As part of the Cityware Project in Bath, UK, Vassilis Kostakos released a Bluetooth application that links proximity data from the physical space (mobility traces) with the online network of Facebook. It aims at exploring how your real world and online social networks are intertwined. Whereas it has some similarities with Nathan Eagle’s Reality Mining, here the spatial traces are enhanced by the large amount of information disclosed on the web. The BBC has a piece on it: Bluetooth helps Facebook friends. The application is available at http://apps.facebook.com/cityware.

Relation to my thesis: The linking of online social networking and mobility traces, goes in the same direction as what I have been working on with Flickr and what could be done with iFind.

The outcome of the work performed during this Spring’s stay at the MIT has been accepted for full presentation at the 4th International Symposium on LBS and Telecartography, November 8-10, 2007 in Hong Kong. The paper is entitled “Understanding of Tourist Dynamics from Explicitly Disclosed Location Information” by Fabien Girardin, Filippo Dal Fiore, Josep Blat, and Carlo Ratti

Abstract: In the recent years, the large deployment of mobile devices led to a massive increase in the volume of records of where people have been and when they were there. The analysis of the accumulated archives of such spatio-temporal data can derive high-level human behavior information valuable to urban planers, traffic engineers, and tourism authorities. In this paper, we describe our approach to analyze the history of physical presence of tourists from the digital footprints they publicly make available on the world-wide web. Our work takes context in the Province of Florence where besides data from survey-based hotel and museums frequentation, tourism authorities have limited information on the fluxes of visitors (i.e. previous and next destination) and on the nationalities of the tourists who do not sleep in town (i.e. excursionists). As a proof of concept, we used a corpus of 85910 publicly disclosed geotagged photos taken in the province by 3348 photographers over a period of 2 years. Based on the time, explicit location and people’s description of their photos, we design geovisualizations to reveal the tourist activity and flows in space and time. They provide insights on the density of tourists in the area the flow and activity of tourists within, in and on of that area.

Keywords: Spatio-temporal data analysis, geovisualization, location-disclosure, location-based services.

Relation to my thesis: Tracing the Visitor’s Eye is off to a good start. Plus now there is a shot to get the paper accepted in an upcoming book on Location-Based Services and Telecartography. Finally, this conf might be the opportunity to meet Jonathan Raper who will keynote.

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.

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.

Today, I presented to the SENSEable City Lab team my past projects and my line of research on location-awarness at the crossroad of ubicomp, HCI and urban studies. This purpose was to provide a rather detailed awareness of my research agenda to maybe find synergies for the future. The slides and notes are available here.

The feedbacks were rather positive with many questions and discussions around the shift from location-based services and location-enhanced services (e.g. location is not at the center of attention). Carlo Ratti questioned the overall coherence of my different studies. For example, he was puzzled by the case study of a study of a system such as Flickr, designed by somebody else to then evaluated my own design in the field. I am aware (and concerned) that I will need to find relations between studies, but so far the several advisors who have seen my work at CHI and Pervasive confirmed me that if was fine. However, I surely will need to find a stronger focus (e.g. study of one/two specific spatial activity) and define the audience and part of the system (e.g. interface visualization, interaction, middleware) I would like to influence. My claim is that I am in a funnel and that this summer case studies will lead me to study and evaluate more specific issues as the one I described today.

As part of my Tracing the Visitor’s Eye project, I am currently visiting the SENSEable City Lab to work on innovative approaches to describe tourist dynamics in cities. Instead of relying on the deployment of ad hoc infrastructure, the solutions will favor the collection and analysis of both explicitly and implicitly disclosed people-generated geolocated information. In parallel, we will work on scenarios of location and time sensitive information delivery to enhance the tourist experience. I hope to set the emphasis for later implementation on the socio-technical implications for the design and deployment these types of applications.

