Questioning Ubiquitous Computing

Last week at Ubicomp, I briefly met Jo Vermeulen who pointed me to an article on written some 12 years ago by Agusting A. Araya examining and criticizing the proposals advanced by the ubicomp literature: Araya, A. A. (1995). Questioning ubiquitous computing. In ACM Conference on Computer Science, pages 230–237.

This papers sketches a framework for understanding modern technology (now commonly mistaken as being the mere application of modern science) to criticize the technological thinking forming the assumptions that determine the development of ubiquitous computing. It highlights the chain problems and technological fixes we are involved in (e.g. issues of privacy of information dealt with innovative technologies such as cryptography) to reach desirable goal of invisibly enhancing the world that already exists. Now assuming that the technological advances could be achieved, I keep two critiques that are still relevant to the current state of ubicomp research:

Driven by technology, rather than needs
Ubiquitous computing is conceived as being primarily – perhaps exclusively – driven by technology and its sources of inspiration are other technologies that have successfully penetrated everyday life. It is seen as the best possibility for “achieving the real potential of information technology”. Thus, ubicomp has little to do with human needs and much more with the unfolding of technology per se.

Acceptance taken for granted
The primary of the unfolding of technology over the satisfaction of humans needs, and the self-sufficiency of this unfolding are taken as absolute givens. Therefore, it does not really require a justification.

Relation to my thesis: This paper proved to be a rather timely reading (in continuation to train of thought started earlier this year at LIFT). From what I have seen in Innsbruck, these topics are still barely taken into consideration (to the mere exceptions to the talks of Barry Brown and Yvonne Rogers). Arayas’ quote “As the poser of technologies grows, it will become increasingly necessary to probe into the assumptions being made during their inception and into the possible consequences” is still very much contemporary.

Workshops on the Integration of Location-Aware Technologies in Urban Environments

A couple of workshops I will send a position paper to:

Situating Sat Nav: Questioning the TomTom Effect, as part of the 2008 Association of American Geographers Annual Conference. 15-19 April 2008, Boston, USA.

Comprehensive in-car satellite navigation (Sat Nav) systems have rapidly become affordable and ‘must-have’ mass-market accessories, advertised on television and the focus of ‘scare’ stories in the tabloid press. With their driver’s-eye position, dynamic maps and an authoritative voice telling you where and when to turn, these archetypal geographical gizmos depend on the ‘magic’ locational power of a cluster of unseen satellites and the global reach of corporations marketing the latest consumer fad. Sat Nav offers technologically sophisticated spatial data models of the world, but the technology quickly sinks into taken-for-granted everyday driving practices, such that its social and political significance is hard to assess. The gadgets themselves take space on the dashboard and windscreens, but also make new senses of space for the driver, well beyond the car. What exactly is the nature of this TomTom effect?

I plan to discuss my work with taxi drivers within the context of my thesis. Deadline: September 30th

Urban Mixed Realities: Technologies, Theories and Frontiers, as part of CHI 2008. April 6th 2008, Florence, Italy

Mixed reality environments encompass a range of domains from pervasive games through to systems to support cultural heritage, and currently represent a growing area of research. However the growth in such systems has resulted in a need to further explore their situated and social nature, and how these aspects impact upon their use of such systems and alter the environment around them. Although there has already been a substantial amount of research into telepresence and sense of place much of this has focused on more traditional technologies such as purely virtual environments or mobile tour guides. In contrast urban mixed reality environments require a substantial change of research emphasis and in doing so must take into account the following shifts
* From virtual to mixed reality environments which mesh or augment places and times
* From psycho-physiological and “constructive perception” to understanding social action, interaction and meaning making
* From a focus on individual behavior to interaction in groups who are co-located and distributed
* From immaterial environments to those which combine real and virtual elements
* From a passive sense of place and presence, one where creation of place, meaning and engaging of all senses plays a critical role

I plan to discuss the work I plan to perform next year as a member of the SENSEable City Lab in the Wireless City project in Florence (e.g. (tourist) interaction issues within urban environments, social navigation, seamful design, evaluation methodology, urban spatio-temporal data analysis). Deadline: 17th October 2007

An Extensive LBS Bibliography

Jonathan Raper uploaded an extensive bibliography of research in Location-Based Services (MobilityNewv2.txt) that mirrors the one in the Editorial Lead article of the upcoming first issue of the Journal of Location-Based Services.

