CFP Special Issues, Workshops and Conferences

Straight from my inbox, a few academic events to keep an eye on:

Social Interaction and Mundane Technologies in Everyday Life.
Theme Issue of Personal and Ubiquitous Computing – Planned publication June 2009

This theme issue is responding to the proliferation and developing constellations of ‘social’ and ‘mundane’ technologies in people’s everyday lives. We define ‘mundane technologies’ (Graham and Rouncefield, 2007) as those quite unremarkable technologies that, given the context in which they operate, have been ‘made at home’, have become ‘ordinary’ and, indeed, part of the organisation already in place (Sacks, 1992). These technologies are often simple, minimalist and ‘loose’ and yet support richly layered social interactions which are sustained and develop across time, place, and culture in particular ‘social worlds’ (Strauss, 1978). Our assumption is that these ‘mundane technologies’ are at a mature level of adoption, with seemingly well worked-out affordances so that their use has become so tightly entwined with activity and social interaction as to be almost invisible (Weiser, 1991) and thus, difficult to study and to be surprised by.

Automated Journeys
Workshop at UbiComp 2008

Computing technology now pervades those moments of our day when we move through our cities. Mobile phones, music players, vending machines, contact-less payment systems and RFID-enabled turnstiles are de rigueur on our daily journeys. This workshop aims to examine these augmented journeys, to reflect on the public, semi-public and private technologies available to us in them, and to speculate on what innovations might be to come. Taking as our starting point cities such as Seoul, we aim to take seriously the developments in mobile technology as well as the advancements in autonomous machinery and how these mesh with our urban journeys.

Collocated social practices surrounding photos
Special Issue of International Journal of Human-Computer Studies – Targeted publication November 2009

Following the uptake of digital cameras there has been considerable interest from the HCI field in contemporary photographic practices. Recent studies on people’s interactions with printed and digital photos have drawn attention to the novel social practices that continue to emerge in light of technical advances. The ways in which people approach the capture, sharing, storing and display of photos are rapidly changing, and the scope of these changes, along with their social and cultural implications, raises interesting challenges and possibilities for the design of supportive technologies. This special issue aims to build on what has become an established corpus of HCI studies on photography, reflecting past research and bringing together recent technical developments, empirical studies and thoughts on method and theory.

ENTER 2009 – 16th International Conference on IT and Travel & Tourism
IFITT’s Global Travel & Tourism Technology and eBusiness Forum
January 28th – 30th, 2009, Amsterdam, Netherlands

Telecommunications and Travel Behavior Committee of the US Transportation Research Board

The TRB Committee on Telecommunication and Travel Behavior invites papers on a wide range of topics related to the understanding, modeling, and analysis of the interrelation between telecommunications and traveler behavior. We are interested in a broad range of issues relating to the role of emerging technologies and travel, but particularly for the 2009 conference, we are seeking papers addressing the following issues.
-Role of Network Attributes on Telecommuting
-Role of ICT in influencing social networks and the travel implications.
-Role of Information and Communications Technology (ICT) on Value of Travel Time
-Role of Information and Communications Technology (ICT)on Leisure Activities
-Geographical and Occupational Clustering of Telecommuters
-The evolving nature of use of Internet and travel implications

International Workshop on Urban, Community, and Social Applications of Networked Sensing Systems
November 4, 2008, Raleigh, North Carolina, USA – Held in conjunction with ACM SenSys 2008

At the same time we are seeing sensors installed in urban environments in support of more classic environmental sensing applications, such as, real-time feeds for air-quality, pollutants, weather conditions, and congestion conditions around the city. Collaborative data gathering of sensed data for people by people, facilitated by sensing systems comprised of everyday mobile devices and their interaction with static sensor webs, present a new frontier at the intersection between pervasive computing and sensor networking. This workshop promotes exchange among sensing system researchers involved in areas, such as, mobile sensing, people-centric and participatory sensing, urban sensing, public health, community development, and cultural expression. It focuses on how mobile phones and other everyday devices can be employed as network- connected, location-aware, human-in-the-loop sensors that enable data collection, geo-tagged documentation, mapping, modeling, and other case-making capabilities.

