The exhibition Situated Technologies: Toward the Sentient City aims at imagining alternative trajectories for how various mobile, embedded, networked, and distributed forms of media, information and communication systems might inform the architecture of urban space and/or influence our behavior within it. Curated by Mark Shepard and organized by the Architectural League of New York, it will open in September 2009 with 5 commissioned projects that examine the broader social, cultural, environmental and political issues within which the development of urban ubiquitous/pervasive computing is itself situated. One of them, Trash Track, proposed by the MIT SENSEable City Lab (led by Eugenio Morello) will explore how pervasive technologies can help expose the challenges of waste management and sustainability:

Trash Track is inspired by the NYC Green Initiative, which aims to increase the rate of waste recycling in the city to almost 100% by 2030. The project considers how pervasive technologies can help expose the challenges of waste management and sustainability. Trash Track will tag different types of waste and follow these through the city’s waste management system to reveal the end-of-life journey of our everyday objects. Whereas most focus in the economic system is on the supply chain, Trash Track will help underscore the environmental impact of consumer waste by visualizing the waste chain, revealing the ultimate destination of the things we throw away.

In other words, the goal of this project is to reveal the “removal-chain” of our everyday objects and waste with a citizen science approach. This approach raise the concerns of using technologies to solve the very problems they have created, as recently discussed by Anne Galloway in “The Rise of Sensor Citizen“:

For example, projects in this domain rarely, if ever, question the environmental or political impacts of the technologies they seek to employ for environmental and political activism. For example, the United Nations now estimates that almost 50 million tonnes of electronic waste are discarded each year. While the environmental costs of toxic e-waste are substantial and can be added to the environmental impact of manufacturing new electronics, the problem is exacerbated by a variety of related practices that disadvantage developing nations. While all of the projects discussed above advocate using technologies for socially, politically and environmentally positive ends, they also implicitly support existing consumption practices in the developed world, and hide the role that technological progress has played in creating the very problems they seek to improve.

Relation to my thesis: The brainstorm session to develop the Trash Track proposal were an excellent learning experience to understand designers, architects, engineers, urbanists concerns and practices, as well as cultural differences in the approach of people as sensors and urban sustainability. I could not help raising the ambivalence of using dust networks that transforms into e-waste to reduce dust. It will be the fascinating challenge of Track Trash to give a counter example to these concerns. I imagined a scenario that solely focuses on the design of pervasive electronic devices that highlight their own removal-chain and help their recycling.

E-waste removal-chain in contemporary cities

I has been 9 intense months since I left Barcelona for MIT. Time has now come to move back to Europe and engage in the last 6 months of my PhD, focusing on a last round of rigorous data analysis, defining an overall coherence and writing the dissertation. My stay at the SENSEable City Lab produced a fair list of highlights and professional satisfactions including:

• the organization of a round table on real-time cities
• the publication of a paper in IEEE Pervasive magazine
• the lead of a project to communicate my research in the Design Museum of Barcelona
• the lead of a project that developed methods to quantifying the evolution of the attractiveness of the New York City waterfront
• complete the core elements of my thesis that helped me frame its overall coherence

I communicated results of my research work at AAG, GIScience and Tourism Statistics, but enjoyed almost as much responding to the invitations of the non-academic venues where I could express my skepticism, thoughts, questions and critics that do not fit in traditional academic outputs:

• Intelligent Cities of the Next Generation, Barcelona
• Visualizar Database City, Madrid
• Forum Chronos, Paris

All these different activities, symbol of a hybrid researcher at the crossroad of multiple domains, certainly taught me a lot. I can highlight the most obvious.

