnology and geoinformation and their impact on the day-to-day application of geography by consumers and geo-friendly industries such as tourism and education. […] In this workshop, we will discuss the issues (both human factors and engineering challenges) surrounding these context-aware systems. While we will include any research topic that relates either to geotechnology or geoinformation, we will focus on the theory behind and application of systems that successfully and rigorously combine the two. Furthermore, we will particularly highlight research that is able to combine the two in a manner that creates a value to the end user that is greater than the sum of the parts. Finally, we will also discuss broader questions related to pervasive and ubiquitous geotechnology and geoinformation. For instance, how will these new capabilities transform the way we experience the world around us? More importantly, how will they alter our interaction with geography?

The First International Workshop on Location and the Web (LocWeb 2008)
In Conjunction with the WWW 2008 Conference. April 22

This main objective of this workshop is to look into the fields of how to extract, index, mine, find, exploit, mashup, and visualize Web content with respect to its location semantics.

Space = Interaction = Discourse
Aalborg, Denmark from 12th - 14th November 2008

The aim of this conference is to bring together researchers who investigate space, mediated discourse and embodied interaction from different perspectives. The conference will highlight interdisciplinary research that explores how embodied and virtual social actors communicate, interact and coordinate their activities in complex multimodal environments, with a special focus on place, mobility and the body.

Summer Institute of the The Vespucci Initiative for the Advancement of Geographic Information Science
With a 1-week session in Tuscany, Italy on the Geo-Sensor Web with the presence of YDream’s Antonio Camara and UCSB’ Michael F. Goodchild

Geospatial information increasingly is being produced not only by central mapping agencies but by diverse and dispersed collections of sensors. How does this new data collection and dissemination paradigm affect the geospatial community, and vice versa? Sensor Web and citizen participatioon: what happens when citizens are able to deploy and exploit their own sensors? If the Sensor Web becomes as ubiquitous and successful (within its realm of influence) as the WWW, in what ways might it change the way we do things? What areas of high-inertia might be reduced? What as-of-yet unforeseen applications might emerge?