The Physical 7.5th Floor

Via Pascal. On the same trend, P&V’s physical representation.

Informal Mobile Sunday Barcelona

Stuart Mudie one of the co-author of Netsize Guide has opened a wiki page to informaly setup a mobile Sunday gathering in Barcelona prior to the 3GSM World Congress. I penciled me in. 8pm, Sunday 12 February 2006, in some BCN bar.

February 14 will be the 3GSM Gathering of the Mobilists.

Moleskine Transfer (2)

• I need to describe the relevance of my research focus. Starting from a big picture (find relations/interconnections with other themes) into a the specific low level of detail. List the key issues and do a selection.
• I will write a first internal report, with a frame and interactively update it (the Umberto Eco way).
• Do literature review on uncertainty and HCI
• Redefine the “measured” space with taking more that sensors into consideration
• Deepen my knowledge with ABM and how to integrate the methodology in my research scope.
• Think about the separation of the soft (socio-psycho, usability) and hard (practical and computational) aspects and how to make may work original on the soft side and with a mix of tools (e.g. ABM)
• I won’t submit conference papers too soon, because my literature review has gaps (missing the uncertainty in HCI part) and I do not want to rush into analyzing CatchBob! data without a strong ground. However, participation in Doctoral colloquiums would be a good thing. Targeted conferences would be:

MobileHCI in Espoo, Finland (May 7. No Doctoral Colloquium)
Perception and modelling of the environment

Ubicomp 2006 in Irvin, USA (March 31, Doctoral Colloquium June 12)
Understanding ubicomp and its consequences (e.g. conceptual models, lessons learnt, user studies and results from Ubicomp experiments)

CSCW 2006 in Banff, Canada (March 17, Doctoral Colloquium July 7)
Innovative technologies and architectures to support group activity, awareness and telepresence (bof…)

Pervasive 2006 in Dublin, Ireland (February 1, Doctoral Colloquium February 15)
Analysis, design, implementation and evaluation of pervasive systems and applications.

ICPS’06 : IEEE International Conference on Pervasive Services 2006, Lyon

Wo Ist Lumpi?

Locatis is yet another GPS based dog tracking solution, but this one is from Jura, Switzerland. One relevant use for Locatis is while hunting:

When tracking and beating during hunts, dogs can run several kilometres from their masters, who then do not know where they are. You can localise them with our PB100 and directly receive their geographical coordinates.

Via Petistic

Notebook Owners Barely Show Nomadic Behavior

A survey by Toshiba shows that notebook users do not take advantage of the mobility of the device and are even barely nomads. Only a handful of people use a laptop to go online when they are outside of the home. Just 11% used laptops in hotels, 7% on trains and 3% in coffee shops, compared to 55% who used them mostly at home. The survey also found that a core of users are still reticent about the technology.

The survey found that 15% thought there were not enough wireless locations for them to use the technology. Does this mean that the rest (85%) do not care, because they do not need and want wide WiFi coverage?

A Guide for Newcomers to Agent-Based Modeling in the Social Sciences

Robert Axelrod, and Leigh Tesfatsion. 2005. A Guide for Newcomers to Agent-Based Modeling in the Social Sciences. In Handbook of Computational Economics: Agent-Based Computational Economics , edited by K. L. Judd and L. Tesfatsion: North-Holland.

This guides gives a short introduction to Agent-based modeling and the social sciences and suggests a list of introductory readings to help newcomers become acquainted with agent-based modeling (ABM)

Social sciences seeks the understanding how the individuals interact with each other, and how the results can be more than the sum of the parts (how large-scall effects arise from the micro-processes of interactions among many agents). ABM is a method for studying the following 2 properties:

• the system is composed of interacting agents
• the system exhibits emergent properties. When the interaction of the agents is contingent on past experience, and especially when the agents continually adapt to that experience, mathematical analysis is typically very limited in its ability to derive the dynamic consequences.

The 3rd Way
ABM (and simulation in general) is a third way of doing science in additiona to deduction and induction. Simulation, like deduction, starts with a set of explicit assumption. But unlike deduction, simulation does not prove theorems with generality. Instead, simulation generates data suitable for analysis by induction.

ABM is a methodological approach that can be used to pursue the following goals:

Empirical understanding
Can particular types of observed global regularities can be reliably generated from particular types of agent-based models.

Normative understanding
Evaluating whether designs proposed for social policies, institutions, or processes will result in socially desirable system performance over time.

Heuristic
The way a greater insight can be attained about the fundamental causal mechanisms in social systems? The large-scale effects of interacting agents are often surprising because ti can be hard to anticipate the full consequences of event simple forms of interaction.

The best example to depict heurisitc in agent-based models is the city segregation model developed by Thomas Schelling: Schelling, Thomas C. (1978), Micromotives and Macrobehavior, Norton, New York, pp. 137-57.

This classic work demonstrates what can happen when behavior in the aggregate is more than the simple summation of individual behaviors. The highlighted pages present an agent-based model that shows how a high degree of residential segregation can emerge from the location choices of fairly tolerant individuals.