International Workshop Sensing a Changing World
November 19-21, 2008 – Wageningen University, The Netherlands

Current developments in sensor technology provide increasing opportunities to analyze human behavior and monitor environmental processes in a changing world. However, the challenge will be to develop concepts and applications that can provide timely and on demand knowledge to end-users in different domains and at a range of scale-levels. This workshop has the objective to elucidate common concepts for sensor network applications on aspects like data communication, processing, standardization, knowledge discovery, representation, and visualization.

See previous list of Events, Seminars, Workshops on the City, Space and Socio-Technical Systems

Mixed Reality Lab Visit

My visit of the Mixed Reality Laboratory at the University of Nottingham, allowed be to exchange with some of the finest researchers active on the edges of CSCW and ubicomp including: Steve Benford (we discussed the potential uses of “trails” to reveal the “wrong” behaviors, replay is often a request of participants of pervasive experiences, but also the challenges to raise the credibility of HCI research in the industry), Martin Flintham (developing and deploying pervasive experiences), Leif Oppermann (uncertainty visualization and tools to develop pervasive experiences), Holger Schnädelbach (evaluation in architecture and hybrid worlds, presentation of cospaces), Stefan Egglestone (feedback look with bio sensors, stress sensing, see telemetry in theme parcs), and Adriano Galati (delay tolerant ad-hoc networks).

In the effort to build more coherence in my research focus, I took the opportunity to present my work and try to highlight and test the key evidences that emerged from my first studies. In the discussion after my talk, Leif Oppermann and Chris Greenhalgh suggested that, in the light of the outcomes of CatchBob! I should have a closer look on how people who atomize the georeferencing of their photos. Do they follow the same practice as in CatchBob! (i.e. become more passive in disclosing the location information, do they “annotate”/communicate less as well?

Events, Seminars, Workshops on the City, Space and Socio-Technical Systems

A few events I would love to attend in early 2008, but I unfortunately won’t be able to…

The Mobile City conference
Is it still useful or even possible to talk about the city as being only physical? Or about the digital world as purely ‘virtual’ (in the sense of ‘not real’ oimmaterial)? The physical city and the spaces of digital technologies merge into a new “hybrid space”. Hybrid spaces are shaped by the social processes that concurrently take place in digital and physical spaces. What is the influence of these developments on the ideas we have of time, space and place, citizenship and identity?

4th and 5th seminars in the ESRC Research Seminar Series: Rethinking the Urban Experience: the Sensory Production of Place
Seminar on the sensory awareness of urban infrastructure. This seminar will ask questions about the infrastructure that supports urban society. Topics may include sensory experiences of public transport networks, olfactory responses to waste and its disposal, public toilet provision in urban areas. Additionally, the role of hidden infrastructures such as CCTV and underground infrastructures such as utilities networks will be considered in this seminar.

EPFL Choros group “Penser l’espace” seminar with a focus on the “critique de la raison cartographique” and the multiple perspectives to think about space.
Quelles habitudes de pensée sont charriées lorsqu’on cartographie ? Quelles sont les implications de la réduction cartographique de la complexité de l’espace ? De quelle façon peut-on contrôler le passage des données à la carte ou le passage de la pensée à la carte ? Comment cartographier de l’espace contemporain – ce « space of flows » et hyperurbanisé – où la mobilité et la digitalité sont les caractéristiques fondamentales ? Quelles sont les implications du passage de la carte sur papier à la carte sur écran ? Le GPS et Google Earth transforment-ils notre rapport à la carte, et, partant, notre rapport à l’espace ?

Pervasive Persuasive Technology and Environmental Sustainability workshop at Pervasive 2008
The key theme of this workshop around environmental sustainability will be addressed threefold: 1. Providing people with environmental data and educational information, 2. Pervasiveness can easily turn invasive. It has already caused negative consequences in biological settings. 3. digital divide between humans and the environment (e.g. Can the process of ‘blogging sensor data’ (sensorbase.org) assist us in becoming more aware of the needs of nature? How can we avoid the downsides?