Analysis of the tourist dynamics
I observe Flickr as a contemporary open platform where location and time sensitive data can be uploaded and accessed (mainly from an historical, archiving, awareness, sociality functions). The platform offers news approaches to collect data revealing patterns of tourists and their usage of a city (points of interests) and a region (flow between urban and natural attractions). In details, it means:

• Reveal temporal signatures: activity by day-of-week, weekdays and weekends, seasons, periods.
• Characterize people: Difference in the traces left by locals and visitors
• Characterize the types of visits: where a tourist converging over the course of their visit (how many days, how far, how dense (i.e. amount of different visits per day)
• Visualize the flow with origin and destination (city, region and world level)
• Characterize the areas of the city/region: where are the concentration of tourists? Cluster analysis to define or characterize zones (define a composite signature).
• Define points of interests: which landmarks attract more people

Enhancement of tourist experience
The study of the use of the granularity feature ) can help defining the level of location information quality and timeliness to be delivered in the design of useful and relevant urban location-aware applications. Moreover, it can help framing approaches the access and delivery of information to tourists owning mobile (cellphone) and nomadic (notebooks) devices. How to perform a field study to evaluate if the tools to enhance a tourist experience allow making more informed decisions. This might not be covered in the scope of these 2 weeks, but it surely would be good to define some next steps.

Expected outcome

• An extended abstract to be submitted as late-breaking results for UbiComp07. As part of the study I perform here. I use the context and tools of the analyis of the tourist dynamics to study how people upload and explicitly disclose geolocated information and how they retrieve/access it. My hypothesis is that the level of location information quality and timeliness to be delivered can help a designer to provide useful and relevant urban location-aware applications.
• Report on the results of the proof of concept of the using Flickr as source for tourist dynamic analysis. I should focus on the results, the limitations and the possible other approaches and convergence of data.
• Scenarios on the delivery of location sensitive information to tourists

Relation to my thesis: Exploring the context of my flickr case study and more importantly my last city-scale field experiment.

My unstructured take-aways from this week’s Pervasive conference in Toronto.

Doctoral Colloquium
I presented a shortened (10min+20min discussion) version of the talk I gave at CHI. I received more or less the similar feedback as in the review of the submitted paper and at CHI in San Jose. I was once again encouraged to take advantage of my engineering skills and interests for the human side of technology. The new suggestions consist in considering the relation between designers-developers-users. That is make them aware of the uncertainty. The analysis of the user behaviors could both the engineering and interface design of location-aware applications. I could help designer think about all the possible issues for the design. It could maybe take the form of a systematic approach on the issues described in the CMPPC workshop paper).

The faculty advisors were: Albrecht Schmidt (Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich), Mike Hazas (Lancaster University), Tom Rodden (University of Nottingham), Marc Langheinrich (ETHZ), Boriana Koleva (University of Nottingham), Rene Mayrhofer (Lancaster University), and Gerd Kortuem (Lancaster University). The slide and notes of my presentation are available here.

Probably the last of my “bridging social-technical gap” serie of presentation. Time to move forward and act.

Scrutability
In his talk on PersonisAD: Distributed, Active, Scrutable Model Framework for Context-Aware Services, Mark Assad (The University of Sydney, AU) mentioned the concept of scrutability (i.e. make the what and why of context visible). For a scrutable application should be able to reveal the user what sensor detected him/her and for what reason (activity, location, movement). Scrutablity is extremely relevant to the “self-disclosing” design principal mentioned by Adam Greenfield in his keynote speech earlier that day.

scru·ta·ble (skrt-bl) adj. Capable of being understood through study and observation; comprehensible.

Authoring tools for location-based applications
Leif Opperman presented his research on facilitating the authoring of location-based applications. He has been running a first set of experiment that let artists use his authoring tools for location-based applications. He uses an ethnographic approach to study of displaying the ubiquitous infrastructure and the uncertainty of positioning and communication influence the work of the artist. Previously, he had been developing games on top of the Mobile Bristol Toolkit which has been released this week under the name of MScapers. InternetActu reported on the release. Apparently, Barcelona has been the stage of a mediscape game.

Source: Leif’s UbiComp 2006 paper Extending Authoring Tools for Location-Aware Applications with an Infrastructure Visualization Layer.

Usefulness and relevance
In his talk on the paper An Exploration into Activity-Informed Physical Advertising Using PEST, Matthias Sala showed a graph comparing the usefulness and the relevance of information (the sweet spot being when the 2 converge). Since I sometimes mix these terms when talking about the delivery of location information, it is important that I go back to the definition:
Usefulness: Having a beneficial use; Being of practical use
Relevance: Pertinence to the matter at hand

Team awareness and wearable computing
Andrew Vande Moere presented a work on wearable visualization with a study based on the hypothesis that awareness will change how people play: “Evaluating a Wearable Display Jersey for Augmenting Team Sports Awareness”. I was most interested in the user-centered approach in the design of TeamAwear: 1. evaluating ethnography, 2. participatory design I, 3. participatory design II, 4. usability evaluation.

