A Survey and Taxonomy of Location Systems for Ubiquitous Computing

“A Survey and Taxonomy of Location Systems for Ubiquitous Computing“, Jeffrey Hightower and Gaetano Borriello, Extended paper from Computer, 34(8), August 2001, pp.57-66.

The authors present the basic techniques used for location sensing, taxonomized location system properties (physical position vs symbolic location, absolute vs relative, location computation, accuracy, precision, scale, recognition, cost, and limitations), and surveyed research and commercial location systems that define the field. They highlight location-sensing-system accuracy as a challenge and the necessity to integrate an error factor:

We therefore suggest that future quantitative evaluations of location-sensir systems include the error distribution, summarizing the system’s accuracy and precision and any relevant dependences such as the density of infrastructural elements. (…) We strongly encourage the location-sensir research and development community to investigate how best obtain and represent such error distribution.

Accuracy and precision are defined as follow in location positioning:

The distances denote the accuracy, or grain size of the positioning information. The percentage denote the precision or how often we can expect to get the accuracy. For example reaching 1-to-3 meter accuracies 99 percent of the time.

Relation to my thesis: The limitations are defined as location system properties.

References:
Markus Bylund and Fredrik Espinoza. Using quake III arena to simulate sensors and actuators when evaluating and testing mobile services. In CHI 2001 Extended Abstracts, pages 241–242. ACM, March-April 2001. Short Talk.

Can you Hear me Now?

Wireless reliability is a still a key selling factor in the US, as highlighted by Verizon’s Can you Hear me Now? campaign.

Source: Elena777

Relation to my thesis: This ad struck me this Fall in the US. Patchy coverage and unreliable networks require attention to wireless mechanisms in their context of use.

Notes on Seams, Seamfulness and Seamlessness

Notes on Seams, Seamfulness and Seamlessness (How designers can help users to exploit shortcomings of technology) taken by Antti Oulasvirta (User Experience Research Group, Helsinki Institute for Information Technology) at the Seamfulness Workshop on 17th of august 2004, at TeliaSonera Haninge. Antti summurizes the Seamful Design as an endeavour not to make everything seamful, but to aim for “seamless interaction but seamful technology“. This calls for solving the following problems:

1. Understanding which seams are important. There are zillions of possible attributes of system/context/interaction/user that can potentially create a seam. We need to know which ones are important to users.
2. Presenting seams to users. Presenting seams to users is a more traditional user interface design or information visualization problem than the two other.
3. Designing interaction with seams. Especially, the question of how users are able to switch from the main task with the device to seams fluently is important.

Antti’s talk on SeamfulSystems: What are they and how can we design them? contains several very interesting thoughts and references (everyday life types of seams, Seamfulnessin 8 current approaches to ubicomp HCI, seams are part of the context, designing seamful systems is ultimately a UCD problem).

I really enjoy the physical example he uses to describe a “beautiful seam”.

A beautiful seam. Construction site at the Doge’s Palace in Venice is hidden behind a sheet that depicts how the building is going to look like after the construction is ready. With a little effort, an ugly seam (construction sites tend to be noisy, unsightly, and block pedestrians and cars) is turned into a one that can inspire passers-by to think and share opinions about how the palace is going to look like.

Relation to my thesis: My work aims at informing location-aware systems designers on ways to manage shortcomings of ubiquitous technologies. Unintentionally, my 3 sub-heuristics target the 3 points of the seamful design program in the context of location-aware systems as mentioned in my research plan:

Understanding which seams are important
the degree of positioning accuracy being appropriate to the task or activity at hand. In consequence, according to the activities supported by our location-aware system, how certain (accurate) do positional and tracking systems have to be in
order to be useful and acceptable?

Presenting seams to users
There is no comprehensive understanding of the parameters that influence successful uncertainty visualization. There is a need for a more systematic approach to understand the usability of uncertainty representation methods and interactive interfaces for using those representations. With our scope of ubiquitous computing we will investigate the visualization of spatial uncertainty in a real-time location-aware system.

Designing interaction with seams:
What is the balance between implicit and explicit forms of human interaction with a location-aware system. Therefore, according to the activities supported by our location-aware system, we can investigate interaction dynamics to communication uncertainty, and nurture usefulness of the system.

Finally, as inprired by Antti’s presentation, I would like to find more failed prototypes that could have benefited from an appropriate management of the technological shortcomings.

AIR: Area's Immediate Reading

AIR is a public, social experiment in which people are invited to use an air monitoring devices to explore their neighborhoods and urban environments for pollution and fossil fuel burning hotspots. Participants are able to see pollutant levels in their current locations, as well as simultaneously view measurements from the other AIR devices in the network.

An on-board GPS unit and digital compass, combined with a database of known pollution sources such as power plants and heavy industries, allow carriers to see their distance from polluters as well. The AIR devices regularly transmit data to a central database allowing for real time data visualization.

Relation to my thesis: I am interested in bottom-up citizen-collected spatial information to highlight features of the urban space

PerGames 2007, Call for Paper

PerGames 2007 will take place at the University of Salzburg, Austria, on June 11 and 12, 2007.

The PerGames series of international symposia addresses the design and technical issues of bringing computer entertainment back to the real world with pervasive games.

Contributions can take the form of research papers (e.g. on awareness issues in pervasive games, (mis-)use of enabling technologies in games) and also citywide games:

Citywide Games are larger than Live Demonstrations with respect to the suggested temporal or spatial expansion. Typically, they will be played over several hours or days within the city of Salzburg or within the conference building.

