Recently in hi, lo, and mid tech Category

1) While we were there, Mike pointed out the "Chinatown" hidden away in the North Hall - an international section with mostly Taiwanese and PRC vendors. Josh, from the swarm scholarship group, pointed out that this spatial arrangement echoes the North American view of technology production: Microsoft, LG, Intel and other large companies in the Central Hall, with the small Asian OEMs and manufacturers that drive the electronics industry relatively invisible.

2) I also went to the Adult Xpo (just down the hall at the Sands). Funny how CES had thousands of devices with different functionality that all managed to look essentially the same, while the Xpo had thousands of devices with identical (ahem) functionality that managed to look vibrantly (ahem) different.

3) Also interesting: the way that Nokia and other NFC groups promote touch as an interface mechanism, while the Zigbee and Zwave folks (also selling short-range wireless) were pushing the advantages of remote control. Most of the NFC products I saw were demo'd on public interaction scenarios (ie, like getting NextBus info by touching a bus map), while the Zigbee/Zwave scenarios were domestic (remote control for your sprinkler system! Your lights! Your kids!). There's something there I need to think through - something beyond the basic ironies of promoting closeness and touching in public and promoting distance and remote interaction in the home.

A couple of weeks ago, I did a webcam talk over lunch with Trebor Scholtz at the Institute for Distributed Creativity called "Teaching for the Wireless Commons." Trebor and I wrote up some resulting notes, and I thought they might be interesting/useful to some of you.

More follows.

from near near future and elastic space via the very interesting pasta and vinegar, the research blog of Nicolas Nova: "A blog about CSCW, Place and Space Research, Urban Studies and Weird Stuff"

Nicolas, now that I mention it, is using a mobile game as a "testbed to study collaborative processes, namely mutual modeling and division of labor" for his thesis. I find this very interesting, of course, since we're also using a game as a research probe with asphalt-games.

Which reminds me: if you're in New York right now, turn off the computer and get on the streets already.

I just got a call from a friend in Berlin. She was on a "family heritage" trip to Poland and Germany, which as the child of Israelis was...difficult. So she found a VoIP phone at an Internet cafe and called me to talk. It was cheap; she could afford to tell me about her family’s ancestral town, the drive through Poland to Germany, her need for a good café and a drink.

VoIP to mobile might not be a novelty for lots of people, but for me it was a revelation. The bits went from a microphone in Berlin, through a server, through long cables, through more servers and cables and thence to the cellular network, (somewhere crossing the Atlantic), emerging clear and true from a mobile phone on a San Francisco freeway. I haven't been this excited about a phone call since I first heard a car phone ring in, um, 1992. I think.

There's a point here I'm getting to about the interplay between stability and mobility. Think about all the movement — temporal and spatial and social — that created that one brief conversation:

1) My friend is wandering around Europe (mobility 1: global tourism)

2) And is upset because of historical traumas (mobility 2: memory and time; mobility 3: emigration; and the potential for mobility 4: a one-way train trip in the 1940s to a small Polish town)

3) So she decides to go out on the town to feel better about Berlin (mobility 4: city-based tourism)

4) And calls her friend in America, who at that moment is driving from work to home (mobility 5: daily commute)

Everything and everyone is in motion except the phone at the Internet café. It’s the technological fulcrum around which this story turns. My friend could have used text — email or IM. But it was important, right then, to talk. My vision’s a little blurry from all the plane tickets, family history, close friendships, and street signs whizzing by. But the social effect of cheap and publicly accessible VoIP (like, I guess, cheap and accessible long distance telephone service) still seems miraculous.

I want to hold on to this sense of wonder as long as I can, because pretty soon VoIP will become invisible as technology (as the phone did). Invisibility is (one) ideal, of course. We couldn’t move smoothly through our complicated 21st century days if every minute or so we stopped to savor the pleasure of doors that open automatically, or lights that turn on when we walk by, or hot water pouring from a tap. We need to be in motion, so we have to stop paying attention to all the fulcrums around which our daily routines turn.