Replay tool
Alistair Morrison presented further work on the University of Glasgow’s Replayer used to perform both qualitative and quantiative analysis for the evaluation of pervasive systems. Using Location, Bearing and Motion Data to Filter Video and System Logs.

Spatial cloaking
In his talk, John Krumm mentioned spatial cloaking as a way to increase the privacy from the analysis of location tracking. Spatial cloaking consists in revealing spatial coordinates with less accuracy. Similarly, temporal cloaking reducing the accuracy in time. Related to that, I stumbled on Anonymous Usage of Location-Based Services Through Spatial and Temporal Cloaking that differentiate location-based services aong the dimensions of frequency of access, time-accuracy and position accuracy:

In the introduction of the subject of his talk/paper “Inference Attacks on Location Tracks” John mentioned that people concern in privacy emerge in the trade-off between usefulness (how much people would pay) and risk.

Digital footprints and exposure awareness
In Virtual Walls: Protecting Digital Privacy in Pervasive Environments, Apu Kapadia introduced the concept of
exposure awareness with the example of an environment that give the people the information about how much information they expose. By deploying “virtual walls,” people can control the privacy of their digital footprints much in the same way they control their privacy in the physical world. Once again a design approach to reveal the systems following Adam Greenfield’s self-disclosing principal and very similar to the concept of scrutability.

Middlewares for context aware computing
I bumped into Mike Blackstock who very briefly introduced me to the current works in the field of middleware supporting context-awareness and most specifically the Java Context-Aware Framework and the PerCom workshop CoMoRea. Later, in chating with Paddy Nixon, it seems clear that:
a. interaction design may impact the implementation of the middleware systems,
b. uncertainty is rarely (if not never) taken into consideration and it is still a challenge.

Location-update strategies
In Zone-based RSS Reporting for Location Fingerprinting, Mikkel Baun Kjærgaard introduced a list of Location-update strategies I could use later (similar to Leonhardi’s A Comparison of Protocols for Updating Location Information. Strangely, the type of user-context generated update was not mentioned.

Tutorials
The day of tutorials lead the participants through all the layers that make pervasive computing a thriving research domain: sensors, location awareness, context awareness, machine learning, middleware systems, interaction, evaluation, ethnography. I recorded most of the lectures.

Tom Rodden introduced the issues in dealing with both the technical and human perspectives of pervasive computing. The HCI approach is about rethinking and reconsider the notion of context, or the human nature of the context. He showed a couple of videos of pervasive systems such as the Stanford i-Room artificially situated within a lab. He argued for more research work more situated in the real world, in every day, because the best way to test the use of such technologies is to make them leave the laboratory. The role is HCI is also to reveal the kind of interaction we can make emerge. Tom talked about “new value systems” with example of subtle interactive and ambient with a refreshing touch of english-humor. A video of the Key Table (video)was without a doubt the most surprising. This definitively goes into the trend of chili computing. The Drift Table (video) was another example

Paul Dourish and Ken Anderson went through the historical periods and transformation in the practices of ethnography to later reflect on they way we use this method today. This lecture was an extension of Paul’s Implications for Design as they described ethnography’s prime goal to write about people and not about trying to fix things (i.e. implication for design). More than understanding what people do, an ethnographic study analyzes how people think/the rationality/conceptual breakdowns. In other words, it aims at understanding people’s conceptual thinking. It is not necessarily the amount of data collected that counts for interpretation but rather it is very important to spot the “symptomes”.

I was absolutely not aware the the differences between emic and etic data to describe human behaviors.

Gregory Abowd argued that an evalutation of pervasive system needs both a technicaly savvy and evaluation savvy people. It is very rare to be good at the 2. There is a uniqueness in the evalution of ubicomp system. Because they take the world as laboratory and they need technology development in order to perfrom such evaluation. In other words, ubicomp helps ubicomp evaluation. An evaluation can be formative (part of the development process) or summative (e.g compare 2 applications). Of course, the exploratory work and the design approach of ubicomp makes some scientist think it is “soft”. However, ethnography and qualitative studies help bring rigor.