Methodological advancement
Provide methods and tool necessary to undertake study of social systems through controlled computational experiments.

The suggested readings are categorized in:

• Complexity and ABM
• Emergence of collective behavior
• Evolution
• Learning
• Norms
• Markets
• Institutional design
• Networks
• Modeling techniques

Research seminar: The Challenge of Internet Search

Prabhakar Raghavan, Head of Yahoo! Research, will give a research seminar on January 23rd at 4:30pm, at the UPF room 102 (França building).

Seminar abstrat

The internet is the biggest ever collection of knowledge, news, opinions, rumors, untruths and contradictions that mankind has ever assembled. Sifting through this jumble of information to extract useful information is one of the biggest and most interesting challenges facing computer scientists, statisticians, mathematicians, sociologists and economists today. This talk explores these challenges.

Slides of a presentation he did on the same subject in 2005.

Prabhakar’s latest publications include: Geographic routing in social networks, Structure and evolution of blogspace, and Propagation of trust and distrust.

L'Utopie du Lisse dans les Technologies de la Communication

La conclusion de l’ouvrage Mobilités.net par Daniel Kaplan est inspirante pour ma thèse. Il parle de l’utopie des technologies de la communication et la perception du numérique comme étant léger, rationel, fluide, beau, … alors que au contraire Kaplan constate (et je partage son constat) que l’intégration du numérique avec le physique apport apporte de nouvelles contraintes, de nouvelles complexité. Les espaces numériques sont remplis de bruit et sont trouées de toute part. A lieu de chercher la simplification, c’est l’adapation et la déformation des technologies qui permet l’humain de rester aux commandes. Cela va un contre les visions du digital qui enrobe le phyisique et du “seamless” inhérente à l’ubiquitous computing. Par contre, l’idéal a tout de même sa place. Par exemple, pédagogiquement, les étudiants apprennent les types idéaux (gaz idéal, fluide parfait, …) pour construire leur intuition sur les relations fondamentales entre les variables clés.

L’utopie du lisse et le constat du complexe

L’utopie des technologies de la communication est lisse. Qu’on l’espère comme un avenir radieux ou qu’on le combatte comme une perte, dans les deux cas, le numérique est associé à l’abstraction, la légèreté, la rationalité, la fluidité. La belle technologie ne fait pas de bruit (ou alors, pas volontairement), ne produit pas de chaleur (et résout en passant nos problèmes d’environnement), ne s’arrête jamais ; elle allège les contraintes, arase les obstacles, abat les frontières. Les technologies numériques transforment tout en chiffres pour ensuite, les transformer en temps : et le long de cet axe unique, tout s’écoule, la seule question est de savoir à quelle vitesse et la seule réponse, d’accélérer.
Or c’est à des constats inverses que nous conduit la lecture de cet ouvrage : celui d’une extraordinaire complexité et d’un monde plus grumeleux, adhérent, voire abrasif, que jamais. La question est alors de savoir s’il s’agit d’un échec, ou même d’un paradoxe. Nous ne le croyons pas.

Les nouvelles contraintes et complexités du numérique/physique

L’interaction croissante du monde numérique et du monde physique n’arrange rien : elle est à l’origine de nouvelles contraintes, de nouvelles complexités. [...] en lieu et place du silence des grands espaces numériques, le monde augmenté par le numérique n’est qu’une immense rumeur, trouée de toute part de sonneries, de bips, d’échos et d’interruptions de réseau

Jouer avec le désordre au lieu de cherche la simplification

Les acteurs des TIC se trompent quand ils affirment que l’appropriation des technologies par le public passe par leur simplification. [...] Le rôle de l’humain, aujourd’hui, est d’introduire du désordre dans les systèmes techniques qu’il a créés. Il s’en acquitte fort bien. C’est le signe qu’il reste aux commandes.

WiMax is All About Money

Now that the technical specifications for roaming are set, WiMax is at the peak of its hype cycle and also at the peak of its confusion. According to WiMax Faces Doubt, Despite Momentum
the challenges WiMax faces are not technical anymore, but mainly economical:

“The challenge that we face over the next three to four years in the WiMax area is that we have to drive the price down,” Maloney added. “All of us have to drive the deployment costs down so we can bridge that digital divide.”

This links to a comment I made on the challenges to create a “cloud of connectivity”. Pieces of technologies might be at disposal, but there is a huge scale up effort (technologicaly, economicaly, politicaly, user appropriation, …) to integrate them together in a valuable and profitable fashion.

Navizon Geotags

Navizon announces via Cyril Houri’s blog their mobile and web spatial annotation service called Geotags. This is nothing new and I have still haven’t seen a spatial annotation application reaching some sort of momentum. Anyway, I kind of like Navizon because whenever they hack something they just push it to their übergeek users. Pure techno-push, but their iterative process might lead to real scenarios if the users get caught in the participatory design game that Navizon seems to invite them to.