This week, I head to Paris for a gig at La Cantine on the theme “La Terre vue du Web“. I will team-up with Denise Pumain to discuss the ways information, communication and location-aware technologies change our relation with the space. This event is part of a conference series on interdisciplinary approaches to the Web.

Later this month, Lift lab will run a workshop in Barcelona “Hands on Barcelona’s Informational Membrane” that aims at exploring the implications and opportunities of the presence of the informational membrane hovering over Barcelona. The list of participants is already utterly promising.

Finally, I will mingle with tourism professionals and experts at the First International Conference on the Measurement and Economic Analysis of Regional Tourism in San Sebastian, presenting new instruments for measuring and modelling tourism flows and other types of innovation in the tourism enterprise. After the 9th International Forum on Tourism Statistics at OECD, I am thrilled to once again participate to a conference sponsored by the UNWTO with practitioners and people who perform studies on the field.

Back on the road again

Why do I blog this: Thriving from the rich diversity of contiguous domains, languages and perspectives.

I returned from a weekend in Paris. with a rich doggie bag of take-aways and food for thoughts collected at the World Information City conference. The event focused on the major themes within the wide field of new urban geographies (i.e. mobilities, global flows, local dynamics, new forms of strategies of security, maps of emerging patterns of distributed action) with a generous brochette of theorists, scientists and activists.
John Urry opened the conference questioning the current period of human history made of unprecedentedly high and growing mobility in the light of dramatic climate change, the peaking of oil supplies. Indeed, beyond peak oil there is a massive potential for failure due to the dependence of society on mobility of humans, objects (mainly good such as water, food and oil) and the dependence of mobility on oil. Therefore, John examined future possible scenarios as to the character, scale and significance of mobility patterns with the imminent extinction of petroleum man through an Autogeddon. One scenario described the end of the fiesta of mobility with the return to “local sustainability” with a global shift towards lifestyles more intensely local and smaller in scale (a scenario going against some of the very reasons why cities exist that enable large scale operation and the need of anonymity). Another scenario, painted the possible emergence of “regional warlordism” with oil, gas and water wars leading to a relocalisation of mobility patterns (increasing separation between different regions). As Hobbesian war of each warlord dominated region/city against their neighbors. Plausible considering that the mobility of US army that consumes as much oil as a country like Sweden would have its mobility highly reduced. Finally, John Urry examined the scenario of the “digital panopticon” where digitized information is inserted within movement and increasingly in chips embedded within each person. digital development would be intrusive and threaten civil liberties as they transform the nature of the individual person. Linking information that lead to limit the freedom to walk, drive or move without connection being made with other information held about each person.

Each of theses scenario seem questionable and negotiable. They where not necessary meant to predict an assured evolution, but to engage the debate on the consequences of the development of “information cities” with mobility being dependant on oil and code. In conclusion, the 20st century based on mobility and oil has given a very bad hand to the 21st century. It provides a very complex environment where researchers need to transcent their own specialities, jump over and build bridges accress artificial disciplinary boundaries. And this is exactly what the World Information City conference was about. The major frictions e conference largely focused on the frictions of code/data with liberties/privacy; basically are we moving to an airport model of live? (reminding me to some extends of Airport code/spaces).

On that topic, Stephen Graham gave compeling examples of the remaking of urban spaces through new forms strategies of security. The emerging militarized control society encouraged by the dream of the perfect technology and the myth of the perfect power. They take multiple forms such as the security at the olympics and other large sport events (see paper Exemplifications of Surveillance through Sport Mega-Events), the Darpa Urban Challenge, or passage point urbanism that profile individues entry to some spaces. On the other hand, this evolution is not centralized and sometimes even contradictory, therefore refuting any conspiracy theory. Moreover the messiness and unpredictability of the world seriously challenge any technophilica dreams and their strategies of bordering (more on that in Sentient Cities Ambient Intelligence and the Politics of Urban Space and The Traditional, Messy Business of Getting Infrastructure into the Ground and more generally The Cybercities Reader.