The evaluation work done by Gregory and his team made me think about what could be done in one of my real-world study. I could take their “beepers studies” as example to ask “where are you?” and questions about the awareness of the whereabouts.

Paddy Nixon refreshed my knowledge in distributed systems and middlware. He went through the approaches of event based distributed programming (publish-subsribe) and defended it and p2p for ubicomp rather than corba/jini (they make the bad assuptions of a perfect world, balancing the local vs. global). However, p2p has been about sharing and not efficiency. So far it has been extremely hard to build generic middleware systems for ubicomp

Interestedly, he mentioned that interaction design may impact the implementation of middleware systems and that uncertainty is still a challenge that nobody really started to tackle.

Anind Dey admited that the community does not try to model the entire world anymore (something that I heard at the DC as well… researchers have given up on over-infering and automate). Therefore now the goal is to understanding what people actually want and find the important pieces of context. Similarly to my talk at LIFT, he showed relevant examples of automatic doors and the difficulty notion of intentionality (i.e. The Amazing AutoDoor, Star Trek manually operated automatic door). Similarly, cleaning automatic doors has become a slow process (video).

Automation has an impact on cleaning. The door should understand that it is being cleaned?

Finally, representing uncertainty is still a challenge along with the balance between autonomy and control.

The written feedback I received for my accepted paper for the Pervasive 2007 Doctoral Colloquium are rather encouraging and reveal similar suggestions and advices given at CHI. My research focus and strategy is well grounded and accepted. One reviewer noticed that my work clearly starts where others (e.g. Benford, Chalmers) have stopped. However, now has come the time to be more specific on the methods to collect and analyze the data. Moreover, I still need to argument the ways I plan to evaluate the design strategies I will propose. I split the feedback as follow:

Scope
First my dissertation research is perceived has well grounded, well situated, and well motivated. My contribution would improve the state of the art. Yet, my early work is perceived as rather preliminary (very simple and obvious). Certaintly because a lot comes from the litterature that concures with what could be observed in CatchBob! Yet, I feel that I contributed into unifying the state of different domains such as context-aware computing, human-computer interaction, CSCW, urban computing, (humanistic) geography, geospatial visualization, transportation research to converge on the specific issue of spatial uncertainty. To my knowledge, the literature in location-aware computing and location-awareness has never profited from the ensemble of these different perspectives. My current contribution maybe lays more in that area, with my first field study acting as revelation and consolidator.

Research strategy
The approach of analyzing the current use of location information and then building and evaluating a location-aware system form an acceptable strategy. In addition, using location-based games has proved to be a feasible avenue of investigation. This strategy is a result of my overall motivation in this research. I believe it is important to study the pieces of the ubicomp of the present in their context and current us to understand how they can gradually be integrated at a larger scale. As a result, practically speaking, knowing how good in good enough in terms of location-awareness, can prevent the counterproductive aim for technological perfection.

Methods and data analysis
Now, how exactly will I tackle my research questions in a way that is not too expensive for a PhD. One reviewer mentions that two of the sub-questions might suffice for a good thesis. However, all this depends on the methods of investigation and support with the data analysis. For example, I might also pursue a collaboration within a larger project (this is my current intention).

Mixing field and case study seems fine, but I must be able to describe in greater details these two different approaches and the methods they imply. For instance, there is not clear definition of both approaches. My perception of a case study is that it is not controlled and very observational both from quantitative and qualitative data. On the other hand, a field study is more directed by the capture of the data from the variables to analyze. That implies a quasy-controlled environment propitious to targetted data collection and focused ethnography. A case study is a good way to explore behaviors and a field study allows to evaluate or demonstrate. Mention field experiment instead of field study for example. At this point I need much more thinking about collecting data and analizing it. Finally, while hard to accomplish and time/resource consuming triangulation of methods (mixed research) is always advisable. Therefore, I should find out which of the analysis methods suit best for my research question, resources (help from co-investigators? collaborate with social scientists) and abilities (improvement with supervision and training, reading about it is not enough).

I still lack of a clear strategy on how to exploit the results of my studies and how to transfer the experience into appropriate solutions/strategies for developing location-aware applications. How will I evaluate the new proposed strategies. I’ll get back to John Creswell’s Research Design over the weekend to help me iterate one more time over my intentions and how to answer the questions of each of my proposed study. Then I’ll need to articulate them as a whole.

