Engagement with Public Art Through Locative Media and Geodata

IFTF’s Anthony Townsend wrote an article that takes the New York City Waterfalls as context and the study I led on the evolution of the attractiveness of the waterfront as example of locative media, combined with the social media outlets of the web as enablers of public participation in public art (also see “Editer l’espace public” in Chronos).

Augmenting Public Space and Authoring Public Art: The Role of Locative Media (web – pdf)

Abstract: Locative media remain a useful frame for understanding how collaborative sensing will broadly empower groups to author alternative narratives of urban public space. The case of Olafur Eliasson’s New York City Waterfalls is used to describe this process in the context of a recent large public art work.

Anthony has some provoking thoughts that go right up to my alley in considering locative media provide a solid basis for investigating the larger implications of collaborative sensing and sensemaking. The example of the Waterfalls indicate that, in the future, artists will need to rethink how they engage the public as co-producers of public art and public. It implies the development of techniques and observations from both on passive activity sensing and pools of user-generated data (or as Anthony would say “the interplay between top-down systems of command and control versus bottom-up systems for collective action“). I would argue that this example with public art could extended to any kind of practice that touches the public spaces.

Relation to my thesis: “locative media will also extend our awareness of the urban condition” and “the next step of urban computing will be the development of platforms for making sense of these pools of user-generated data, and visualizing them in place.”

Seminar at Yahoo! Research

I was in Barcelona this week to present an extensive overview of my research work in the domain of people-centric sensing at the weekly 1-hour seminar of the local Yahoo! Research lab.

People-centric sensing in the city of the near future (slides)

Abstract. Technological advances in sensing, computation, storage, and communications is turning people as sensors of their own environment. Indeed, the increasing deployment of wireless and mobile devices produce new types of dynamic urban data that people generate by passively and actively interacting with these ubiquitous technologies. In this talk, I will illustrate through a few examples how the analysis and visualization of these data gives the ability to show previously invisible urban dynamics resulting in opportunities to inform the urban design, planning and management processes. Moreover, the increasing integration of these technologies into the fabrics of our lives could create more responsive cities in which authorities, service providers and citizens can monitor urban processes and react to events in real-time. Finally, I will ponder these opportunities by highlighting the complex socio-technical assemblage that challenges researchers and practitioners in designing the integration of these new dynamic urban information into people’s daily life.

Thanks to Ricardo Baeza-Yates for the invitation

Situated Technologies: Toward the Sentient City

The exhibition Situated Technologies: Toward the Sentient City aims at imagining alternative trajectories for how various mobile, embedded, networked, and distributed forms of media, information and communication systems might inform the architecture of urban space and/or influence our behavior within it. Curated by Mark Shepard and organized by the Architectural League of New York, it will open in September 2009 with 5 commissioned projects that examine the broader social, cultural, environmental and political issues within which the development of urban ubiquitous/pervasive computing is itself situated. One of them, Trash Track, proposed by the MIT SENSEable City Lab (led by Eugenio Morello) will explore how pervasive technologies can help expose the challenges of waste management and sustainability:

Trash Track is inspired by the NYC Green Initiative, which aims to increase the rate of waste recycling in the city to almost 100% by 2030. The project considers how pervasive technologies can help expose the challenges of waste management and sustainability. Trash Track will tag different types of waste and follow these through the city’s waste management system to reveal the end-of-life journey of our everyday objects. Whereas most focus in the economic system is on the supply chain, Trash Track will help underscore the environmental impact of consumer waste by visualizing the waste chain, revealing the ultimate destination of the things we throw away.

In other words, the goal of this project is to reveal the “removal-chain” of our everyday objects and waste with a citizen science approach. This approach raise the concerns of using technologies to solve the very problems they have created, as recently discussed by Anne Galloway in “The Rise of Sensor Citizen“:

For example, projects in this domain rarely, if ever, question the environmental or political impacts of the technologies they seek to employ for environmental and political activism. For example, the United Nations now estimates that almost 50 million tonnes of electronic waste are discarded each year. While the environmental costs of toxic e-waste are substantial and can be added to the environmental impact of manufacturing new electronics, the problem is exacerbated by a variety of related practices that disadvantage developing nations. While all of the projects discussed above advocate using technologies for socially, politically and environmentally positive ends, they also implicitly support existing consumption practices in the developed world, and hide the role that technological progress has played in creating the very problems they seek to improve.

