In April of next year, I will attend in Boston the AAG meeting and participate to a session on “Situating Sat Nav: Questioning the TomTom Effect“. Organized by Chris Perkins and Martin Dodge, it aims to address the social effects, cultural meanings and political economy of in-car satellite navigation. I will be in the middle of a spectacular line-up:

Session One

Amy Propen: The Use of Sat Nav Systems: An Empowering Cultural Practice or Portentous of a Lost Geographical Imagination?
Don Cooke: The TomTom Effect: Industry Point of View
Allan Brimicombe and Chao Li: Sat Nav: Rising theft of a geo-engineered must-have.
Tristan Thielmann: Navigation becomes travel scouting: The augmented space of car navigation systems
Caren Kaplan: Precision Targets: Consumer Subjects, Militarization, and the Politics of Location.

Session Two

Fabien Girardin: The co-evolution of taxi drivers and their in-car navigation systems
Georg Gartner: Restrictions in mental representations of the world as a result of relying upon navigation systems
Jonathan Raper: The mistakes that satnavs make (and what they don’t know)
Alexander Klippel: Can we afford to provide cognitively inadequate wayfinding assistance?
Discussant: David M Mark

The abstract of my paper entitled “The co-evolution of taxi drivers and their in-car navigation systems” goes as follow:

In the recent years, the massive use of in-car navigation systems has symbolized the emergence of location-based services for wayfinding. This market success creates the opportunity to learn from a real-world use of present location-aware systems in order to inform the design of future applications. In that context, we are using an ethnomethodological approach to study the different ways taxi drivers rely on their navigation system. First, this work focuses on describing how location technologies impacted the wayfinding practices and similarly how the practice influences the appropriation of navigation systems. This co-evolution starts from the acquisition and setup of a navigation system to mastering the system shortcomings and limitations. Second, we study the criteria that steer a driver in selecting among the different modes of a navigation system and the other artifacts and tools (e.g. maps, street directories, landmarks) he or she uses for location awareness and wayfinding. Moreover, we are analyzing the role of context in this dynamic. That is where and when a driver accesses location information from the system, the external supports and the surrounding environment. We are currently collecting data from 20 semi-structured interviews each augmented by in-car observations of 1-hour ride. The study concentrates on the taxi drivers of the city of Barcelona, Spain. This community forms a massive population of early adopters of in-car navigation systems with a strong past practice of relying on mobile technologies and maps to support their work.

Relation to my thesis: I can’t imagine a better set of people to receive feedback on my taxi driver study.

Today I gave a talk to my research group on the current state of my investigation. The presentation covered the topic of my DEA work, the early results of Tracing the visitor’s eye project and their implication for a field experiment taking advantage of digital footprints to support social navigation and seamful design. One personal goal of this presentation was to prepare my DEA defense in November and next week’s presentation of Understanding of tourist dynamics from explicitly disclosed location information at the 4th International Symposium on LBS & TeleCartography.

Towards Reducing the Social-Technical Gap in Location-Aware Computing (PDF)

Relation to my thesis: Trying to put the pieces of the puzzle together. The overall argumentation still lacks of coherence. I will need to make some choices and get rid of some themes to explore others profoundly. Most of all, my research questions are now outdated. I need to refine them. More on that later.

Meeting to discuss my DEA thesis. We agreed that the focal point of my research shifted from uncertainty to granularity of location information. The first is a problem to solve (while sometimes being an opportunity), the latter is a source for interaction. In my model of the social-technical gap in location aware computing, I intend to define their relations. I hypothesize that uncertainty appears when a location system does not match the granularity of information expected by a user. So I keep the work I have done so far on the reactions (uncertainty) to fluctuating location information, and focus more on the factors influencing people to tune the information. This is what I need to further investigate in my ethno study of the taxi drivers (e.g. the funnel metaphor to access information, their use of neighborhoods, landmarks, addresses). Similarly with my Flickr study I could include the analysis of the textual description (i.e. tags) to understand how the users describe the granularity (for example: city -> landmark). Results of complete studies from different contexts could already be a nice outcome to define key aspect of human interaction with location information granularity in a mobile context. It could open the door to the definition of sub-issues (psycho, social, cultural, gender, …) that would be mostly outside of the scope of my thesis. No decisions have been made on further studies (let’s see what the outcomes of the 2 current studies), but we certainly don’t lack of ideas. The concept of granularity of location information is nothing new. However, it is worth revisiting it since “we use things that did not exist previously”.

As for the DEA thesis, he shared my mixed feelings. I believe I have not achieved a good breadth-depth ratio, trying to cover too many aspects of my research domain. Then I lacked of energy to argument the choice (why a mention to privacy? -> uncertainty as opportunity + studies in spatial cloaking) and linkage of the key concepts. However, I think the breadth of this initial scope will help me in the long run. We discussed that chapter 3 (literature review) was not well self-contained. That is that I did not argue enough for the choice of the topics, the perspectives I chose to cover them, and their relevance to my work. The last section (Discussion) clearly revealed that lack of connection between the concepts described and the future work. I should rewrite that part by focusing and arguing the key elements of my framework and their relations.

Relation to my thesis: Still not quite in the narrow part of the funnel… but working on it.

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 entitled “Place this Photo on a Map: A Study of Explicit Disclosure of Location Information” has been accepted to the 9th International Conference on Ubiquitous Computing, 16-19 September 2007, Innsbruck, Austria.

Abstract. This paper reports on the early results from an ongoing study of the use of popular photo-sharing platform. We specifically focus our investigation on the factors influencing the accuracy users choose to link their photos to the physical world. We believe that modeling these mechanism can impact the design of ubiquitous systems that support sharing and retrieval of location-enhance information. For instance, it could suggest guidelines to match people’s expectations of granularity in location information. Our early results reveal that while familiarity with a place does not seem to influence the accuracy of the disclosed location, the city and type of urban landscape impact the use of coarse and fine-grained location information.

The reviewers’ feedback are positive about the pertinence of this work and the approach. They mention “relevant to ubicomp”, “the concepts and the writing are generally good”, “the problem is important and the early findings are interesting”, “good problem formulation and research methodology”, “the authors have taken the proper first steps by looking at a real-world data set”. However, they question the early analysis:

• I concentrate on how people tag, rather than what is actually done with those tags. So I won’t be able to know about the usefulness of granularity.
• More depth analysis and logic should be supplied to make the Barcelona results believable.
• Application of arbitrary boundaries (why 2 months to seperate between resident and tourists. I could have let the categories emerge.
• Why familiarity with the environment was the only metrics chosen.
• Some more depth to the results, even in a few more sentences
• The results might be strongly tied to Flickr, thus I need to validate the findings by cross-checking different platforms.

Relation to my thesis: A final extended abstract to help me validate Tracing the Visitor’s Eye.

I like to introduce Plazes to highlight the importance of granularity in to communicate the timeliness and quality of location information.

The now classic slide on “Location information granularity” with the Geneva airport in the Rhone river and me at the train station (while I took the screenshot in another city)

I might have to update my slides. The new version of Plazes came up with a “My World” view that (I think) has some intentions to take into consideration the granularity in space of the “trazes” I left recently. Drawing a circle is an obvious way to communicate the uncertainty in the location sighting (as modeled by Leonhardi and Rothermel).

No recollection of a trip to the midwest…

Relation to my thesis: Collecting example of visualization location information granularity

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.

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…

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.

Relation to my thesis: Embracing the Real World’s Messiness