Inaugural Research Institute for the Science of Socio-Technical Systems
A science of socio-technical systems is emerging from research in the fields of HCI, social computing, social informatics, CSCW, sociology of computing, and other domains. The Consortium for the Science of Socio-Technical Systems (CSST) is a new organization devoted to advancing research on socio-technical systems. A primary goal of the institute is to build a new cohort of faculty and graduate students who are interested in research on the design and interplay of technology and humans at the level of individuals, groups, organizations, and larger communities.

ifgi Spring School 2008
Two weeks of short block courses with innovative topics in GI such as: geospatio-temporal information: issues in representation and reasoning, usability and user-centred systems, location-aware systems, information visualization & presentation, and research methods

Meeting with PhD Advisor

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.

*sigh* DEA Thesis Submitted *sigh*

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.

Litterature Map

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.

Mobility Agents

At a talk given today at TECFA on Video Games meet Ubiquitous Computing: The Collective Simulation of a Human Being, Alexander Repenning shortly mentioned Mobility Agents. The Mobility Agents system provides multimodal prompts to a traveler on handheld devices helping with the recognition of the “right” bus, for instance. At the same time, it communicates to a caregiver the location of the traveler and trip status.

An article describes the findings at several levels. At a technical level, it outlines pragmatic issues including display issues, GPS reliability and networking latency arising from using handheld devices in the field. At a cognitive level, it describes the need to customize information to address different degrees and combinations of cognitive disabilities. At a user interface level, it describes the use of different mission status interface approaches ranging from 3D real-time visualizations to SMS and instant messaging-based text interfaces.

Repenning, A. and Ioannidou, A. 2006. Mobility agents: guiding and tracking public transportation users. In Proceedings of the Working Conference on Advanced Visual interfaces (Venezia, Italy, May 23 – 26, 2006). AVI ’06. ACM Press, New York, NY, 127-134.

Relation to my thesis: Excellent reference on a urban-scale use of a location-aware system highlighting both the technical and user interface approaches and issues. In some aspects, this research project made me think of GPS System to Raise the Confidence in the Ability to Travel.

My PhD Research Plan

My PhD research plan has been validated. The current title of my thesis is: “Designing location-aware systems that manage discrepancies between the sensed physical world and its virtual representation“, but it surely will evolve. I summarize my research as follow:

Advances in mobile technologies allowed the emergence of a quantity of applications taking advantage of location. The uses of Location-Aware Systems (LAS) range from car and pedestrian navigation, finding and tracking a person, a group or an artifact, targeted marketing, local search, to the virtual annotation of the physical space (e.g. geotagging and geoblogging). However, most mobile, distributed systems and sensor technologies that deliver location information to these applications have their faults and limitations. These shortcomings create challenges for the designers and users of LAS to successfully use the contextual information promised by such technologies.

This proposal emerges from early work that shows that the uncertainties inherent to location-sensing technologies affect the usability of ubiquitous systems. It stresses on the importance of integrating the limitations of positioning technologies in a real-world use of a large-scale location-aware system.

We aim at answering the challenges enhancing the usability of a location-aware system by handling uncertainty inherent to ubiquitous technologies. Consequently we will investigate how certain a location-aware system should be in terms of location quality, location timeliness and evaluate design strategies to manage sptail uncertainty. We formulate our research question as “How to build a location-aware system that enhances its usability by handling uncertainty inherent to ubiquitous computing technologies?”. To answer it, we will rely on a classical design-science research method with an innovation building approach. We expect the outcomes of this thesis to be in the form of methods (i.e. a set of guidelines to use to manage uncertainty in LAS in order to enhance their usability) and instantiations (i.e. the realization of a real-world LAS that uses guidelines to manage spatial uncertainty).

