Interest-based life logging

Blum, M. Pentland, A. Troster, G. (2006), InSense: Interest-Based Life Logging, IEEE Multimedia, 13 (4), pp. 40- 48. The paper describes a wearable data collection device called InSense based on Vannevar Bush’s Memex principles. allows users to continually collect their interactions as store them as a multimedia diary. It basically take into account the sensor readings from a camera, microphone, and accelerometers. The point is to “classify the users activities and “automatically collect multimedia clips when the user is in an “interesting” situation“. What is interesting is the types of categories they picked-up to develop their context-aware framework: they chose location, speech, posture, and activities—to represent many diverse aspects of a user’s context. They also have subcategories (for instance for location: office, home, outdoors, indoors, restaurant, car, street, shop)

The experience sampling approach works like that:

Subjects wear the system for several hours without interacting with it. Audio and acceleration signals are recorded continuously. The camera takes pictures once a minute and WiFi access points are logged to establish location. After the recording session, the user employs an offline annotation tool, which presents an image at a time, the corresponding sound clip, and a list of labels from which to chooseshowing sensor placement.

What is also curious is their description of their algorithm that calculates the current level of interest of an event based on the context classification.
Why do I blog this? I am less interested in the purpose of the system itself (sharing material) but rather by the data extracted from context readings and how this could be used to tell a story (or to build up a narrative). Of course, given my interest in games, I see this device as intriguing and potentially relevant to map the first life experience with virtual worlds counterparts; it could go beyond current pedometer that control dogs.

Onlife, Nintendo Wii and traces of interaction

It’s been several weeks that I am hooked on using Onlife, a very simple application that tracks and help you to visualizes traces of your interaction with Mac applications.

Onlife is an application f or the Mac OS X that observes your every interaction with apps such as Safari, Mail and iChat and then creates a personal shoebox of all the web pages you visit, emails you read, documents you write and much more. Onlife then indexes the contents of your shoebox, makes it searchable and displays all the interactions between you and your favorite apps over time.

For instance, yesterday’s patterns are quite clear:

Why do I blog this? the notion of “traces of interaction” is very trendy lately, I see it popping up everywhere: about blogjects, in educational technologies (how to use past interactions to fed back users and make them learn? why not using AI techniques such as cased-based reasoning to meet this end?)… This is also an approach favored by Nintendo with the “Wii play history”: the Wii indeed automatically records details of what game was played. Users are then able to see the record of how long they played which games.

Now, some might be wondering, what would the potential usage of such applications? To me onlife is interesting to see my work patterns (my web browser is a very important tool that I used in conjunction with my text editor) and eventually adjust my behavior (time to shut down my IM client?). But what else? A problem here might be that those applications are too limited to make sense, a lot of stuff that we do are not logged… and eventually a tremendous problem here is… privacy…

“Bruno Latour forecasts the future”

A quite compelling title for a blogpost right?
(Via Daniel Kaplan), last month I haven’t parsed the whole New Scientist’s special issue about 50 years foresight. There is this intriguing short one by
Bruno Latour that makes sense:

In 50 years, social scientists will be able to visualise the connections between human organisations and technological objects. Today we know how to visualise technological systems using scientific images and technical drawings, but we have no idea of how to hook those designs up with the arrays of emails, spreadsheets, blogs and pieces of paper that organise the people who operate those systems. Why should that matter? Think of the Columbia disaster: there were thousands of drawings of the space shuttle and its parts, but none to represent the organisation of NASA. Once Columbia had exploded, everyone realised that faulty procedures were just as much to blame as faulty parts.

Devising connecting tools is a major but feasible undertaking. Fifty years is a safe bet: it is about the time it took in the Renaissance to invent perspective in the first place.
Why do I blog this? well, I fully concur with Latour’s description and I sorta like that this forecast is not about crappy superintelligent computers or quantum leaps into parallel universe. What is interesting here is the description the authors makes of potential connection between human and non-human actors. It might seem a bit cryptic but there are good implications to draw here concerning blogjects and the participation of objects in social webs.

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Canary in coal mine

Digging some stuff out of the web about how the role of animals in some specific situations, I came across this interesting “usage” as described on the BBC website:

(Picture from the BBC website)

The canary is particularly sensitive to toxic gases such as carbon monoxide which is colourless, odourless and tasteless. This gas could easily form underground during a mine fire or after an explosion. Following a mine fire or explosion, mine rescuers would descend into the mine, carrying a canary in a small wooden or metal cage. Any sign of distress from the canary was a clear signal the conditions underground were unsafe and miners should be evacuated from the pit and the mineshafts made safer. (…) Coal miners now rely on carbon monoxide detectors and monitors.

Why do I blog this? this is an example of how miners found a trick for “measuring” some level of gases that might be dangerous. This concept is not so different from Beatriz Da Costa’s blogging pigeons, which measure urban pollution.

A wireless smart ball that senses position, direction, speed and acceleration

Via, this intriguing new device described in the press release as a wireless smart ball that senses position, direction, speed and acceleration :

STMicroelectronics (NYSE: STM),one of the world’s leading semiconductor manufacturers, and Ball-IT Oy, a leading provider of advanced real-time wireless sensor solutions, today announced a novel MEMS-based wireless motion-control device. Making its debut at ST’s stand at Electronica 2006, the smart golfball-sized object can operate as a free-hand personal computer mouse, compass, measuring tape, pedometer, or a 3D-object controller

Why do I blog this? As Gene Becker says “Put that in your blogject and smoke it ” (a private joke related to some other quotes from ubiquitous computing discussion). Anyway, what is interesting here is that it can be seen as a standardized wireless and sensing controller. Though the company says “I believe we’ve sensed the market’s direction and are on the ball”, the observer is still left out with no precise ideas about what they want people to do with it (no worries some people have some ideas). Here is the only mention:

ST’s acceleration sensors are used to provide a motion-activated user interface in Nintendo’s new home console, Wii.(…) ST’s unique portfolio of two- and three-axis MEMS accelerometers targets a wide range of low-g applications from motion-based user interfaces to hard-disk drive and automobile-passenger protection. Market analysts predict that by 2010 there will be one accelerometer in each mobile phone and every portable hard-disk-based device (laptops, audio/video players), representing a total market of more than 1.2 billion units.