Contribution
My preliminary work (while basic and somehow obvious) show that I can meet the research goals. However, I will need to be careful to the extend the results I claim can be generalized across domains (but I guess this is every PhD student’s problem in the field of HCI).

Related avenues to consider
The reviewers suggest avenues that I actually considered in the past, but did not mention in the paper for the sack of … They mention that I should have a look at the positive aspect of uncertainty. For example: How do people exploit uncertainty (keep privacy, location disclosure) and as a way to appropriate ambiguit for one’s one purposes (e.g. Bill Gaver’s Ambiguity as Resource for Design). I should look at how people experience space (or place). There is a good litterature on that in the domaine of “humanistic geography” (so far, I inspired more from the works of Rapper and Mountain… Time geography). So instead of going too much in geography (geometric measurement of space) I should be more aware of the experience and meaningfulness of space.

I could address the privacy issues in addition, with the demand of spatial uncertainty (privacy policites to cloaking). Not to deliver information about the intentional spatial uncertainty. I read a rather technical article (based on a middleware approach) on that recently: Efficiently managing location information with privacy requirements in Wi-Fi networks: a middleware approach. The ideal would be to impact the design and logic of the middleware from a human-centered perspective as Tom Rodden suggested me 2 weekends ago.

Next step: Provide an answer to these feedback in my DC presentation on Sunday. Try to explain more clearly the questions/methodology/data analysis for each study. Then define the outcome of each study to articulate a coherent whole. Iterate, and iterate more…

Captured this week in downtown San Jose, CA.

Will these warning signs preventing interferences disappear in the ubicomp of the future? There is probably a cultural take to it. It is not surprise that seamful design emerged in the UK. Designers have been used to warn about the limits of the infrastructure (i.e. the culturally anchored “mind the gap”) almost to the overdose. In other cultures, designers assume for the best without overloading the interfaces almost to the point of the uselessness. It will probably become important to understanding to find the right balance to notify the seams to the everyday users of the ubicomp invisible infrastructures. Might be a topic to extend to contribute to Julian Bleecker’s ‘Salon’ at Picnic’07.

Konomi, S., and Roussos, G. Ubiquitous computing in the real world: lessons learnt from large scale rfid deployments. Personal and Ubiquitous Computing (2006).

This article takes part of the train of thoughts on the inherent antagonisms of ubiquitous computing reality and the seamless calm computing vision advocated by some academic research. It does so by examining two fully operational Radio Frequency Identification-based systems: the Oyster card ticketing system used at the London Underground in the UK, and retail applications deployed at the Mitsukoshi departmental stores in Tokyo, Japan. Each case study is analyzed through the terms of technologies, user interactions, and their business and organizational context. As a result, the authors highlight that the real world has concerns that are rarely dealt with in research.

Ubiquitous computing in the real world has concerns that are rarely dealt with in research. Lengthy and costly preparation or upgrade of existing infrastructures; training of employees and users in the new ways of working; controlled introduction of new functionality; features and services to manage risk; unexpected behaviors due to the wider variety of possible real world situations; incremental approach to systems development so as to better identify successful aspects; regard for the economics of systems as a core requirement; and selection of open or closed systems, are all issues that are mostly outside the scope of current ubiquitous computing research, but seem to play a critical role in both case studies we consider here.

As a consequence, so far, the ubicomp of the present is made of isolated islands of functionality rather than a seamlessly connect whole. That brings the authors to define the challenges for ubicomp research around taking into consideration of the constraints of the real world but also in bringing a more user-oriented approach to research practices:

Therein lies the challenge for ubiquitous computing research: how not only to learn about the concerns of those developing systems in the real world but more importantly, how to translate principles, guidelines and models discovered in the context of research into useful tools for building ubiquitous computing systems in the real world. Bringing the two communities closer together and communicating lessons learnt in ubiquitous computing research so as to inform practical system design and development can have profound implications for the success or the failure of the ubiquitous computing vision.

Relation to my thesis: My research on spatial uncertainty revolves around the gap between practice and the state of the art in research. (That is in other words understanding both the concerns of the real world and the expectations of the users to build useful location aware application). This gap is well described by papers such as this one. I also ground my approach on the critique of researchers and technologies that absolve themselves for responsibilities for the present.