Relation to my thesis: The brainstorm session to develop the Trash Track proposal were an excellent learning experience to understand designers, architects, engineers, urbanists concerns and practices, as well as cultural differences in the approach of people as sensors and urban sustainability. I could not help raising the ambivalence of using dust networks that transforms into e-waste to reduce dust. It will be the fascinating challenge of Track Trash to give a counter example to these concerns. I imagined a scenario that solely focuses on the design of pervasive electronic devices that highlight their own removal-chain and help their recycling.

E-waste removal-chain in contemporary cities

From Sentient to Responsive Cities, Long Version

Last week at Visualizar’08, I presented the long version of my talk From Sentient to Responsive Cities (slides with notes, video). This talk compiles many of the thoughts and works I produced over these past couple of years. It is divided into three parts:

Microscopes and telescopes
I discuss the dynamic data we generate when actively or passively interacting with new urban actors such as wireless networks or RFID systems. The mapping of these data reveal many invisible dynamics of the city and this often in real-time (with Bicing, Velib or Flickr as data sources). Research in that domain have produced beautiful microscopes and telescopes to visualize urban dynamics. Besides their utility in stretching the imagination of stakeholders in the city, they do not allow to understand “what we see”.

Mapping new urban actors

Evidence and loops
New techniques are being developed to transform the massive amount of dynamic urban data into evidences and information that can be acted upon; moving from purely Sentient to Responsive cities. From the dynamic census of a city from its cellular network activity to the definition of indicators to measure the evolution of the attractiveness of places, there are potential to create a new type of urbanism based evidences generated with the analysis of digital footprints actors of a place leave behind them. These evidences can transform the evaluation of urban design and digital urban services with post-occupency evaluations often overlooked in the practice of architecture and urban design. Similarly the communication of the information generated back to actors of the urban space could create a feedback loop in which the analysis of the data impact the activity of people that create new data and so on.

The evolution of the flows of photographers in Lower Manhattan in Summers of 2006, 2007 and 2008.

Taxi drivers
But how to integrate this type of mechanism by taking into consideration the complex socio-technical assemblage of cities? A set of answers can come from the observation of current deployment of ubiquitous technologies in the city. Therefore, I studied of the integration of satellite navigation system into the practice of taxi drivers describes the co-evolution people have with technologies: how they adapt to it and how they adapt it to their practice. The observations reveal the necessity to have a large knowledge of the city judge the quality of the information provided by sat-nav system. Novice taxi drivers were often not trusting system and access the paper street guide and maps to support their navigation and wayfinding; the satnav system becoming a tool among a large eco-system of artifacts.

A taxi driver mixing the use of a satnav and the official street guide of Barcelona.

Relation to my thesis: An attempt to find a coherence in my multiple works. I might have found a good line of thoughts in describing the potentials to transform urban data into evidences and information that can be acted upon. (Paco Gonzalez produced a summary in Spanish)

At Visualizar08 Database City

This week, I am Visualizar08 Database City Workshop at Media Lab Prado in Madrid. The program of this 2-weeks workshop mixes theoretical seminars with hands-on development of 9 selected projects of data visualization applied to the urban context. Today I gave the long version of my “From sentient to responsive cities” talk in which I laid out many aspects of my research including the mix of quantitative urban data analysis and qualitative observations (taxi drivers). More on that later.

Other lecturers include Juan Freire (Visualizing Urban Spaces’ Digital Skin. How? Why?), Andrés Ortiz from Bestiario (What’s that good for?) and Adam Greenfield with his opus The Long Here, the Big Now, and other tales of the networked city.

Relation to my thesis: A unique event that covers my thoughts and instantiation discussed here. I used my talk as an experiment to find a coherent line of thought for the outline of my dissertation.