• collaborating with architects and urban designers, learn some part of the language and their practice
• learned some of the challenges that urban planners face with their expectations and shortcomings in the development of responsive cities: Digital Technologies to Shape the Future of Urban Transportation Planning, Why Real-Time Data Are Not Used to Improve Urban Systems? and Manuel Castells Talk on the Implications of Networks on Urban Planning.
• learned some urban data analysis techniques and some more in data mining techniques
• challenged and improved my project management skills with the experience of coordinating a complex project that involved local authorities and providers of urban data.
• explored some of the ideas on post-occupancy evaluation in a real-world setting.
• use of multiple language and references to participate to discussions that aimed at shaping urban informatics
• experimenting with inductive strategies and research based on urban demos for data collection.

Relations to my thesis: My stay in Boston provided me the necessary boots to finish my PhD in 3.5 years with a good set of skills that I plan to use after the defense of my dissertation. The affiliation with the MIT SENSEable City Lab has helped opening doors and I cannot thank its director Carlo Ratti enough for giving me the opportunity to engage into research with one of the finest team that studies the relations between ubiquitous technologies and the city.

Last week at Visualizar’08, I presented the long version of my talk From Sentient to Responsive Cities (slides with notes, video). This talk compiles many of the thoughts and works I produced over these past couple of years. It is divided into three parts:

Microscopes and telescopes
I discuss the dynamic data we generate when actively or passively interacting with new urban actors such as wireless networks or RFID systems. The mapping of these data reveal many invisible dynamics of the city and this often in real-time (with Bicing, Velib or Flickr as data sources). Research in that domain have produced beautiful microscopes and telescopes to visualize urban dynamics. Besides their utility in stretching the imagination of stakeholders in the city, they do not allow to understand “what we see”.

Mapping new urban actors

Evidence and loops
New techniques are being developed to transform the massive amount of dynamic urban data into evidences and information that can be acted upon; moving from purely Sentient to Responsive cities. From the dynamic census of a city from its cellular network activity to the definition of indicators to measure the evolution of the attractiveness of places, there are potential to create a new type of urbanism based evidences generated with the analysis of digital footprints actors of a place leave behind them. These evidences can transform the evaluation of urban design and digital urban services with post-occupency evaluations often overlooked in the practice of architecture and urban design. Similarly the communication of the information generated back to actors of the urban space could create a feedback loop in which the analysis of the data impact the activity of people that create new data and so on.

The evolution of the flows of photographers in Lower Manhattan in Summers of 2006, 2007 and 2008.

Taxi drivers
But how to integrate this type of mechanism by taking into consideration the complex socio-technical assemblage of cities? A set of answers can come from the observation of current deployment of ubiquitous technologies in the city. Therefore, I studied of the integration of satellite navigation system into the practice of taxi drivers describes the co-evolution people have with technologies: how they adapt to it and how they adapt it to their practice. The observations reveal the necessity to have a large knowledge of the city judge the quality of the information provided by sat-nav system. Novice taxi drivers were often not trusting system and access the paper street guide and maps to support their navigation and wayfinding; the satnav system becoming a tool among a large eco-system of artifacts.

A taxi driver mixing the use of a satnav and the official street guide of Barcelona.

Relation to my thesis: An attempt to find a coherence in my multiple works. I might have found a good line of thoughts in describing the potentials to transform urban data into evidences and information that can be acted upon. (Paco Gonzalez produced a summary in Spanish)

This week, I am Visualizar08 Database City Workshop at Media Lab Prado in Madrid. The program of this 2-weeks workshop mixes theoretical seminars with hands-on development of 9 selected projects of data visualization applied to the urban context. Today I gave the long version of my “From sentient to responsive cities” talk in which I laid out many aspects of my research including the mix of quantitative urban data analysis and qualitative observations (taxi drivers). More on that later.

Other lecturers include Juan Freire (Visualizing Urban Spaces’ Digital Skin. How? Why?), Andrés Ortiz from Bestiario (What’s that good for?) and Adam Greenfield with his opus The Long Here, the Big Now, and other tales of the networked city.

Relation to my thesis: A unique event that covers my thoughts and instantiation discussed here. I used my talk as an experiment to find a coherent line of thought for the outline of my dissertation.