For that purpose, we plan to use an iterative process to design location-aware mobile platform. We will hence use participatory design and fast prototyping techniques in each iterative phase of the project. The platform will provide a context for series of field studies in which we will evaluate design strategies to integrate the discrepancies of the sensed physical world and its virtual representation

Relation to my thesis: end of first year

Jane McGonigal on the Ubicomp Games

Nicolas pointed to me the now (partially) online PhD dissertation of Jane McGonigal entitled This Might Be a Game: Ubiquitous Play and Performance at the Turn of the 21st Century. In chapter 3 Colonizing Play: Citations Everywhere, or, The Ubicomp Games, she explores the role of experimental game development in producing research insights in ubicomp (in our case mutual location-awareness in physical space, technological boundaries and design strategies to be applied) and persuading that the vision of ubicomp is worth pursuing (we do that by deploying an engaging context). She discusses our work on CatchBob! with her performance studies perspective from which the ubicomp field can learn a lot, as I did while reading that chapter. I am glad she included our paper Getting real with ubiquitous computing: the impact of discrepancies on collaboration as part of the “Are we there yet?” (in the 2003-2005 era) discourse. Converging with my impressions of the last UbiComp conference, it has become clear that this question cannot be answered because the “there” (ubicomp desired state) is very ill defined and fuzzy. From the pervasive games reviews by Jane (expect the later seamful games), I do not think they were setup to stage the imperfection, but that came up as an unexpected research outcome of the first real-world runs of CYSMN and CatchBob!

Even if not specifically mentioned, I think that it is understood that we used our game platform as an alibi for our research. I think that as suggested by Starner (2000) gameplay is perfectly suited to smoothing over the inevitable flaws and incompleteness of early technology deployment. However, it is true that, as underlined by Jane, we completely under-produced play. A trait of academic pervasive games is that neither the player nor the game take center stage, but rather the technological and interface aspects. The experiments stage an artificial (if not fake) world for the user to try out. Ciarletty (2005) describes this as the “fake it” environments and missions of so many ubicomp tests (in our case the influence of the experimental psychology approach that constraints us to defined an artificial task).

The dissertation bibliography is available as well.

Relation to my thesis: Happy that my work is cited outside my strict research community. As I wrote it very early in my PhD adventure (1 month), I do not consider (and was told) that the eMinds paper has of big scientific value, but this proves me that other communities (other research communities, industry, designers, artists) can profit to that type of outcomes. I intend my applied research to stay on this accessible track.

I could find some references I could use such as Albert Schmid (2003 or? 2005) encouraged his HCI audience to continue aggressibely pursuing Weiser’s vision, “confronting real people in real everyay environments” with more and more functional ubicomp prototypes. Schmid argues that “developing complex system isn’t a new problem. However when looking at ubicomp system, understanding the full complexity is often differnt and more difficult than in ares of more bounded scope.

References:

Ciarletta, Laurent. “Emulating the Future With/Of Pervasive Computing Development.” Online Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Pervasive Computing. Munich, Germany: 8-13 May 2005.

Schmidt, Albrecht. “Interacting with the Ubiquitous Computer.” Keynote lecture at the Fifth International Symposium on Human Computer Interaction with Mobile Devices and Services. Udine, Italy: 8-11 September 2003.

Schmidt, Albrecht, Nigel Davies, James Landay, and Soctt Hudson. “Rapid Prototyping for Ubiquitous Computing.” Pervasive Computing. 4:4 October-December 2005. 15-17

Starner, Thad, Bastian Leibe, Brad Singletary, Kent Lyons, Maribeth Gandy, and Jarrell Pair. “Towards Augmented Reality Gaming.” Proceedings of IMAGINA 2000 Conference. Monaco: 31 January-2 February 2000.

UbiComp 2006 Poster Sent for Print

Girardin, F., Nova, N., Blat, J. (2006): Towards Design Strategies to Deal with Spatial Uncertainty in Location-Aware Systems, Poster at Ubicomp 2006, Orange County, CA.

Abstract:
Building ubiquitous applications that exploit location requires integrating underlying infrastructure for linking sensors with high-level representation of the measured space to produce a pleasant user experience. However, the real-world constraints limit the efficiency of location technologies. An inherent spatial uncertainty embedded in mobile and location systems constantly challenges the coexistence of digital and physical spaces. This paper reports on a qualitative study of spatial uncertainty in the context of a pervasive game named CatchBob! It is part of ongoing work that aims at capturing information on users’ perceptions of uncertain spatial information in uncontrolled, real-world settings as well as a key element for defining better design strategies to manage spatial uncertainty in location-aware applications.

Related to Posters for UbiComp 2006 Accepted.