Framing my PhD Dissertation

After a summer of dense project coordination and urban data analysis, time is slowly coming to frame the content of my PhD thesis dissertation. I plan to submit it in March 2009 with a timeline composed of 3 months to complete the current “deep dig” analysis of digital breadcrums followed by another 3 months early next year of compiling and writing the dissertation. Discussions with my PhD advisor led to the agreement that the dissertation should cover the extensive work I have been leading in the aspects of implicit and explicit human interaction with pervasive geoinformation. In practice it implies framing my analysis of pervasive user-generated content as a core element alimented with more qualitative studies on the perception and generation of location information (with an emphasis on location quality and uncertainty) and the co-evolution of humans with location information. It creates the challenge to keep a flow of thoughts between the different studies, but it allows me to build on the approach to mix quantitative digital footprints analysis enhanced with descriptions from qualitative observations. A mixed approach I would like to document and ponder for my post-academic life.

The next step is to staple my paper together and write a chapter that summarizes the contribution for each work. Then from each contribution see what kind of linking is necessary. My work addresses a few questions created by the increasing amount of implicit and explicit interaction people have with digital infrastructures in the (urban) physical space:
1. How do we co-evolve with the pervasive availability of geoinformation?
2. How do we manage (interpret and generate) the fluctuating quality of geoinformation?
3. How to take advantage of these novel massive amount of pervasive user-generated geodata?

My thesis addresses these question first by describing how the location information provided by pervasive appliances impacts our work practices, a theme I cover in The co-evolution of taxi drivers and their in-car navigation systems (and other more complete paper still in progress). The very different appropriation of the systems raises the issue of the user interpretation of location quality that I categorize in the experiments on CatchbBob! summarized in Getting real with ubiquitous computing: the impact of discrepancies on collaboration and Issues from Deploying a Pervasive Game on Multiple Sites. A fluctuating location quality is part of humans practice of generating and sharing geoinformation as highlighted in Place this Photo on a Map: A Study of Explicit Disclosure of Location Information and Assessing pervasive user-generated content to describe tourist dynamics. I still need to finish my study and publish on the practices of geoannotating and georeferencing information. Despite the imperfections of sensors-based and user-generated geoinformation constantly generated implicitly or explicitly, their aggregation and analysis (following privacy regulation and ethical guidelines) provide novel perspectives on understanding urban dynamics and particularly tourism. I covered the opportunities from the development of softwares to the application of data analysis techniques that I entitled “digital footprinting”. The contributions include the collection, visualization and analysis of digital footprints that reveal tourist dynamics in Leveraging explicitly disclosed location information to understand tourist dynamic: a case study (Journal of Location Based Services) and the analysis of digital shadows and their correlation with digital footprints in Digital footprinting: uncovering the presence and movements of tourists from user-generated content that reveals the complementary perspectives of each data set. Other data analysis techniques on digital shadows allow to Quantifying the presence of visitors from the mobile phone network activity they generate (International Forum on Tourist Statistics, in print) and develop indicators on the urban space that perform Measures of urban attractiveness based on the analysis of digital footprints (in progress). While these approach focus on aggregated data and crowds, specific mobile software developments allow to perform mobility panel studies on a world-wide scale with system that perform World-wide air travel detection (in progress).

Relation to my thesis: Setting a deadline to finish in 3.5 years and framing the work done so far under one umbrella. The challenge will be to link the multiple contributions under a common umbrella. Equality important will be to keep a scientifically honest piece of work that is accessible to people on the edges of academia. For instance, I was advised not to hesitate in referencing to my blog and acknowledge it is a research tool (inspired by Anne Galloway’s PhD disseration).

The Visible City

Last week at Picnic took place a session on the The Visible City that featured projects that map cellphone network activity mobility as proxy of different urban dynamics in a city. Euro Beinat Director Sensible Future Foundation revealed the Current City initiative was with an artistic animation of SMS activity in Amsterdam by designed by Aaron Koblin with the support of urban data mining star Andrea Vaccari. In addition colleague Assaf Bidermann presented the senseable city lab‘s classics (see the a recent program on Discovery Channel for a description of the motivations behind these projects).

InternetActu has a concise report on these 2 presentations (Regarde la ville vivre) that apparently briefly discussed the use of cellphone data to reveal touristic areas (a theme I touch in a paper in the upcoming issue of IEEE Pervasive Magazine). With a less subdued tone, Michiel de Lange (who organized the Mobile City conference this year) provides a very refreshing angle on the session. He argues that quantitative data reduce mobility to mere movements without meaning that does not allow to to get a sense of the city as a lived space and how it is experienced. I find a lot of sympathy in this claim that touches the limitations of hard urban data (they might reveal the “how” but barely assess the motivations of the people who produce the data) and the necessity of the qualitative angle to describe the “why”.