Stephen Graham confronting technophiliac dreams with situated practices

Bruno Latour gave his spin to the notion of panipticon arguing arguing that with the kind of information (mmhmm… transformations) of the invisible city we should rather present it as an oligopticon that sees very little information very good. Based on his book the Paris: Invisible City, he gave several examples of oligopticons that are blind but plugged in, partially intelligent, temporarily competent and locally complete. For instance, Latour described a classic, very informatized situation room of the Parisian police, there is one person who pushes figurines on a map, because all the information persent in the room are not cognitively understandable. This policeman materialize the information through his practice that transform the information or as described in Paris: Invisible City

Can we say that the police officers in charge of traffic dominate all of Paris? Precisely not. Proof of that is in the strangest oligopticon of all, in these rooms containing so many of them. Close to a computer screen an official is sitting at a table looking at a map of Paris on a scale of 7,500 to 1, shifting around wooden figurines that he takes from a box as if he were playing Monopoly. Why? “Because SURF” he explains “gives an image that’s too precise! All the traffic problems in Paris have a ripple effect spreading over several kilometres. No computerized map enables us to vary the scale fast enough: either it’s too big or it’s too small; the frames are always too rigid. Here, with the figurines, I can see both the whole and the details, anticipate better and spread out my forces more effectively”.

Latour further attacked the current hype that the digital will bring us visibility. Indeed, with all their tools and visualization, Bloomberg could not detect the eve of the financial crisis. In fact, we are more aware of the limitation of the transformation and moderation of the information now with Google Maps than before with paper maps (further feeding the conclusion of my thesis on uncertainty and granularity of information!)

Bruno Latour on dominating traffic in Paris with figurines. Exemplifying the limitations of oligopticons.

With a contrasting techno-determinist tone, Carlo Ratti proposed solutions for sustainable mobilities such as CopenCycle, Track Trash to capture objects removal chain) and approaches to build a city as a real-time control system by feeding the complexity of urban dynamics back to people. However, these proposals mainly aim at optimizing the urban life, but it is still unclear what the parameters for optimization are and who defines them (preferably an transparent process). Moreover, there is still efforts to grasp the unentended consequences of the real-time. For instance there is no study of the feedback loop the reveal the implications a real-time control system (see for instance Cities as Networks in Geographical Euclidean Space).

Despite these critiques, Saskia Sassen encouraged the audience in thinking in terms of trajectories (chain of implications) rather than good or bad. Particularly when considering the role of city (and technologies) as disablers of powerlessness. For instance, in the case of illigal immigrants in California who were granted legal papers, their status became a voice in Los Angeles, not in the rural areas of the state. Of course, the same could have happened without technology, but technology become an unablers of extraordinary order of magnitude (see for instance in the financial domain). Can this same technology can be use of other domains such as environmentalism or urbanism that relies on the topologigraphic plan of the city is less and less effective with the current respresentation of the city.

I thought my talk People as sensors; people as actors (slides), given at the conference Data City workshop, echoed rather well with these notions of powerlessness and oligopticon. I described the ability to exploit open data with open “transformation” processes that aim at revealing some specific aspects (sentient city) of the city and improving its mechanisms (responsive city). I also explained the limitations of my oligopticons as tools that make the invisible visible reveal some elements of urban dynamics without explaining them. The interpretations of the analysis generate hypothesizes that are difficult to prove considering the messiness and complexity of urban dynamics. I suggested that only qualitative observation could help better understand the revealed. As suggested by John Urry, it could very well complement more traditional mobility studies (once again. further feeding the conclusion of my dissertation).

In that workshop, Christophe Cariou, founder of Everydatalab presented an innovative process of mixing quantitative data (anonymous logs of calls, handovers and sms) with user-generated content to map the Fête de la Musique night in Paris. In collaboration with Orange Labs, he exploited data visualized in Urban Mobs to extract the different scenes and the communities formed around them. The “abnormal” temporal signature of cellular network antennas help detecting the areas effected by the event as well as betweenness indicators (Girvan-Newman algorithm) in a graph formed by mobility traces (Christophe called them “steps”)

Map of the different scenes of activities at the Fête de la Musique in Paris

Besides presenting leading-edge investigation and innovative work on urban data analysis, I feel that we, researchers, still lack of discours that motivate our work (already expressed in Debates on Privacy-Preserving Statistics and Data Mining). This means going beyond the communication of the fascination for mathematical and statistical models and maps. For instance, Reading Steven Strogatz’s column on Math and the City, I feel that an important point of vulgarization should also communicate on the coarse grained laws of urban phenomena we need to discover and why use human networks can help us overcome the current mathematical understanding of complexity.