It’s nice to be reminded, occasionally. To be mindful of how utterly ridiculous and pleasurable it is to talk to a distant friend, and the infrastructions - simultaneously stable and very fragile - necessary to have made that connection.

If you check the column to the right, you'll see I've added an rss feed that tracks my location. So if you are one of the happy few who both want to know where I am at all times AND use an rss aggregator, today is your lucky day.

Cheers.

Lovely road trip blog featuring a combination of shots from the ground and aerial photos. Via many2many

Which inspired this trip...

You Drive A Honda Civic, Not a Race Car

Road food

Jesus drove an SUV

The Driver Distraction Internet Forum (an actual project of the US Dept of Transportation, with many exciting links)

Backseat gaming

Why yes, it was inevitable and perfect that someone should invent Political Friendster, a tasty mix of the aforementioned site, They Rule, and Wikipedia.

It reminds me, actually, of the Pepys diary project -- another absolutely spot-on intersection of medium, content, and group participation.

[FYI, they have also posted, in what seems like near entirety, a ridiculous and telling IM transcript of a conversation between Jonathan Abrams and a friend of the founder.]

Mobile Community Design...is an academic blog I just found focusing on:

Design of mobile communication devices that facilitate mobile communities, Computer Support Cooperative Work (CSCW), sociotechnical systems, usability, Human Computer Interaction (HCI), ethnography, User Centered Design for mobiles, groupware, social networks, mobile reputation systems.

Recent posts covered Using technology to create positive norms and Effects of size on physically distributed groups.

It's run by a Ph.D. student at the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia. He's looking for collaborators, so why not send some postings his way?

I had the best of intentions and had planned to annotate all the talks I attended, then post them with lucid and thoughtful commentary. Fortunately for me, this unexpected freelance job showed up and I am now totally overwhelmed. So I am going to have to declare timeliness the victor in this skirmish in the never-ending war of "late but beautiful" vs "timely but imperfect."

I will just have to addend later.

Matt Webb

glancing.interconnected.org

finding the right moment: fluidtime timing tools for social networks

Molly Steenson and Michael Kieslinger

[mostly quoted directly, if garbled-ly. sorry.]

Collaborative contexts and relationship-based computing

Social relationships transcend applications
Manifesto/slogan1: don’t build applications. build contexts for interaction.

Architecture of entertainment has been shaped by the idea of “immersion”
[architecture for participation]
: architectures built to spend time in (for transactions)

Play is about people, not places

Play is often about building things (including places) collaboratively

Most expressive forms of play involve improvisation and collaboration

ex: A badge which shows whether you’re on or offline in the game

: creating a game that’s more than an island on the net
: bridge the outside world to the game

ex: social network explorer
: in-game relationships applied to “out of application” actions

GNE neighborhood browser
: transpose the game relationships to a blog context (instant blogroll)
: blur the lines between the game and the rest of the net
: using a js include to help surf relationships between players

Manifesto/slogan2: Not application-based computing, not document-based computing, but relationship-based computing

ex: Flickr
: shape the flow of content that you generate
: create paths for distribution
: batch upload to enable and annotate realtime group communication
: ways to manage sending/receiving to others
: filtered Amazon recommendations based on your friends’ recs on Flickr

Applications, like architecture, can shut down possibility

Returning to the subject of Etech, I'm still thinking about Don Norman's keynote, which made one nice suggestion and two unhelpful ones.

Norman is selling the importance of emotions to "win hearts and minds." Emotional (sometimes called "affective") design is a big thing right now; I think it represents an attempt to bridge the gap between design as art practice (usually taught using group studios in art schools, usually with aesthetics as a metric of success) and design as scientific discipline (usually taught in CS or engineering depts, often using cognitive efficiency as a metric of success). So Norman's trying to be a peacemaker by reconciling engineers to the value of nonquantifiable factors like emotionality and aesthetics in creating successful products. He's trying to explain why "poorly designed" (from an engineering POV) products often do so well in the marketplace. Which is laudable, as far as I'm concerned.

