Smokers seem to have a better spatial awareness of the conference center hosting the LIFT conference. One of the smoker’s first task is to explore the new space to find smoking areas and create scenarios (e.g. detect the closest place to smoker after lunch).
Too much content and too many people to summarize the first day at LIFT06. I leave the running notes to Nicolas Nova, Bruno Giussani, Mauro Cherubini and Daniel Kaplan. Most relevant talk related to my work have been:
Bruno Giussani’s keynote [Bruno]
Matt Jones, Nokia – “Play & Mobility : Small Toys, Loosely Joined” [Daniel]
Bruce Sterling, Spimes and the future of artifacts [Bruno] [Daniel] [Nicolas]
Stefana Broadbent: The specialization of communication channels [Bruno] [Daniel]
One of the most joyful moment was when was when journalist Bruno Giussani was talking about the now existing “cloud of connectivity” over 70% of the population of the world and we (all with engineering background) could not get setup a basis Subethaedit back channel because we do not have the control over the routers and subnets. Very ironic moment (not for Bruno Giussani who I value his talent to grasp and communicate about technologies and people) and great for my thesis! We were covered by a few clouds of connectivity (WiFi, GSM, UMTS, …), which does not mean that a collaborative service would work. Technology is about chaos, complexity (in scale up), disturbance, frustration and of course adaptation.
I enjoyed Bruce Sterling vision on technology that “of course” lead to disturbance and cutting edge meaning “broken last week”. Moreover his spimes are not about being aware or smart. They have no computational capabilities nor ubiquitous. The “wands” control the spimes (same way as a mobile phone is a current gateway to the connected world. Bruce mixes wild ideas of “Fabjects” (objects on demand) with actually pretty down-to-earth, pragmatic requirements and questions of adoption and deployment. I hope that in Bruce’s next novel, the main character will feel either some sort of frustration to be among seamless spimes or incredible mental load to manage seamful spimes . And what about the ultimate goal of ubiquitous computing and the “Internet of things” (the term to talk about spimes if we want to make money)? Why would people want it? Reaching sustainability, having a society that can cleanup for itself. It is related to the study Effects of Pervasive Computing on Sustainable Development that I mentioned a few weeks ago.
In yesterday’s workshop Julian Bleecker mentioned first class citizen, first class objects and some objects becoming more important than humans. It think it is also now also relevant for countries, when the economy in World of Warcraft is more powerful than in some third-world nations. A break-down in this virtual world would create more disturbances than a catastrophe in a poor african country.
The terms Internet and Web are now definitively mixed, even among a specialist crowd of LIFT (browsing the Internet!). I am not a stuck up purist, but I am not sure if this is a good sign…
Finally a couple of nice expressions (mainly from Cory Doctorow (brilliant speaker!)):
“dot-com non-sence”
“dumb info hippie”
“John Doe lawsuits”
“as lost as last year’s Easter egg”
“jurassic era blogjects”
“a rothweiler beating the living shit out of a teddy bear”
Tag: lift06
Extension to my first thoughts for Today’s Blogjects in the World of Interconnected Things. Unfortunately I do not have too much to dedicate myself to the questions asked by Nicolas and Julian.
A blogject is…?
A context-aware and social-aware object that periodically communicates on categorized themes with its owner(s) and fellow blogjects using web protocols and blog stantdards.
What are examples of mobile, tangible, chatty networked objects today?
Tagged cows, My electricity and gaz counters (I receive a bill in the end of the month). I am still trying to find the first blogject in history. I believe blogjects might go back until ancient history.
“Technology-Fiction” is a genre of writing based upon Fictional Technology for design-innovation practices in which the style and language of technical, design, research and technical report writing is used to help envision an imaginary (future or past) technology that does not yet exist. It is distinct from fictional technology in that it emphasizes the social-cultural aspects of the world in which the technology exists, and distinct from science fiction in that . In effect, technology-fiction is a way to creatively explore novel, potentially unrealizable forms of technology for the purposes of design-innovation. In what usage contexts do you think a blogject or something related to this concept could be part of a compelling design?