Chumby

The Chumby seems to be an intriguing artifact expected to be released in 2007
:

a compact device that can act like a clock radio, but is way more flexible and fun. It uses the wireless internet connection you already have to fetch cool stuff from the web: music, the latest news, box scores, animations, celebrity gossip…whatever you choose. And a chumby can exchange photos and messages with your friends.

Looking at the product history is quite interesting, I highlighted the aspects I found relevant:

Chumby is different. The chumby was not created in the design department of some big consumer electronics company. (…) We made it all up. Chumby Industries was formed by hackers who wanted to create something interesting, useful and different.
(…) What we decided to build was a really low-cost, wireless (WiFi), Internet-connected device that will sit on your bedside table (or in your bathroom, or kitchen, or living room, or maybe even plug into your car somehow…) that could do a lot more than this old clock radio.
(…)
We also decided that the chumby would be different because it will be “open and hackable.” If you happen to be another card-carrying hacker, you can blow off the warranty, pull out its electronic guts and reprogram it. If you’re more of a “crafter,” we’re providing patterns so you can give your chumby a new skin. You can sew on patches, attach enameled pins, bury it in glue and glitter; whatever you want to do to personalize it. If you’re a Flash artist, we hope you’ll use chumby as a sort of always-open art gallery for your coolest stuff.
(…)
The chumby is designed to let you stay connected to your Internet life in locations where it might be fun and convenient.
(…)
We’ve now built a few hundred and and are in the process of getting feedback from early users, mostly hackers and artists. We want to learn what people think of chumby, and how they’d like to use it or collaborate to make the world a chumbier place.

Why do I blog this? I like the way this device goes beyond the “communicating object” paradigme (exemplified by the Nabaztag) by expanding the use of information flows (pictures for instance) and taking into account crafting/hacking issue.

Digital patina: Lucent’s Live Web Stationery

Lucent’s Live Web Stationery is an old project (SIGGRAPH ’97) that shows the concept of “virtual aging”: a web page ages as if it were a physical piece of paper. It’s a project by Dorée Duncan Seligmann and Stephan Vladimir Bugaj. As described in the press release:

Live Web Stationery is a demonstration of Web pages that “age” based on the amount of traffic that they endure. Peloton is a computer-based simulator that creates virtual environments for bicycle rides.
(…)
“The Web is a public virtual space that requires signs of life and interaction in order to become more engaging,” said Seligmann. “Web pages are touched by thousands of people each day, and there must be a way to convey the age of the ‘page’ itself, how its texture changes, how its shape is altered. Live Web Stationery conveys a sense of community and interaction that doesn’t exist on Web sites today.”

Why do I blog this? because I like this idea of digital patina: it’s a way to enhance objects (virtual or not) with an history of their interactions (positive history?) by the user or by a group of users. The next step is to find or create affordances based on this. Besides, as Laurie Anderson expressed it, at some point it’s good to put more dirt in virtual reality.

A blogging purse

Cyril pointed me on this quite unusual blogject (which is wrong since there is no prototypical blogject representation) is this ‘blogging purse’: “ It looks like it just uploads images. The details are a bit on the weak side, but some of the stuff looks neat. The purse contains a camera, basic stamp, pedometer and Nokia phone“.

Here is the blog it creates, a contextual uploader actually.

remote control gardening

Via, look at this Aiterrarium: Remote-control gardening:

On October 11, Matsushita Electric Works, Ltd. announced plans to begin selling an indoor gardening system whose lighting, temperature and water supply can be remotely monitored and controlled via the Internet. The system, called Aiterrarium, is slated for release on December 20 and will initially target research facilities for universities and businesses.

Why do I blog this? I am wondering why could not it be the other way around: sensors on a cell phone (or whatever object that can be mobile, “visiting” diverse environments) that would remotely control elements of the plans (for instance water distribution with different levels of Sodium, different light exposition, noises… or even radiowaves and touch sensors) so that the plant development itself is a by-product of your own movement in space… Matching your own experience (the light you have access, the radiowave you encountered, the food you eat) or not… I mean it’s a matter of turning your cell phone in a blogject input and your plant as a blogject output.

CARPE: Capture, Archival, and Retrieval of Personal Experience

The last issue of IEEE Multimedia is about “Capture, Archival, and Retrieval of Personal Experience”, which the authors refer to as “CARPE” (sounds fishy in french). What stroke me as the most interesting part is the introduction:

The human preoccupation with capturing and archiving memorable experiences witnessed astonishing technological advancement in the 20th century, progressing from diaries and paintings to the dawn of the digital camera and camcorder era—and ushering in our multimedia community. Today, we must expand our notion of media, because audio and video recording can also be supplemented in many ways, including with temperature, heart rate, location, acceleration, humidity, Web pages visited, and logging how we use many devices.

Why do I blog this? The special issue describes some solution regarding this problem (through automatic labelling or passive capture). Here they describe only the information capture by human (or by devices that belong to human), what about objects that would act on their own. If we think at what I blog the other day, there might be surrogates to be put in the loop.