The problem is that in promoting art-design values to an engineering audience, he implies two crucial misreadings of the lessons (I, at least) have learned as a designer. Since I haven't read the book, I'm willing to admit that I may be misreading him, and that many of my complaints may be based on the way authors often simplify complicated arguments in order to fit them into an hourlong speech. Still. I think his pedagogical mission is better served by fully explaining fewer concepts, rather than breezing through a laundry list.

Hi there. I was too distracted by interesting people at the conference to be much good at writing anything thoughtful. You know, I'm just not one of those people who can simultaneously write in paragraph form and IM and listen to a speaker and read slides.

Now I can post again, and will post more as I get my balance back.

This is more-or-less a paraphrase. I've tried to put all direct quotes in, well, quotes. Enjoy. [my comments in ital]

The O’Reilly Radar

key word: “amplify” -- it’s occurring often at this conference

“The future is here. It’s just not evenly distributed yet.” --Wm Gibson

Following the Hacker Frontier
- hackers push the limits of new technology
- entrepreneurs apply hacker knowledge to mass consumption
- tech becomes widespread
- hackers move on

The New Killer Apps
- we all use web services like Google, ebay, amazon, paypal etc
- funny how all the web services run on linux, but we wouldn’t describe ourselves as linux users
- software is elsewhere

What O'Reilly Thinks Is Interesting
- Internet is platform
- Built on top of open source, but not open source
- Services not packaged apps
- Exploring becoming platforms thru web apis
- Data aggregators, not just software
- User contributions are key to “market dominance”

Geoapps
- the mapping service that gets user participation right will win in the end
- maybe with meetup.com?

Mobilizing people
- moveon.org: largest advocacy organization in the world
- just getting people to do stuff

Wikis
- SO easy
- wikipedia
- wordspy

Wireless devices
- mobilewhack

iTunes
- Rendezvous
- mobile enabled
- no architecture of participation for users
- data sharing is limited
- why no iPhoto and iTunes buddies?
- need best practices for network-generation apps
-- managing relationships: modes of intimacy and interaction
-- also, the “where is my address book?” question

[where is the sweet spot of p2p and webservices data aggregation?]

Network-enabled Market Research
- spiders: asking the computers what they’re doing

Manipulating data through visualizing it
- netscan
- technorati
- Valdis Krebs’ political book selling map (watching the purchase patterns)

Hacking
- FirstMile in Cambodia: the guys on motorbikes picking up email [DTN: Delay Tolerant Networking]
playing with hardware

“second generation network effects”
social software
network enabled market research/data visibility
architectures of participation
robotics/hardware

full of young people watching TV, if you believe Vodafone.

Oh yeah, and in the future there's a lot of Flash.

It's got the familiar complement of bracelet, pendant, and sunglasses wearables, although Digital Wallpaper, as always, strikes me as a really liveable idea if programmed correctly*. I love the ways our visions of the future never quite see the real changes to come: who could imagine now a world in which female military officers wear miniskirts? We're always crucially wrong on those small details -- and the larger cultural changes that create them.

But one vision of the future seems to remain constant: the idea that somehow computers will magically read our hearts and minds, then respond appropriately. Scott points this out in a great post on an article by Roy Want in Scientific American: "Weiser['s]... bold vision of 'ubiquitous computing': small computers would be embedded in everyday objects all around us and, using wireless connections, would respond to our presence, desires and needs without being actively manipulated." if by "active manipulation", he means "conscious operation of an interface", then that's all good and fine. but i suspect the article's audience will interpret it to mean that ubicomp won't have an interface and will respond to us automagically. using what? telepathy? interactional invisibility does indeed involve active manipulation, in the sense that users will physically and socially manipulate the world to achieve ends aided by computers. but they'll be thinking not about the manipulated tool, but about the action or activity the manipulation effects.