Moreover, I believe that we, researcher, need to listen more to the critiques and understand their foundations (for instance by reading La tyranie technologique or Eric Sadin’s surveillance globale). That should help evolve our practice and discourse; for instance we need to understand that it is not the anonymity of the data that raise concerns (by default they are expected to be so), but it is the ability to categorize society or perform social rating (as in marketing) that worries most. Similarly, in the worry of simplicity we, researchers, present the distribution of mobile phones as an close representation of society, inferring that at a 120% rate, everybody should wear at least a mobile phone (which is not the case). This simplification that depicts any ability for a paniptical view of society contradicts the oligoptical results of our works.

The critiques on the frictions of code/data with liberties/privacy we generate are therefore understandable. However, I believe the persons critiquing the analysis of digital footprints also suffer from lack of understanding of the motivations, processes and limitations of our research work. For instance, the disregards for people co-evolution with technologies lead to some sort of “negative techno-determitism” discourse in which technology now drives us to the wall, as if we suddenly had lost our proven abilities to hack and appropriate it. Similarly some critique discard the fact that “code” and data are now part of the life of the city, the makes the infrastructure and services work (our society is based on them, such as the domains of finance, planification). Moving beyond the state of denial of our dependency, the discussion should be about: what do we do with these data? with palettes of scenarios going from burying data as toxic waste to their use to develop the perfect power.

Between these two extremes, I have a lot of sympathy for Christophe Aguiton’s proposition on the 3 layers of politics of living maps formed with data within a common good and part of a transparent process (algorithms) with an accountable set of rules and laws. Indeed, as the politics of robots and crawlers is here to stay (we depend on them), every single algorithm that touch the common good should be scrutanized (like we do for every element of society). In this society made of multiple oligopticons, the concern is not to make things visible (as argued for the panopticon), but rather to continue dealing the the opacity of information and politics.

An example of this process was taking place at WikiPlaza on the side of the conference. It featured the first set of Montre Verte prototypes made of a watch with two environmental sensors (ozone, noise) and a mobile phone that regularly communicates the collected data to an open platform which openly stores and visualizes them. My hat is off to the FING that proves that with the right people, a think tank can also become a do tank. Hopefully they will publicize their experiments of the Hexagon. The green watch will be featured soon in Marseille for Lift France.

The first prototype of the Green Watch

Relation to my thesis: Conferences like World Information City serve the purpose to treat arguments that would be hard to voice in an academic conference of my domain. The discussions helped futher developped my understanding and arguments on the frictions of code/data with liberties/privacy; a theme it is important to master when working on people + technology + space.

A couple of initiative to discuss the management and mining of personal electronic information: The MIT SENSEable City Lab starts the Engaging Data Initiative with the First International Forum on the Application and Management of Personal Electronic Information (see CFP). The goal of this forum is to explore the novel applications for electronic data and address the risks, concerns, and consumer opinions associated with the use of this data. At the other side of the Pond, an afternoon will be dedicated to the obligations of French companies in handling their personal electronic information: Anonymisation des données : Cachez ces informations que nous ne devrions voir !.

The paper Mobiscopes for Human Spaces set the debate on these privacy-preserving data mining issues. They present a “mobiscope” has a federation of distributed mobile sensors into a taskable sensing system that achieves high-density sampling coverage over a wide area through mobility. Vehicular and handheld mobiscopes complement static sensing systems by addressing the fundamental limitations created by fixed sensors. Classic technical issues relate to data resolution and heterogeneity. The authors propose to handle privacy issues with policy definition, local processing (such as for my travel survey study), verification and privacy preserving data mining. Besides these technical solutions they acknlowledge the necessity to have a richer discussion of these observing technologies’ social implications

• explicitly considering broader policy precedents in information privacy as they apply to mobiscopes,
• extending popular education on information technology’s new observation capabilities,
• facilitating individuals’ participation in sensing their own lives, and
• helping users understand and audit their own data uploads.