Humans have a social identities and status in the physical and virtual space (with these 2 worlds now converging). Object do not have social statuses in the real world (expect some exception). Some objects are actually used to change an identity (a car, a cell phone, clothes, …) Blogjects might gain social status in the digital world and it would be interesting to see how to design blogjects that challenge their owner’s social status.
What would then be the design challenges of creating such a thing?
Make it grasp the context in uncontrolled environments and transfer a sense of trust. Affordable communicatation (except PAN, connectivity has a price). Make sense out of context. Or do we want lying objects?
For particular objects and specific user communities, consider blogject scenarios.
* Children… as en extension of the tamagochi or nintendos. Old people to feel less alone. Summarize my day (to-do list follower) and send it my girlfriend’s blogjects
Think about an object that can track history of interactions with other objects or with people. How might these interaction histories be used?
As memory, reasoning and imagination helper. Blogjects could be yet another physical form to extend our memoroy. To keep track of my unformal social network. To prevent us from interacting with people. Externalize imagination??
Alongside of recording its history of encounters and experiences (where it has been and what it has seen, for example) what would a blogject have to say to other blogjects?
Sharing gossips
Mike Kuniavsky tried to structure the terms related to the fragmentation of information processing into everyday objects. He says that pervasive computing, ubiquitous computing, ambient intelligence and physical computing describe the same idea but describe them as follow:
In Kalle Lyytinen and Youngjin Yoo. Issues and challenges in ubiquitous computing: Introduction. Communications of the ACM, 45(12):62–65, 2002., the authors introduce introduce ubiquitous computing as the integration of large-scale mobile computing with the pervasive computing functionality. These terms are thefor conceptually different and employ different ideas of organizing and managing computing services.
I especially like the pragramtic views of the 2 authors, mentioning the technological challenges (they use the term “service” without touching the social challenges) that ubicomp must and will face:
Mobile computing and its limitations (context-awareness)
Mobile computing is fundamentally about increasing our capability to physically move computing services with us. However, an important limitation is that the computing model does not considerably change while we move. This is because the computing device cannot seamlessly and flexibly obtain information about the context in which the computing takes place and adjust it accordingly.
Pervasive Computing and its challenges (environment-awareness and scale-up)
The idea of pervasive computing is an area populated with sensors, pads, badges, and virtual or physical models of the physical and social/cognitive environment. Pervasive computing services can be built either by embedding models of specific environments into dedicated. Currently, the main challenge of pervasive computing is the limited scope to teach a computer about its environment. This makes the availability and usefulness of such services limited and highly localized because of the large effort required to design and maintain such services.
Ubiquitous computing and its challenges (all of the above)
The main challenges in ubiquitous computing originate from integrating large-scale mobility with the pervasive computing functionality. In its ultimate form, ubiquitous computing means any computing device, while moving with us, can build incrementally dynamic models of its various environments and configure its services accordingly. [...] It is simultaneously very personal and extremely global.
Research in ubiquitous computing requires transcending the traditional barriers between social and technical as well as levels of analysis – individual, team, and organizational [1].
1. Kalle Lyytinen , Youngjin Yoo, Research Commentary: The Next Wave of Nomadic Computing, Information Systems Research, v.13 n.4, p.377-388, December 2002
Philips’ Next Simplicity was intended to be a tangible and inspirational way of communicating the brand promise for the coming three to five years. There were five themes: care, glow, play, share and trust.
Philips calls their approach simplicity-led design. They present artifacts characterized by straightforward operation, with an almost total absence of buttons and switches. Gestural interaction is a recurring theme in their environments.
The aim is honorable, but I am questioning if we really need for over-simplification and smoothen interfaces. Simplicity should not necessary mean hiding or not experiencing complexity? My claim is that it that seamless is utopic in uncontrolled environments (too many constraints) and in the same time the user want grips to keep control of technology. Humans adapt and twist. Learn and do the gestures or grab the switch?
