The Amgen Tour of California took place this week. During this year’s edition, 7 riders have been tagged with CSC’s OmniLocation devices to send a constant stream of GPS data to the T-Mobile GSM network (over general packet radio service signals, HTTP streaming and SMS messaging). In consequence, The race’s web spectators had access to almost-real-time location information displayed on Yahoo! maps for the riders with a short delay offset (i.e. about 10 seconds).

Screenshots from the live webcast featuring the rider tracking system.

Relation to my thesis: Using sensors to track performances in sport is nothing new. Yet, this is an example of deployment in a semi-uncontrolled settings (the GSM network provider was a sponsor). Moreover, I am wondering about the web spectator’s experience in watching dots moving (without smooth animation but with icons of riders jumping from one location to another) on a map. Finally, the web application does not seem to take into account the delay offset from the acquisition of the location to the display on the screen. I suspect that a sharp synchronization of the geodata had to be performed prior to the visualization.

At the end of his talk on Big Games: Large-Scale, Multi-Player, Real-World Games at Where 2.0 in 2005 (audio), Kevin Slavin came up some “chili computing” (coined by Frédéric Kaplan at Lift) concepts around the experience of location in real-world games. First he mentioned that location is more than GIS data. Location has a wider context and different meanings, it is about being indoors, outdoors, about hearing the busy sound of a street or not. Then he suggest that in fact disinformation and “dislocation” might be more engaging to people as we might become interested into getting lost and making things up (aiming at misrepresentation rather than accuracy). This idea of inventing the real reminds me a discussion with Julian on his current game ideas around the concept of familiar strangers and his inspiring talk When 1st Life Meets 2nd Life.

Relation to my thesis: While my specific work aims at the opposite of using technologies to get lost and tell use lies, I find the approach very relevant. The approach actually reveals that “constraints aren’t what break games. Constraints are what makes them work”. It can be an inspiration for designer of location-aware systems who must deal with quality and accuracy issues could. Instead of hiding the problems or aiming at sharp accuracy, an application might be more engaging when it is less “serious”. This relates to my last week’s discussionwith Frédéric on the nabaztag who tells the weather. Because, the nabaztag is not serious by itself, it is okay if he makes mistakes on forecasting the weather. Actually, its mistakes might lead into a discussion and a collaborative correction of the error.

On Friday, I gave a talk on Embracing the Real World’s Messiness (slides, video) at the Lift Conference open stage session. Some people in the audience took notes and pictures, including Tom Hume (Future Platforms), Hubert Guillaud (Fing, en français) and Mark Meagher (EPFL).

Relation to my thesis: While I did not present the core of my research, the topic can serve as introduction to my thesis.

I felt a research or engineering talk would not have completely fit to the audience. Therefore, I rather preferred taking the role of the observer of the current integration of sensor technologies in our everyday life in order to question the seamlessness and calmness visions in ubiquitous computing. Even though I feel I only communicated 1/3 of my thoughts, the feedback I received suggest that I delivered my message. In his wrap-up talk (video), Daniel Kaplan shared my observations in highlighting that “we’re using technology to create disorder – you can call it innovation, I call it disorder”. I have been enjoying reading Daniel since he coined the term “Désordinateurs” in reaction from the “Utopie du lisse“.

This talk was based on a few previous blog post, including:

• Coexistence of Systems and System Failures (inspired by the work and thoughts of Jan Chipchase, Adam Greenfield and Mark Meagher)
• The Technological Tower of Babel (art work by Eboy)
• Comparing AI’s Failures with Ubicomp’s Visions (Ben Kraal and Larry Irons)
• Yesterday’s Tomorrows: Notes on Ubiquitous Computing’s Dominant Vision (Geneviève Bell and Paul Dourish)
• Moving on from Weiser’s Vision of Calm Computing: Engaging UbiComp Experiences (Yvonne Rodgers)
• Adam Greenfield on ubicomp (Adam Greenfield interviewed by Daniel Kaplan)
• Invisible Infrastructure and Communicating Failure and Malfunctioning to the User (Norbert Streitz and Paddy Nixon)
• Interference in Deployed Ubiquitous Computing Systems (Ricardo Morla)

Rogers, Y. Moving on from weiser’s vision of calm computing: Engaging ubicomp experiences. In Ubicomp (2006), pp. 404–421.