The methods and tools I have developed at the MIT SENSEable City Lab to explore the significance of the new types of user-related spatiotemporal data have been published in the current issue of the IEEE Pervasive Magazine. In Digital Footprinting: Uncovering Tourists with User-Generated Content I describe how our approach helps uncover the presence and movements of tourists from cell phone network data and the georeferenced photos they generate.

Girardin, F., Calabrese, F., Dal Fiore, F. , Ratti, C., and Blat, J. (2008). Digital footprinting: Uncovering tourists with user-generated content. IEEE Pervasive Computing, 7(4):36–43.

Relation to my thesis: A follow-up work of the case study in Florence. In this paper I explain how different types of digital footprints visitors leave behind when visiting Rome, capture their presence at different places and moments. While, the analysis of georeference photos help define sightseeing areas, mapping the aggregated cellular network activity originated from foreign mobile phones reveal places of travel (train station) and lodging
(hotel areas).

Geovisualizations of the presence of (a) 932 tourist photographers and (b) 520,000 phone calls from foreign mobile phones in the Coliseum and Piazza della Repubblica area from September to November 2006. Both types of data cover the train station area in the proximity of the Piazza della Republica. The values in each cell are normalized.

After a summer of dense project coordination and urban data analysis, time is slowly coming to frame the content of my PhD thesis dissertation. I plan to submit it in March 2009 with a timeline composed of 3 months to complete the current “deep dig” analysis of digital breadcrums followed by another 3 months early next year of compiling and writing the dissertation. Discussions with my PhD advisor led to the agreement that the dissertation should cover the extensive work I have been leading in the aspects of implicit and explicit human interaction with pervasive geoinformation. In practice it implies framing my analysis of pervasive user-generated content as a core element alimented with more qualitative studies on the perception and generation of location information (with an emphasis on location quality and uncertainty) and the co-evolution of humans with location information. It creates the challenge to keep a flow of thoughts between the different studies, but it allows me to build on the approach to mix quantitative digital footprints analysis enhanced with descriptions from qualitative observations. A mixed approach I would like to document and ponder for my post-academic life.

The next step is to staple my paper together and write a chapter that summarizes the contribution for each work. Then from each contribution see what kind of linking is necessary. My work addresses a few questions created by the increasing amount of implicit and explicit interaction people have with digital infrastructures in the (urban) physical space:
1. How do we co-evolve with the pervasive availability of geoinformation?
2. How do we manage (interpret and generate) the fluctuating quality of geoinformation?
3. How to take advantage of these novel massive amount of pervasive user-generated geodata?

My thesis addresses these question first by describing how the location information provided by pervasive appliances impacts our work practices, a theme I cover in The co-evolution of taxi drivers and their in-car navigation systems (and other more complete paper still in progress). The very different appropriation of the systems raises the issue of the user interpretation of location quality that I categorize in the experiments on CatchbBob! summarized in Getting real with ubiquitous computing: the impact of discrepancies on collaboration and Issues from Deploying a Pervasive Game on Multiple Sites. A fluctuating location quality is part of humans practice of generating and sharing geoinformation as highlighted in Place this Photo on a Map: A Study of Explicit Disclosure of Location Information and Assessing pervasive user-generated content to describe tourist dynamics. I still need to finish my study and publish on the practices of geoannotating and georeferencing information. Despite the imperfections of sensors-based and user-generated geoinformation constantly generated implicitly or explicitly, their aggregation and analysis (following privacy regulation and ethical guidelines) provide novel perspectives on understanding urban dynamics and particularly tourism. I covered the opportunities from the development of softwares to the application of data analysis techniques that I entitled “digital footprinting”. The contributions include the collection, visualization and analysis of digital footprints that reveal tourist dynamics in Leveraging explicitly disclosed location information to understand tourist dynamic: a case study (Journal of Location Based Services) and the analysis of digital shadows and their correlation with digital footprints in Digital footprinting: uncovering the presence and movements of tourists from user-generated content that reveals the complementary perspectives of each data set. Other data analysis techniques on digital shadows allow to Quantifying the presence of visitors from the mobile phone network activity they generate (International Forum on Tourist Statistics, in print) and develop indicators on the urban space that perform Measures of urban attractiveness based on the analysis of digital footprints (in progress). While these approach focus on aggregated data and crowds, specific mobile software developments allow to perform mobility panel studies on a world-wide scale with system that perform World-wide air travel detection (in progress).

