Uncertainty in Location-Aware Systems

Presentation of my research on “Uncertainty in Location-Aware Systems” (40MB) at today’s internal mini-workshop.

Relation to my thesis: I am now considering selecting my first sub-question “how certain (cf. taxonomy) do positional and tracking systems have to be in order to be useful and acceptable?” as my main research question. It really fits with my past experiences and with my current interest in the granularity of user experiences in ubicomp (as well as in the accuracy of geotagged images in Flickr).

I blanked on a basic question about the potential applications of my research and started talking about how garbage collectors could profit from it (referring to the Liaison project and my very own thoughts in urban computing) . I am afraid it did not match the audience on that one, but it feels good to get off the beaten tracks (e.g the usual emergency management, fleet and assets tracking) when it comes to location-aware systems.

In the workshop, a talk on the quality of service in networks, made me recall the paper User-perceived Quality of Service in Wireless Data Networks and how I could actually apply the same approach of user-perceived quality in my research.

There is a philosophical level to my research that highlights the mismatches between our needs, expectations and behaviors towards technologies. It relates to Jose Rojas‘ (University of Glasgow) questioning the techno-push in ubicomp and how cultures have a different set of beliefs, goals, aims towards technology.