The Scientific American article is headed "Automating Everything," and the Vodafone concepts pick up that ball and run with it. My favorite "automate everything" candidate is the "Emergency service" communicator, which can monitor the emotional state of the user and detect distress or fear. Faced with a threatening situation, the service can trigger an audible alarm or automatically contact the appropriate authorities. There's a lot unstated in this scenario of use, so I'm going to try to give Vodafone the benefit of the doubt. Let's hope the user has to deliberately arm the device before it calls the cops. Let's hope there's some good feedback to the user and some manual overrides. Because otherwise, I'd really hate to see what would happen if I was late for work, ran a block after the bus, yelled for the driver to stop, then finally gave up and started to cry.

This is a challenge that the affective AI people have taken on as well. I can't say as I have much hope for that project either. As Scott says, life is lived in the confounds; it consists both of patterns (which supposedly "the system" will learn and act on) and of exceptions to those patterns. In the future, as in the past, people will continue to misunderstand me, I will continue to misunderstand myself, and we'll all stumble forwards together, often failing -- but sometimes succeeding beyond our wildest hopes. A computer emergency system, like a can of Mace or a .45 in the back pocket, can be a reassuring thought in a dark street after midnight. But as with the gun, just because something sounds reassuring doesn't mean it makes you safer.

*cf last year's sharing personal media ideation. Or thinking about Equator's tablecloth

In an attempt to keep track of the ever-growing number of ubiquitous devices and pervasive systems, I wrote up a brief taxonomy of “networked objects” for a class last year. I’m reposting an excerpt now as a blog entry because, well, a couple of people said they found the original paper useful. Most of the projects I see these days fit into a few rough categories: surrogate objects, network displays, remote controls, and community devices. The categories are not mutually exclusive; rather, they describe a range of functions shared by many devices hooked into networks.

Once again, it's time for another ITP show. It's a little weird not to be in New York for this; I've been to every show over the last four years. I'll miss the chaos, noise, and trauma -- final projects tend to be conceived and built over maybe six weeks, so they're often a little...rough around the edges. At ITP, you may be a bit upset that a project doesn't look or work as well as hoped for the final show. You are, however, fervently grateful when it works at all.

Social software shopping tools, retro-chic* community video mixers, elegant minimalism, and yeah -- "relational musical chairs."

Here's hoping that everyone who's ever asked me, "Just what is it that you got a degree in?" checks the show catalogue. I got a degree in interactive telecommunications -- and like everyone else at the program, am still trying to figure out just what that means.

The Helloworld Project is a global interactive text installation combining language, landscapes and communication technology to create a visual dialogue. From December 9-12, 2003, people from all over the world will be invited to send in messages, either by sending an SMS to a dedicated number or by going to www.helloworldproject.com.
-----
These messages will be projected almost instantly onto mountains and buildings in Mumbai, Geneva, Rio de Janeiro, New York. Video images of the projections will be broadcast live on the project website and at the World Summit on the Information Society in Geneva.

Three quotes from this past week

"A little less conversation, a little more action please." Elvis, via Google

"Can I get some action/from the back section?/we need body rockin'/Not perfection." Ad Rock, via CS' email

"Action not authenticity." (from DW's business card)

It seems to be a week for taking care of business, as the Colonel might say.

I just spent two very exhausting weeks with my little sister, who is 11. Omigod. She lives in Kitsap, near Seattle, literally 10 feet away from the Puget Sound. It's unbelievably beautiful, and I find myself already missing the sound of birds calling across the water in the morning, the small boats sailing by in the afternoon, the way the Sound turns silver in the early evening.

But I spent most of my visit dealing with electronics: setting up a DSL modem for her mother, a poet, pricing and buying a wireless router and some cable, installing an Airport card in the poet's iBook, and looking for a mysteriously missing USB cable for the printer, bought three months ago and never fully plugged in. Not to mention troubleshooting the digital camera and resetting the poet's watch, which had started beeping every hour on the hour.

It was especially urgent to get the house (un)wired so that my little sister could go online. I mean, every hour on the hour, the fricking watch would go beepity-beep and my little sister would run in and say, "is the computer fixed?" And I'd say, "not yet," and she'd say, "Well, can I play a game on your phone?" Or, "Why can't I IM on your phone?"