A new urban hiker in Manhattan (the day Lehman Brothers filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection). Quantitative data won’t capture his divergent experience of the city that day.

Relation to my thesis: Discussing the visualization of urban digital footprints seems to be the trend this year (see also José Luis de Vicente’s interview “Visualiser pour discuter et agir” and the upcoming VISUALIZAR’08: Database City workshop he organizes). In 1 years will we actually discuss the analysis of these data and the methods to assess them? My journey as a PhD candidate will be over by then.

Apparently my work on Flickr in Barcelona has been mentioned at Picnic. Photo courtesy of cc. Kandinski

Leveraging explicitly disclosed location information to understand tourist dynamics: a case study

Previously accepted for publication in the Journal of Location Based Service, the paper Leveraging explicitly disclosed location information to understand tourist dynamics: a case study, co-authored with Filippo Dal Fiore and Carlo Ratti at the MIT SENSEable City Lab and Josep Blat my advisor at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra, in now available on the journal web site (Volume 2, Issue 1).

Relation to my thesis: First outcome of my collaboration with senseable. Follow-up work will be published in the upcoming issue of IEEE Pervasive Computing.

VISUALIZAR'08: Database City

In November, I will be in Madrid to teach at this year’s VISUALIZAR workshop on “database cities”. Organized by Medialab-Prado, this series of workshop explores the social, cultural and political possibilities of the art and science of data visualization. This year, curator José Luis de Vicente set the focus on the city and its “daily generated volumes of information that requires new methods of analysis and understanding”. The introductory pitch goes as follows:

Urban environments, which are becoming increasingly dense, complex and diverse, are one of contemporary society’s largest “databases”, daily generating volumes of information that require new methods of analysis and understanding. How can we use the data visualization and information design resources to understand the processes governing contemporary cities and better manage them? What can we learn from studying traffic and pedestrian movement flows through the streets of Madrid? What would happen if we filled the streets with screens providing information updated each moment about water and electricity consumption?

For two weeks, lectures, presentations, and an intense project development programme will involve participants from all over the world in a collaborative process that will culminate in eight new proposals for the city.

There is a call for projects and a call for papers (Deadline: October 5, 2008).

Relation to my thesis: A good gig to summarize and transmit the lessons learned this year at senseable with a 1-hour lecture to provoke and days of hands-on activities to share my methods and techniques. I will share the roles of lecturer and instructor with Adam Greenfield, Juan Freire and Bestiario‘s Santiago Ortiz and Andrés Ortiz.

First International Workshop on Trends in Pervasive and Ubiquitous Geotechnology and Geoinformation

The program of the First International Workshop on Trends in Pervasive and Ubiquitous Geotechnology and Geoinformation as part of GIScience 2008 is now online. I will present a position paper “Assessing pervasive user-generated content to describe tourist dynamics” on my ongoing study of people’s practice of geotagging and geoannotating photos in Flickr.

Abstract. In recent years, the large deployment of mobile devices has led to a massive increase in the volume of records of where people have been and when they were there. The analysis of these spatio-temporal data can supply high-level human behavior information valuable to urban planners, local authorities, and designers of location-based services. This paper proposes the study of publicly available people generated geo-referenced content to provide novel perspectives on tourist dynamics. Our initial works analyzed these digital footprints people leave behind them as a historic of physical presence when they visit a city. The results provided insights on the density of tourists, the points of interests they visit as well as the most common trajectories they follow. Yet to be able to fully analyze these newly available data, there is a need to understand the diverse circumstances they were generated from. We believe that the understanding of the human practice behind these data and their relation to the urban space could open a new perspective in analyzing tourism.

Relation to my thesis: An occasion to mingle with the GI Science community and understand how they perceive the increasing amounts of spatially relevant information (from both human factors and engineering challenges). For instance I have been interested in Brent Hecht’s GeoRS as a way to present Wikipedia knowledge repository as a geographic reference system.