Relation to my thesis: Setting a deadline to finish in 3.5 years and framing the work done so far under one umbrella. The challenge will be to link the multiple contributions under a common umbrella. Equality important will be to keep a scientifically honest piece of work that is accessible to people on the edges of academia. For instance, I was advised not to hesitate in referencing to my blog and acknowledge it is a research tool (inspired by Anne Galloway’s PhD disseration).

Whenever I introduce the domain of “urban computing” I mention three highly intertwined themes. First the design of technologies that integrate into the urban environment (still) driven by ubicomp-optimists; second the study of impact of these technologies on the city observed by social scientists and human geographers; and third the research on revealing the invisible urban dynamics led by hybrid groups of individuals with architecture, design, urban planning, GIS, social sciences or computer sciences backgrounds. Two major drivers of this this theme are the emerging and massive availability of georeferenced data and the popularization of mapping softwares (not to say GIS). Kazys Varnelis and Leah Meisterlin’s essay “The invisible city: Design in the age of intelligent maps” exemplifies very well these new opportunities for designers to describe cities in a novel ways. Yet, this text shows a confusion the novel map previously uncollectible and inaccessible data to the possibility to produce “intelligent maps” (the urban computing version of the ubicomp’s “intelligent fridge”?). It overlooks some critical considerations that the current state of “mash-ups” is still trying to figure out: 0. What part of reality the data reveal? 1. What we can do with them? 2. How to communicate them for people to acquire information (still a far stretch from “intelligent”).

My own “Let’s map and see…”

Relation to my thesis: As much as ubicomp’s vision has been driven by the emergence of mobile, wireless and sensors technologies, I notice that part of the urban computing vision are driven by the newly available data, with a “let’s map and see” trial and error approach rather than starting from human and urban considerations. Of course, my work has not been completely foreign to that, but the clear current steps are about exploring points 0. et 1. They were discussed this Spring at the Real-Time Cities Round Table.

See also Nicolas’ “Design in the age of intelligent maps”

This week’s LBS360.net podcast “You are a Sensor” discusses volunteer geographic information and “taking advantage of people doing what they do” to detect diseases, natural disasters, traffic jams, and zones of social activities.

Researchers have determined that you, even without a portable device can be an effective geographic sensor. This week we explore examples of how individuals, sometimes along with their electronic gadgets, can act as effective sensors for disease or natural disaster. Our editors share some proven techniques and explore how this type of data collection might play out in the future.

Relation to my thesis: “human as sensors” getting mainstream

Straight from my inbox, a few academic events to keep an eye on:

Social Interaction and Mundane Technologies in Everyday Life.
Theme Issue of Personal and Ubiquitous Computing - Planned publication June 2009

This theme issue is responding to the proliferation and developing constellations of ’social’ and ‘mundane’ technologies in people’s everyday lives. We define ‘mundane technologies’ (Graham and Rouncefield, 2007) as those quite unremarkable technologies that, given the context in which they operate, have been ‘made at home’, have become ‘ordinary’ and, indeed, part of the organisation already in place (Sacks, 1992). These technologies are often simple, minimalist and ‘loose’ and yet support richly layered social interactions which are sustained and develop across time, place, and culture in particular ’social worlds’ (Strauss, 1978). Our assumption is that these ‘mundane technologies’ are at a mature level of adoption, with seemingly well worked-out affordances so that their use has become so tightly entwined with activity and social interaction as to be almost invisible (Weiser, 1991) and thus, difficult to study and to be surprised by.