Relation to my thesis: A complement to my current bibliography (in BibTeX).

*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.

IEEE Pervasive Computing on Urban Computing

IEEE Pervasive Computing special issue on Urban Computing is out. The guest editors Tim Kindberg, Matthew Chalmers, and Eric Paulos define urban computing as “the integration of computing, sensing, and actuation technologies in everyday urban settings and lifestyles“. The urban space is a recent ground of investigation because it poses many specific research and deployment challenges: as ownership issues are complex as are the dynamics and density of system participation. Successful integration requires taking several facets of the environment into account at once. Urban settings frame social behaviors. They encompass architectural forms and features that might not be harmonious with given technologies, and they’re variably permeated by wireless networks and fixed and mobile devices.

Urban computing research is still at an early stage with a wide range of opportunities. They range from understanding urban appropriation of pervasive technologies, to producing fully integrated designs specifically for urban settings, and taking advantage of the deployed technologies to augment the understanding of the urban environment. My contribution (in collaboration with Nicolas) to this issue lies in the last category. We briefly describe as a Work in Progress the Tracing the Visitor’s Eye project in which we collect Flickr photos to reveal the movements of people in cities.

Tracing the Visitor’s Eye in Rome

Relation to my thesis: Urban computing is an emerging research avenue at the crossroad of ubiquitous computing and HCI. Definitively a sweet spot of my research focus.

Accepted: Work in Progress in IEEE Pervasive Computing

My work-in-progress submission (co-authored with Nicolas) entitled “Tracing the Visitor’s Eye: Using Explicitly Disclosed Location Information for Urban Analysis” has been accepted for publication in the July-Sept. IEEE Pervasive Computing special issue on urban computing. The call for paper was here. With in addition my two weeks stay the MIT Department of Urban Studies and Planning to deliver a proof of concept, the project is now well alive and kicking.

CHI Workshop on Mobile Spatial Interaction

I could not attend the CHI workshop on Mobile Spatial Interaction, but luckily I bumped into the (co-)organizer Peter Fröhlich, as well as participants Will Seager and Zach Toups whos work closely relate to mine.

Will Seager, and Danae Stanton Fraser, User responses to GPS positioning information on a digital map
This paper contributes to demonstrate the need of transparent position carrying the notion of uncertainty in the data. The field study involving a pedestrian navigation task, positioning information supplied by GPS seemed too inaccurate to be useful. Worst still, the inaccuracy could confuse users, especially since the position icons used in commercial products typically give no indication of the degree of uncertainty. One solution to the issue of uncertainty would be to convey the level of certainty to user. If the GPS unit provides sufficient information to estimate the level of inaccuracy, this could be reflected in the position icon e.g. a transparent position icon that grows or shrinks depending on the level of accuracy.

Zachary O. Toups, and Andruid Kerne, Location-Aware Augmented Reality Gaming for Emergency Response Education: Concepts and Development
This paper presents the location-aware game Rogue Signals, deployed to enhance the team coordination skills of participants. The authors relied on an ethnography of fire emergency response practice to inform the design of the game. The study revealed design implications based on building coordinations skills such as leveraging information differential, mixed communication modalities, and utilizing audible clues.

Apparently, I missed Morten Fjeld who presented 3DVN: A Mixed Reality Platform for Mobile Navigation Assistance.

Imaging the City Workshop at CHI

The Imaging the City workshop here at CHI featured a nice set of practices and technologies for representing the urban environment in Human-Computer Interaction. Some of them are strongly related to my current work.

Urban Ritual in Rome: Characterizing the City with High-Resolution Cell Phone Data by Matthew Jull and Carlo Ratti is a follow-up on their work with Real-time rome. Their spatio-temporal analysis show that cell phone activity correlates strongly with the infrastructures and zones of the city (e.g., transportation links, commercial, office, residential zones) and the daily activities (e.g. wake up, commute, work, lunch, dinner, sleep, sports events). These preliminary results suggest that cell phone data can be used to characterize and map urban domains and the cultural signature of its occupants.