However, the debate avoids the motivations behind research works behind mobiscopes. For instance, in what scenarios do we need high spatial density to accurately sample the field of spatially varying phenomena? When do the desirability of instantaneity and speed contributing to the health of society? Who are the “users” (a term often abused in the literature on personal electronic information) and are these “users” aware of their role of “user? For instance, reading You’re Leaving a Digital Trail. What About Privacy? makes me wonder if the debate on privacy can evolve if researchers do not make a serious effort in describing value-added scenarios without a techno-deterministic rhetoric.

Reference:
Abdelzaher, T., Anokwa, Y., Boda, P., Burke, J., Estrin, D., Guibas, L., Kansal, A., Madden, S., and Reich, J. (2007). Mobiscopes for human spaces. IEEE Pervasive Computing, 6(2):20–29

Eric Sadin, Surveillance globale (généralisation du principe de quantification invidualisée des personnes qui se met en place depuis l’universialtion de l’interconnexion)

Relation to my thesis: Elements to form an argumentation on privacy issues related to my research domain

Last week I participated to the workshop “La Ciudad Híbrida” organized in Sevilla by José Luis de Vicente. The first 2 days, we used different theoretical lenses and practical references to explore the many different aspects of the hybrid city. Juan Freire engaged us with proposals for a participatory urbanism with the design of open processes and bottom-up solutions (see De la ciudad híbrida al urbanismo P2P: democracia 2.0, gestión local participativa y crowdsourcing). José Luis de Vicente stepped back and led us through the history influenced by urban theorist, architects and artist that have paved the way to the hybrid city of the 21st century, the dynamic city (see Una historia de la ciudad de software: arquitecturas dinamicas y sistemas digitales urbanos). An argumentation completed by Juan Martín Prada who covered the rich field of location media with a philosophic spin (co-existance men-thinks, men-animals, men-deads, the urbanization of the real-time city (networked city) vs. desurbanization of the real-space; the “Here” being replaced by the permanant “Now”.

Before Juan Martin, I played the role of “data cowboy” with a 90min talk (in Spanish) that looked at the contemporary hybrid city through the lenses of my research work augmented by some offline observations. In this intervention entitled “People as sensors; people as actors” (slides with annotations, video), I look at the integration of ubiquitous technologies (and soft infrastructures) and how they afford us new flexibility in conducting our daily activities with simultaneously providing the means to study our activities in time and space.

The other part of the workshop was dedicated to more hands-on activities in which groups had to define, sketch and prototype a citizen-led system or process that take advantage of open/public urban data. With a majority young architects, the focus was first based on “infrastructure”, “mobility”, “space”, but then rapidly also evolved around social issues and even political touching the Critical Cartography approach and critique. There was a lot to learn from the languages employed by participants with different practices (architects, social scientist, biologist, artist).

Finally, Sevilla provided an excellent context to ponder the hybrid city of the present. In addition to its rich history of mixed cultures, architectures and art, engineering work and south-european clichés, the city offers the vestiges of the techno-utopian Expo ‘92. The crumbling infrastructure at the Cartuja Island is source of fascinating sightseeing with an Ariane V on the loose and a monorail in advanced decomposition among other things. The theme for the Expo was “The Age of Discovery”. mmhmm.

Sevilla, a true hybrid city….

…with its real urban furnitures

Thanks José Luis for the invitation!