Possible types of Citywide Games include mobile phone games, augmented reality games, casual games, alternate reality games, online on street games, event-based games, proximity games, crossmedia games, technology-enhanced larp games.

Relation to my thesis: I plan to perform evaluations on a city-scale

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.

Landed in Geneva

I will go to the TECFA seminar entitled Video Games meet Ubiquitous Computing: The Collective Simulation of a Human Being as well as the CHOROS monthly seminar on Digitally and Space with this month’s topic on “Les echelles de la société de l’information”. The Choros lab recently published the Atlas des mutations spatiales de la Suisse. Finally I will try to attend the CTI’s Réseaux de personnes, réseaux d’objets.

Mobile Monday Barcelona on Mobile Social Networks

Today, I moderate this month’s Mobile Monday Barcelona event on Mobile Social Networks. We will explore the new layers of commodities offered to support our mobile social lives in extension to the obvious voice and SMS communications means. The developing fist generation of mobile social networks are characterized by a mix user-generated content, instant messaging, friend finder (location-awareness), ping your buddies, and proximity-based matchmaking. They promise to deliver ubiquitous availability to our friends, our familiar strangers, and their generated content. On kind of mobile social networks rely extend strong web-based platform (such as the upcoming mobile versions of MySpace and YouTube) while others almost uniquely target the mobile space (e.g. Dodgball, AirG, Jaiku). Now, what are the key elements to “bringing your phone to life” (as advertised by Dodgeball), “connect with the people you care about” (Jaiku), “connect with anyone, anywhere” (AirG) and meet users and investors expectations. Speakers will provide different perceptive on this promising yet challenging field. Alex Kummerman has been a long observer and actor in the world of mobile social softwares. His 13 years of mobile telecommunication expertise should offer us an overview of the mobile social market trends. Alex will present YouTribe as a case study for ClickMobile platform, a platform to build and run connected communities. YouTribe is a social networking cross platform (web and mobile) community recently launched in France. Alberto Benbunan Garzón, founder and Business Development Director of Mobile Dreams Factory will talk about their social networking and dating platform called Moviligo, the specificity of the spanish market, the challenges, opportunities and future applications in this area. Finally, Felix Petersen, co-founder of Plazes world-widely used (100,000 users) location-aware interaction system, connecting people and “plazes”. This service is branded as “the navigation system for your social life”.

I expect this event to address the current state of the art in mobile social networks, insights on the current use of mobile social software in order to already think of the next generation of mobile social networks (e.g. ubiquitous social networks?)

Current generation:
What are the key constraints that prevent mobile social softwares to reach the popularity level of their web-based versions. Can mobile social networks cover more than the targeted the 15-24 years old population? Is it really useful for mobile users right now? Do the companies behind make money yet? What are the new business models in this field?

Learn from current use:
What are the activities of member of mobile social networks to be supported, what are the (non-expected) emerging uses. Where are mobile social software used? While being mobile, nomade, at home (example of mobile games being mostly played at home)? So in general: What do they learn form the mobile social communities? How are they different from the web-based communities? How people use the software? When? Where?

The omnipresent privacy issue:
The location-awareness raises issues on privacy. How do people deal with that?

Next generation:
What can be learn from current platforms. What could be the next generation? social network capabilities build-in on other mobile devices (e.g. Microsoft Zune), social network interoperability/integration, more use of the tagged physical space?

Relation to my thesis: mingle with the industry and understand how location is integrated in social softwares.

“Convince Woody”, a serious game on competence development in a distributed collaborative environment

Paper submitted to the Service Oriented Approaches and Lifelong Competence Development Infrastructures, 2nd TenCompetence Workshop which is going to take place on January 11-12, 2007 in Manchester, United Kingdom.

Girardin, F., Boursinou, E., Moghnieh, A., “Convince Woody”, a serious game on competence development in a distributed collaborative environment

Abstract: In this paper, we present the adaptation of a serious game in the context of an e-learning framework supporting distributed social networks. The game, “Convince Woody” takes stage in the digital movie production highlighting the problem of managing the competence development dimension involved in interdependent yet highly spread organizations. Our first objective is to demonstrate the utility of serious games in complex cooperative environments and converge on the provision of a suitable environment for validating and evaluating informal learning perspectives in an e-learning framework. Secondly, the pilot will prove a state-of-the-art environment for revising remote collaboration from an asynchronous communication perspective in order to evaluate the relevant tools’ efficiency in responding to the needs of our scenario. Lastly, we plan to explore the use of synchronous and asynchronous collaborative tools to maintain the flow of information, the interaction and the cooperation.

Relation to my thesis: …

Common Models and Patterns for Pervasive Computing Workshop (CMPPC '07)

The Common Models and Patterns for Pervasive Computing Workshop will take place at Pervasive 2007 in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, May 13-16, 2007. The goal of CMPPC 2007 is to provide a forum to identify and address the issues to continue the rapid rate of progress and facilitate the wider deployment of pervasive systems. The workshop topic “Examples of pervasive systems used and supported by multiple projects and research groups avoiding reinvention and rework” provides me the opportunity to submit a paper on the development, deployment and run of EPFL’s CatchBob! and UBC’s The Fugutive.

Relation to my thesis: For quite some time now, I have been looking for the opportunity to write a workshop paper on CatchBob!