And I know this is a commonplace observation, but it's really true that for my little sister, a computer (and in some ways, cell phone) is an IM and game machine. Without an Internet connection, she didn't even bother fully installing the printer.

> Ideo's SMS-driven window installation for BBC Interactive:
> http://www.ideo.com/portfolio/re.asp?x=50186

> Blogs on your mobile phone:
> http://sync.wokup.com:8082/admin/about_en.jsp
>
> SMS Micro Poetry:
> http://www.poettext.com/poems_micro.php
>
> More place annotation:
> http://www.annotatespace.com (my project site)
> http://www.touchtonetours.com (ITPer Steve Bull)
>
> Another game, :
> http://a.parsons.edu/~awhung/thesis/
>
> Participatory journalism:
> http://www.ndn.org/mediacenter/research/wemedia/

> Outdoor soundtrack programming via SMS:
> http://www.intelligentstreet.net/

...thanks, Andrea

"Playing with the Bits": User-configuration of Ubiquitous Domestic Environments (TECHNOTE)
Andy Crabtree2, Terry Hemmings2, Karl-Petter Åkesson1, Boriana Koleva2, Tom Rodden2, and Pär Hansson1
1 SICS, Swedish Institute of Computer Science, 2 MRL Lab, Jubilee Campus, University of Nottingham

The future home will be one of continual reconfiguration and created in piecemeal fashion.

project uses a jigsaw graphic metaphor to link sensors and actuators together

...from my admittedly sketchy notes. The laptop battery died midway through this session.

People were really into this talk. I didn't see it, but here are Michele's notes.

Context-Aware Computing with Sound (FULL PAPER)
Anil Madhavapeddy1, David Scott2, and Richard Sharp3
1 Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge, 2 Laboratory for Communication Engineering, University of Cambridge, 3 Intel Research, Cambridge

Practical Considerations of Context for Context Based Systems: An Example from an Ethnographic Case Study of a Man Diagnosed with Early Onset Alzheimer's Disease (FULL PAPER)
Tony Salvador and Ken Anderson
Intel Corporation

From Michele...

New Perspectives on Ubiquitous Computing from Ethnographic Study of Elders with Cognitive Decline (FULL PAPER)
Margaret Morris, Jay Lundell, Eric Dishman, and Brad Needham
Proactive Health, Intel Research

From Michele...

Andy Crabtree, Tom Rodden, Terry Hemmings, and Steve Benford
The School of Computer Science & IT, The University of Nottingham, Jubilee Campus

...feeling really low energy. I've had three shots of espresso today and I still can't quite focus.

Addendum: Notwithstanding my total exhaustion, I had pretty strong feelings about this session. I felt that it was misleadingly titled, since only one paper dealt critically with the social aspects of privacy. My comments are in brackets, to distinguish them from my summaries of the presenters' arguments.

Can Ubicomp come out and play?

Mobile Play: Blogging, Tagging, and Messaging

Moderator
Eric Paulos (Intel Research, Berkeley)

Panelists
Barry Brown (University of Glasgow)
Bill Gaver (Royal College of Art)
Marc Smith (Microsoft Research)
Nina Wakeford (University of Surrey)

Ubiquitous computing, by its very definition, aspires to weave computing technologies across the fabric of our everyday lives. Many of the successes and failures encountered during the pursuit of ubiquitous computing will be dictated by the manifest integration of play. It is play that helps us cope with the past, understand the present, and prepare for the future. This panel of experts is passionately interested in engaging in a critical dialogue around the applicability, adoption, and consequences of such elements of play in ubiquitous computing research. As motivation, several tremendously popular ubiquitous computing themes with playful elements will be examined: blogging, tagging, and message play.

We're using Bill Griswold's ActiveClass software for a backchannel. About a third of the people here have laptops, but unfortunately there are very few outlets. It has been explained to me that this is because "it's rude to use your laptop while people are speaking," which seems, well, odd in a ubiquitous computing, but I understand the impulse. I myself go ballistic when people have their lids up while I'm speaking in public.

...The extended entry has a bunch of notes. I couldn't deal so I decided to leave midway through.