Automated Journeys
Workshop at UbiComp 2008

Computing technology now pervades those moments of our day when we move through our cities. Mobile phones, music players, vending machines, contact-less payment systems and RFID-enabled turnstiles are de rigueur on our daily journeys. This workshop aims to examine these augmented journeys, to reflect on the public, semi-public and private technologies available to us in them, and to speculate on what innovations might be to come. Taking as our starting point cities such as Seoul, we aim to take seriously the developments in mobile technology as well as the advancements in autonomous machinery and how these mesh with our urban journeys.

Collocated social practices surrounding photos
Special Issue of International Journal of Human-Computer Studies - Targeted publication November 2009

Following the uptake of digital cameras there has been considerable interest from the HCI field in contemporary photographic practices. Recent studies on people’s interactions with printed and digital photos have drawn attention to the novel social practices that continue to emerge in light of technical advances. The ways in which people approach the capture, sharing, storing and display of photos are rapidly changing, and the scope of these changes, along with their social and cultural implications, raises interesting challenges and possibilities for the design of supportive technologies. This special issue aims to build on what has become an established corpus of HCI studies on photography, reflecting past research and bringing together recent technical developments, empirical studies and thoughts on method and theory.

ENTER 2009 - 16th International Conference on IT and Travel & Tourism
IFITT’s Global Travel & Tourism Technology and eBusiness Forum
January 28th – 30th, 2009, Amsterdam, Netherlands

Telecommunications and Travel Behavior Committee of the US Transportation Research Board

The TRB Committee on Telecommunication and Travel Behavior invites papers on a wide range of topics related to the understanding, modeling, and analysis of the interrelation between telecommunications and traveler behavior. We are interested in a broad range of issues relating to the role of emerging technologies and travel, but particularly for the 2009 conference, we are seeking papers addressing the following issues.
-Role of Network Attributes on Telecommuting
-Role of ICT in influencing social networks and the travel implications.
-Role of Information and Communications Technology (ICT) on Value of Travel Time
-Role of Information and Communications Technology (ICT)on Leisure Activities
-Geographical and Occupational Clustering of Telecommuters
-The evolving nature of use of Internet and travel implications

International Workshop on Urban, Community, and Social Applications of Networked Sensing Systems
November 4, 2008, Raleigh, North Carolina, USA - Held in conjunction with ACM SenSys 2008

At the same time we are seeing sensors installed in urban environments in support of more classic environmental sensing applications, such as, real-time feeds for air-quality, pollutants, weather conditions, and congestion conditions around the city. Collaborative data gathering of sensed data for people by people, facilitated by sensing systems comprised of everyday mobile devices and their interaction with static sensor webs, present a new frontier at the intersection between pervasive computing and sensor networking. This workshop promotes exchange among sensing system researchers involved in areas, such as, mobile sensing, people-centric and participatory sensing, urban sensing, public health, community development, and cultural expression. It focuses on how mobile phones and other everyday devices can be employed as network- connected, location-aware, human-in-the-loop sensors that enable data collection, geo-tagged documentation, mapping, modeling, and other case-making capabilities.

International Workshop Sensing a Changing World
November 19-21, 2008 - Wageningen University, The Netherlands

Current developments in sensor technology provide increasing opportunities to analyze human behavior and monitor environmental processes in a changing world. However, the challenge will be to develop concepts and applications that can provide timely and on demand knowledge to end-users in different domains and at a range of scale-levels. This workshop has the objective to elucidate common concepts for sensor network applications on aspects like data communication, processing, standardization, knowledge discovery, representation, and visualization.

See previous list of Events, Seminars, Workshops on the City, Space and Socio-Technical Systems

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