Martin Dodge announces the Software and Space theme issue for Environment and Planning A with some of the papers available online now. This issues was meant as a useful contemporary review of different developments under what can be labelled, broadly, as ‘the spatiality of ubiquitous computing’ (see the introduction “How Does Software Make Space? Exploring Some Geographical Dimensions of Pervasive Computing and Software Studies“). Through the lenses of Software studies that expands understanding of code beyond its technical aspects, this issue brings geographical work on ubiquitous computing. In other words, it discusses the significance of software as an agent in the making of spaces. For instance, software can make space through the capacity of calculation at a scale and speed far beyond human abilities. Equally significant for geographers is the degree to which software is also spatial; an issue that will become only more important as ubiquitous computing unfolds in the social world. For instance the appearance of “machine readable” spaces:

The growing calculative role of code is of greatest concern with its ability to render all kinds of spaces ‘machine readable’ through identification technologies and fine scale sensors (Dodge and Kitchin, 2005a; Dennis 2008) enabling the generation of ‘data shadows’ and so-called ‘lifelogs’ that record the minutiae of everyday life with great granularity and, potentially, to never forget what has been captured (Allen 2008; Dodge and Kitchin, 2007). These extensive and readable spaces can then be interpreted by code which makes decisions automatically including socially significant ones, in terms of access control and anticipatory governance (cf. Adey 2009; Graham, 2005).

An agent in making Manhattan readable

Close to my observations, the editors Martin Dodge, Rob Kitchin and Matt Zook highlight the particularities of software in relation to their failures and fluctuating quality:

As a product software also enjoys some unusual qualities. How software is licensed means that liabilities for its failures are limited. Although most people do not read the terms and conditions they agree to when using licensed software, they are willingly accepting an imperfect product whilst abrogating the supplier from responsibility for damage caused. These imperfections in terms of bugs, glitches and crashes are at once notorious and yet also largely accepted as a routine part of the ‘conveniences’ of computers.

Runtime error in the subway, a routine part of the ‘conveniences’ of computers. Contact your service representative?

Relation to my thesis: After considering the temporal dimension of ubiquitous computing, I use the contributions of my thesis to discuss the aspects of human-space relationships, particularly with the evidences that the integration of ubiquitious geoinformation changes the relations of people with the space. This issue echoes very well with my works that show how software that collect, store, analyze and visualize ubiquitous geoinformation alters the perception of the space, particularly to what the editors describe as “Machine readable spaces” and “Imperfections as the routine part of the convenience of computers”. It complements some of my consideration on the temporal dimension of ubiquitous computing

A paper by senseable’s colleague Bernd Resch has received the Best Paper Award at the IEEE International Conference on Advanced Geographic Information Systems & Web Services for his paper:

Resch, B., Mittlboeck, M., Girardin, F., and Britter, R. (2009). Real-time geo-awareness - sensor data integration for environmental monitoring in the city. In IEEE International Conference on Advanced Geographic Information Systems Web Services. Cancun, Mexico.

Bernd has been pursuing the urban sensor data interoperability holly grail, building methods to integrate heterogeneous data sources that both lack of interoperable interfaces and have deficient coordination due to monolithic and closed data infrastructures. He has been developing the kind “Sensor Data Integration” system based on open sensing infrastructure making extensive use of open (geospatial) standards.

Congrats Bernd!

Relation to my thesis: I humbly contributed to a section on the potential implications of such a system on raising people environmental awareness.

Shoval, N. (2007). Sensing human society. Environment and Planning B: Planning and Design, 34:191–195.

In this paper Noam Shoval proposes referring to the possibility of the aggregative use of cell phone spatial data as human sensing. He makes the distinction with remote sensing that applies more to the domain of physical geography arguing that human sensing enables us to sense people directly, in contrast to remote sensing, where the information obtained regarding human activity is indirect. Even if new sources of physical geographic data is related to aspects of human spatial activity, none of them can be thought of as materially augmenting more traditional social scientific data that describe the social characteristics of individuals and groups. Now the emergence of human sensing coupled with the considerable progress in the field of GIS, currently places us on the verge of a veritable revolution in human time-space activity research.
The author introduces the two methods of analysis of location data of cell phone that I have explored in the course of my thesis. First from the activity of devices that are associated with each antenna of the network during a certain period of time. Second, the detection of the location and migration of devices over a given period of time on the different antennas of the networks. Both approaches raise privacy issues, even though Noam mentions that “the data derive from statistics regarding activity in antennas and not regarding the locations of the phones themselvesötherefore there should not be any privacy considerations in this case”, comparing the approach to study census data for which “detailed census records at the individual household level are not usually available to researchers. Data are available only in aggregated forms at a level of detail intended to prevent the ready association of demographic information with individual households.”