The daily activity of people throughout the city is revealed (i.e. wake up, commute, work, lunch, dinner, sleep, sports events etc.)
Personalized City by Continuous Location Logging by Jun Rekimoto and Takashi Miyaki. They propose a city visualization method based on long-term and continuous personal location history generated by WiFi-based location detection methods. Their visualization reveals a person’s “cognitive” map based on the traces left while navigating the urban space. They apply a fisheye-view method to distord the map in order o reflect the person’s location probability density. Therefore, frequently visited area becomes larger on the map. The continuous log of one’s geographical position could be a foundation for various “lifelog” applications, such as memory aid or information organizer (as suggested in Tracing Personal Mobility).

A nice comparison of WiFi in GPS location accuracy in a urban setting

Person’s “cognitive” map based on location history. Fisheye-view to reflect the person’s location probability density. Frequently visited area becomes larger on the map. To be useful in a local search task, it might be more useful to distort the map to reveal the less know areas. I have this experiment using anamorphosis maps in mind for a while now…

How We Watch the City: Popularity and Online Mapsi by Danyel Fisher. He developed Hotmap, a tool that visualizes how people have used Microsoft’s maps.live.com to reveal what parts of the maps they find most compelling. The results show that the vast majority of hits are focused on a fairly small area, following population, suggesting that largely, users currently find use of the tools for looking at natural scenery less compelling then they do city imagery. This work could be extended by show how people “query the city” (e.g. what are the keywords. Something I wanted to find out more about at Urban Mapping). Knowing more about the types of searches and the areas of interests could help the local search community to go beyond the classic, yet irrelevant “closest Starbucks” scenario. Categorizing the different types of granularity in space and time embedded in the queries could help understand how people query space.

The Big Picture: Exploring Cities through Georeferenced Images and RDF Shared Metadata, by Carlo Torniai, Steve Battle and Steve Cayzer. They present a prototype system by on Flickr geotagged images to discover geo-related pictures of a same city taken from different users. The browsing interface, based on different levels of relationship between pictures metadata, allows users to explore cities according to the relations discovered. An extension of the work can be found in Sharing, Discovering and Browsing Geotagged Pictures on the Web”.

DC Paper for Pervasive 2007 Accepted

My paper for the Pervasive 2007 Doctoral Colloquium has been accepted. It is an extended version of the CHI’07 submission.

Bridging the Social-Technical Gap in Location-Aware Computing

Abstract. 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. My research aims at exploring, and hopefully reducing this gap in the context of location-aware computing.

Relation to my thesis: I am pretty glad that people like Shwetak Patel (Supporting Location and Proximity-Based Studies in Natural Settings) and Leif Oppermann (Extending Authoring Tools for Location-Aware Applications with an Infrastructure Visualisation Layer) will also present their work. Hopefully Leif will also talk about his location based mobile phone game Love City. Pervasive 2007 will take place on May 13-16 in Toronto, Ontario, Canada.

Position Paper for the CMPPC Workshop at Pervasive 2007 Accepted

My paper (co-authored with Mike Blackstock and Nicolas Nova) for the workshop on Common Models and Patterns for Pervasive Computing (CMPPC) at the Pervasive 2007 conference has been accepted. All the accepted position papers are available online.

Issues from Deploying and Maintaining a Pervasive Game on Multiple Sites (pdf)

Abstract. In this paper we present the lessons learned from the deployment of a collaborative pervasive game on two different sites. We emphasize on the practical aspects of getting a pervasive systems deployed without any extra special infrastructure. Based on our experience, we describe the issues providers and administrators must take into consideration to deploy and maintain pervasive environments. In this perspective, we highlight that ubiquitous technologies must be consciously attended, as they are unevenly distributed, unevenly available.

Relation to my thesis: a paper I can link to whenever I mention the issues around deploying and maintaining CatchBob! Pervasive 2007 will take place on May 13-16 in Toronto, Ontario, Canada.