This paper urges for an alternative agenda in ubicomp research that shifts from Weiser’s calm vision to engaging people (i.e. proactive computing, persuasive computing, engaged living). Yvonne Rogers acknowledges that research in context awareness, ambient intelligence and monitoring/tracking have been somehow fruitful. However they have yet failed to reach Weiser’s world. Indeed, there is an enormous gap between the dream of conformable, informed and effortless living and the accomplishment of UbiComp research. In fact, the fundamental stumbling block has been harnessing the huge variability in what people do, their motives for doing it, when they do it and how they do it. While it has been possible to develop a range of simple ubicomp systems that can offer relevant information at opportune moment, it is proving to be much more difficult to build truly smart systems that can understand or accurately model people’s behaviors, moods and intentions. This makes it difficult, if not impossible, to try to implement context in any practical sense and from which to make sensible predictions about what someone is feeling, wanting or needing at a given moment. Therefore, ubicomp technologies should be designed not to do things for people but to engage them more actively in what they currently do. Rather than calm living it promotes engaged living, where technology is designed to enable people to do what they want, need or never even considered before by acting in and upon the environment. Examples include extending and supporting personal, cognitive and social processes such as habit-changing, problem solving, creating, analyzing, learning or performing a skill.

The author mentions the problems of calm computing in the most prominent ubicomp research themes (i.e. context-aware computing, ambient/ubiquitous intelligence and recording/tracking and monitoring).

Context-awareness
Key questions in context-aware computing concern what to sense, what form and what kind of information to represent to augment ongoing activities. Many of the sensor technologies, however, have been beset with detection and precision limitations, sometimes resulting in unreliable and inaccurate data. While newer technological developments may enable more accurate data to be detected and collected it. However, people often behave in unpredictable and subtle ways in their day-to-day contexts. Therefore, it is likely that context-aware systems will only ever be successful in highly constrained settings.

Ambient and Ubiquitous Intelligence
While there have been significant advances in computer vision, speech recognition and gesture-based detection, the reality of multimodal interfaces – that can predict and deliver with accuracy and sensitivity what is assumed people want or need – is a long way off. In consequence, when a ubiquitous computing system gets it wrong – which is likely to be considerably more frequent – it is likely to be more frustrating and we are likely to be less forgiving.

Recording, Tracking and Monitoring
Much of the discussion about the human aspects in ubicomp has been primarily about the trade-offs between security and privacy, convenience and privacy, and informedness and privacy. This focus has often been at the expense of other human concerns receiving less airing, such as how recording, tracking and re-representing movements and other information can be used to facilitate social and cognitive processes.

Yvonne mentions 2 goals of my research, one being to use ubicomp technologies in the wild, the other to evaluate how to present data and information:

In addition, more studies are needed of UbiComp technologies being used in situ or the wild – to help illuminate how people can construct, appropriate and use them. With respect to interaction design issues, we need to consider how to represent and present data and information that will enable people to more extensively compute, analyze, integrate, inquire and make decisions; how to design appropriate kinds of interfaces and interaction styles for combinations of devices, displays and tools; and how to provide transparent systems that people can understand sufficiently to know how to control and interact with them.

Currently, the more engaging approach is beginning to happen through the areas of playful and learning practices, scientific practices and persuasive practices.

As already mentioned in Comparing AI’s Failures with Ubicomp’s Visions, Yvonne Rogers concludes on “strong” and “weak” UbiComp.

Just as ‘strong’ AI failed to achieve its goals – where it was assumed that “the computer is not merely a tool in the study of the mind; rather, the appropriately programmed computer really is a mind”, it appears that ‘strong’ UbiComp is suffering from the same fate. And just as ‘weak’ AI2 revived AI’s fortunes, so, too, can ‘weak’ UbiComp bring success to the field.

Relation to my thesis: I would argue that current “strong” UbiComp problems not only lays on modelling people and their activities, but also in the integration ubicomp systems in the real-world (e.g. co-existence of systems, real-world constraints). I enjoy the difference between what is “relevant” and what is “smart”, as I find the word smart or intelligent are widely (over)misused. Finally, the agenda proposed in this article, goes in the direction of my research: in sitiu (out of the lab) studies, investigate the playful approach of ubicomp and how to present relevant information rather than seeking the seamlessness utopia.

The CommonCensus Map Project redraws the map of the United States based on a survey questions, to reveal the boundaries people themselves feel (i.e. sphere of influence), as opposed to the official state and county boundaries.

The national maps shows the response to the question “On the level of North America as a whole, what major city do you feel has the most cultural and economic influence on your area overall?”

Regional maps show the response to the question “Please choose the name of the local community that you feel is the natural cultural and economic center within your local area.”

Local maps show the response to the question “What do you consider to be your local community?”