Very Low-Cost Sensing and Communication Using Bidirectional LEDs (FULL PAPER)
Paul Dietz, William Yerazunis, and Darren Leigh
Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories

Lovely idea for using bidirectional LEDs for communication.

Is Context-Aware Computing Taking Control Away from the User? Three Levels of Interactivity Examined (TECHNOTE)
Louise Barkhuus1 and Anind Dey2
1 The IT University of Copenhagen, 2 Intel Research Berkeley

liquid: Context-Aware Distributed Queries (TECHNOTE)
Jeffrey Heer, Alan Newberger, Chris Beckmann, and Jason I. Hong
Group for User Interface Research, Computer Science Division, University of California, Berkeley

AwareCon: Situation Aware Context Communication (TECHNOTE)
Michael Beigl, Albert Krohn, Tobias Zimmer, Christian Decker, and Philip Robinson
TecO, University of Karlsruhe

Secure Spontaneous Device Association (TECHNOTE)
Tim Kindberg and Kan Zhang
Hewlett-Packard Laboratories

Context-Aware User Authentication - Supporting Proximity-Based Login in Pervasive Computing (FULL PAPER)
Jakob E. Bardram, Rasmus E. Kjær, and Michael Ø. Pedersen
Centre for Pervasive Computing, Department of Computer Science, University of Aarhus

Nice explanation of the ideas behind the semantic web project

...And from boingboing, an idea whose time came about a year ago, when I was late to a job interview because the NYC subway is an untrustworthy, deceitful beast.

Activity Zones for Context-Aware Computing (FULL PAPER)
Kimberle Koile1, Konrad Tollmar2, David Demirdjian2, Howard Shrobe1, and Trevor Darrell2

Inferring High-Level Behavior from Low-Level Sensors (FULL PAPER)
Donald J. Patterson, Lin Liao, Dieter Fox, and Henry Kautz
Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University Of Washington

* On a Location Model for Fine-Grained Geocast (FULL PAPER)
Frank Dürr and Kurt Rothermel
Institute of Parallel and Distributed Systems (IPVS), University of Stuttgart

Building World Models by Ray-tracing Within Ceiling-Mounted Positioning Systems (FULL PAPER)
Robert K. Harle and Andy Hopper
Laboratory for Communication Engineering, University of Cambridge

William Mitchell, MIT
head of Media Arts and Sciences
Me++: the Cyborg Self and the Networked City

"let's assume it all works"
- let's assume that all we want comes to pass and affects us
--> how does it affect everyday life in cities?

Manifesto!

workshop design exercises

Aware - a project from UIAH in Helsinki that uses mobile phones to collect and display images, text, and sounds based on cell id.

Personal memory gathers, shifts and adapts according to activity, event and journey. It may be associated to someone, or anonymous, and it may be of importance to someone else. Ups and downs, special occasions or everyday minutia; Fantastical obsession or critical reality, loves, frustrations and desires. Sometimes these experiences spill into the collective domain as story, rumour, history and scandal, documented in the media with vested interest. But rarely can you contribute to the collective domain, even though it happens to you.

Check out the great links section, which includes work by Mongrel, a classically British art collective.

via Anne Galloway

...Now combine that with dirty data and voila! mo-porn.

Psiloc miniGPS for SE P800 is an app that tracks your location relative to nearby cell towers, then triggers location-based events.

That means, you can create an event to have an alarm at the moment your phone logs in (or out) a selected cell. So you will be able to sleep calmly in your train to work or school - it will wake you up precisely at your station, even if your train is late? You can also set it up to remain you of speed controls! For every such alarm you can select any sound file from your device (also prepared by you).

For places like church, theater, hospital etc. you can set a flight mode event which will just switch the phone part of your P800 off as soon as you come there! No more embarrassing rings during performance!

via Matt Jones. If you follow the link, it will take you to the archives of the Geowanking mailing list, which has such a good name I decided to join.

So I was looking at this and decided to check out the GeoUrl link and discovered this stunning site. Now I really want to visit Koln. Which I guess is the point, no?