Other challenges confirms the limitations that have emerged from my thesis works: a) aggregated cellphone data are particularly difficult to deal with high-resolution
interurban analysis; being more appropriate for studies of relatively low geo-graphical resolution, such as at the metropolitan level b) the representativeness of the cellphone data than necessitate calibration methods (although such issues must be addressed in any other research method as well)

Interestingly, Noam suggests the observation cellular network infrastructure already reveals general idea about the main nodes of activity in cities, such as concentrations of business activities, shopping, and leisure, such as here for Manhattan:

Image courtesy of Noam Shoval (original), created by Adi Ben-Nun from the Hebrew University GIS Centre, of a density map of around 1300 cellular antennas in Manhattan.
Relation to my thesis: “Time will tell whether the contribution made to human geography and the social sciences with this methodology will be on a par with the revolution generated by remote sensing in the field of physical geography and related geosciences.“

Within the spirit of 2007’s Embracing the Real World’s Messiness and 2008’s Sliding Friction, the plan to install GPS-ready bus tracking equipment to New York City buses has been pushed off indefinitely.

It’s a project that was supposed to revolutionize bus travel, telling riders exactly how long ’till the next bus, and allowing them to see the exact location of buses in real time, whether on the Internet or on a handheld device. But at a City Council oversight hearing Thursday, MTA officials said ‘forget about it’ and have officially abandoned the project, to the disbelief of lawmakers.”

“‘It’s just incredible that in this day and age, we’re nowhere closer to being able to know where the buses are at any given point,’ said Queens Councilman John Liu.”

“Under a contract awarded in 2005, tracking equipment was installed onboard 185 Manhattan buses. In August of 2007, screens began operating in test mode, but were turned off a few months later because the times were inaccurate. They’ve been dark ever since.”

Source: Planetizen

The workaround? Bus stop relaxation! (in Zürich)

Relation to my thesis: Cities Are All About Difficulty

Martin Dodge’s latest talk on “A New Countryside Code? Software, Surveillance, Simulation of Rural Spaces“, takes us away from the socio-technological considerations of pervasive computing in urban environments to make observations of his concept of code/space in the rural context, looking at “What difference does code make in the countryside, particularly in farming practices and rural landscape“. Beyond the ‘techno-hype’ the pieces about distributed sensor nets on farms and bio-instrumentation of livestock, the contemporary country has rarely been observed through social-technical lenses. Contradicting the general assumptions that oppose the rural with the urban and the modern, farm spaces are highly surveilled and governed (e.g. to track bird flu outbreaks). The integration of software in the countryside makes farming knowable, abstracting animals and changing practices with a stock person becoming a screen-worker. The ability to code livestock and the agricultural land creates new types of surveillance with “the data needed to drive them can be obtained without any knowledge of those to whom the data pertain” and new opportunities to simulate risks. This evolution raises questions on the dependency of farms on software and the effectiveness of their promises:

But how far are some farm spaces now code/space? are coming to depend on software and distributed information systems to function?

What is the effectiveness of real-time surveillance and potency of future predicting software simulations for managing rural landscapes?

Walking through the contemporary Spanish rural code/space over the weekend, capturing what Martin Dodge would describe “green and pleasant landscape mixing with the obvious technological infrastructures and grey concrete”

Relation to my thesis: Healthy exercise to observe the socio-technical implication of pervasive computing outside of the city, comparing, rather than opposing with other environments, the rural context with its need of surveillance, governance and predictions, with digital data and software that change the practices and expectations. Juan Freire researcher in marin biology also performed this kind of exercise that draws comparisons between the ocean and the city and their digital skins (see his presentation at Visualizar: Visualizing Urban Spaces’ Digital Skin. How? Why?)

The International Workshop on Urban, Community, and Social Applications of Networked Sensing Systems took place this Fall with a few contributions in relations to my research projects including on detecting modes of transportation: MobileSense - Sensing Modes of Transportation in Studies of the Built Environment and on using new urban actors as proxies to uncover and measure urban dynamics: Measuring the Pulse of the City through Shared Bicycle Programs.