Relation to my thesis: People do not always follow the official boundaries to refer to areas. A local neighborood might reveal very fuzzy and fluctuating edges depending on a context. This is what Ian White highlights in User-centered approach on geodata by saying “In practice, a neighbor is defined with average centroid based on population density and then a radial curve is drawn. This barely represents reality in many cases and in the context of use many time useless”.

Due to the low amount of data, the areas of the map are still highly inaccurate and subject to change. It is an example of bottom-up generated information uncertainty.

Extracted from an inspiring talk “Lipstick on a pig” given by Clive Grinyer at the European Market Research Event.

London Heathrow Airport Terminal 5 forecast that future travellers would be older. Research into older travellers showed they often go into the toilet, so many new toilets were planned.

However, deeper investigation discovered they were going into the toilets….to hear the announcements. It was the only place they could find where they could clearly hear the flight calls! So now the airport is putting new audio areas where you can clearly hear your flight call….

Relations to my thesis: A nice example of the limitations and (sometimes) subjective analysis in user studies. Then it highlights a very interesting adaptation of some people in a very complex and high-tech infrastructure such as an airport.

Still in the theme of around messy and heterogeneous vision of ubicomp, a new graphic from Eboy paints the way technologies are playing out, forming some sort of technolological Tower of Babel.

via LUCI’s group

.

I have been playing around trying to sketch a literature map of my research. Here is the current high-level status.

If I ever need to theorize more my framework, I still keep situated action, embodied interaction and distributed cognition in the drawer.

Jan Chipchase has post on a remote control to operate the toilet with peace-of-mind-security coverage placed next to the toilet interface. So when house guests are wanting to flush and aren’t familiar with these interfaces it is no surpise that the ‘wrong’ button is pressed and an alarm sounds, and the security company sends out a uniformed emergency response team. There is of course many wrong approaches in this future-perfect-connected world situation. Yet, it reminded me of the thoughts of Adam Greenfield on the the blue toilet of death highlighting the coexistence of systems surrounding us and their nonlinear interactions and the affective dimensions of system failure (advocating for “graceful degradation”).

And still nobody was talking about the nonlinear interactions of network systems in one space all operating at once - it’s as if none of the people who were designing them had, not so much thought, but felt what it would be like to sit in the middle of a room where you’ve got fifteen different technical interfaces around you, and you’re responding to all of them at once, and they’re all responding to you at once.
[…]
But I’m not sure how many people in academic ubicomp have really marinated themselves in a consideration of the experiential and affective dimensions of system failure. I’m not sure to what degree people have ever simply sat and imagined what it will feel like when systems like these surround us…and break down, as technical systems often do. They may have thought about the specific system at hand, but as a gestalt? I haven’t heard that many people raising the issue.

These kind of problems are exemplified by Fabio Sergio and his story with motion sensors in a bathroom and considerations on reactive system as well as by Mark Meagher on automatic doors and how the funtionality of the door are invisible and no attempts are made to communicate to the user.

I enjoy observing people (and myself) waving my hands in front of a tap or to an automatic doors. Doors in swiss train are particularly prone to the situations described by Mark. Their opening is often slow, maybe due to the overuse of the sensors or most probably to their bad calibration. Some train have sensor on the floor (opening when you step in). It is not unusual to see people jumping or hardly stepping in front of the doors. Other trains have their sensors in the top and bottom of the door. I noticed that even some train directors do it and some people refusing the automation and manually forcing the door to open. I am wondering if there is ever been a study a user-centered study to calibrate the swiss train automatic doors to lower the user confusion.

Geberit’s eyes, motion sensor in a bathroom

Relation to my thesis: My work highlights to problem of integrating technological limitations (such as system not being able to coexists) and human factors in real-world environments. I already mentioned it in Peaceful Cohabitation and Scalability in Ubicomp. I am exploring how to support user activities top of errors and system-generated uncertainty. In the context of interaction, I guess it is not only important for interfaces to reveal their functionalities and states, but also to think in terms of granularity (for example to calibrate thee automatic doors) as express by Mike Kuniavsky.

Ed Parsons posted a short report of the couple of days he spent at Reuters, as part of their excellent Innovation Programme. He mentions the increasing interest for Reuters to deliver location and consumer focused information but as with many things maybe it will take at least three or four attempts for location based services to reach the mainstream. The challenges to deliver appropriate LBS (e.g. data availability, privacy concerns, standards). However, Reuter’s interest show the intention to innovate in the long term in this space.

Relation to my thesis: In the past, location information where given by official or central entities. The bottom up generation of geolocated information raises not only the problem of lack of standards but also on the granularity (or generalization) and the subjectivity of the location attached to the information. Similar challenges faced by GeoCommons for example, that companies such as Urban Mapping try to tackle.