LIFT06 organizers waited the conference to be sold out to announce a last minute guest speaker in the name of Bruce Sterling. Nice job in tracking the beast down in Belgrade (in the tradition of Carla Del Ponte) and bring it to Geneva. Let’s get ready to rumble…
Related to my current interest in modeling users of mobile and ubiquitous environments, Intelligent Space Partnership is working in urban areas on pedestrian movement analysis and modelling. Their developments lead to better understanding of pedestrian movement, shopping patterns and advise on the optimisation of public space design.
Pedestrian-oriented land uses in central Leeds (left), street network accessibility analysis in Washington D.C.
Robert Axtell. 2000. Why Agents? On the varied motivations for agent computing in the social sciences.
This paper (mainly focused in social sciences and political economy in particular) argues the existence of three distinct uses of agent-based computational models:
Strengths and Weaknesses
A very common motivation for ABM is dissatisfaction with rational agents. In most social processes either physical space or social network matter. These are difficult to account for mathematically except in hightly stylize ways. However, in ABM, it is usually quite easy to have the agent interactions mediated by space or network or both. Spatial networks are quite naturally represented in agent-based computatinal models. A physical location can be part of an agen’ts internal states. Likewise, its position in a social network can be easily represented internally. In ABM the only way to prove a sufficiency theorem is to go through multiple runs, systematically varying initial conditions or parameters in order to assess the robustness of results.
Robert Axelrod. 2003. Advancing the Art of Simulation in the Social Sciences. Japanese Journal for Management Information System 12 (2):16-22.
This paper provides a theoretical background on agent-based modeling (with a focus on social sciences). It describes simulation as a third way of doing science, in contrast to both induction and deduction. It finally offers advices for doing simulation research, focusing on programming, analyzing and sharing the results.
Simulation means driving a model of a system with suitable inputs and observing the corresponding outputs. One purpose of simulation is to be used as a scientific methodology (prediction, proof and discovery). Using simulation for prediction can help validate or improve the model upon which the simulation is based. However, even highly complicated simulation models can rarely prove completely accurate (it does not aim to provide an accurate representation of a particular empirical application). While induction can be used to find patterns in data, and deduction can be used to find consequences of assumptions, simulation modeling can be used as an aid intuition. Its goal is to enrich our understanding of funcademtal processes that may appear in a variety of application.
Emergent properties
Large-scale effects of locally interacting agents
Adpative rather than rational strategies
When agents use adaptive rather than optimizing strategies (rational), deducing the consequences is often impossible. Thus, simulation is often the only viable way to study populations of agents who are adaptive rather than fully rational. While people my try to be rational, they can rarely meet the requirements of information, or foresight that rational modle impose (Simon, 1955; March 1978)
Complexity
The complexity of agent-based modeling should be in the simulated results, not in the assumptions of the model.
Three apsects of the research process need to be taken care of once the conceptual model is developed:
Programming
The programming of a simulation model should achive three goals: validity, usability, and extendibility
Analyzing the results
Despite the purity and clarity of simulation data, the analysis poses real challenges. Understanding the results often means understanding the details of the history of a given run (results are path-dependent). In order to determine whetheer the conclusion from a given run are typical, it is necessary to do seveal dozen simutation runs using identical parameters (using different randome number seeds) to determine which results are typical and which are unusual. The statistical method for studying the effects of the changes will be regression if the changes are quantitative, and analysis of variance if the changes are qualitative. As always in statistical analysis, two questions need to be distinguished and addressed separately: are the difference statistically significant (meaning not likely to have been caused by chance), and are the difference substantively significant (meaning large enough in magnitude to be important)
Sharing the results
The basic problem is that it is hard to present a social science simulation briefly. It may be necessary to explain very carefully both the power and the limitations of the methodology each time a simulation report is published
Head of Yahoo! Research, Prabhakar Raghavan, was at the UPF today to officially announce that Yahoo! will expend its research operations into Europe with the opening of a new facility in Barcelona. UPF professor Ricardo Baeza-Yates will lead the center (with another one in Chile). The focus of the center will be on topics related to Web search and information extraction. The center’s new facility will be at the Parc Barcelona Media and will be run in conjunction with the Center for Innovation Barcelona Media which has strong ties to the University of Pompeu Fabra (UPF). [More...]
