Emerging Operator-based GSM Positioning 3rd Party Services

Third-party services with operator-based GSM are emerging. World-Tracker.com offers operator-based GSM positioning in the UK (Germany, Spain and US (via Sprint) coming). Let’s hope for their users that their service is not at the level of their poorly designed web site. Last week, I tested Alex Kummerman‘s Are you Here?, lbs mososo based on operator-baded GSM positioning for London, Paris and Geneva.

Blogjects in the World of Interconnected Things

Prior to LIFT06, I participate to the Blogjects in the world of interconnected things workshop organized by Julian Bleecker and Nicolas Nova.

Blogjects – a neologism Julian Bleecker came up with for objects that blog – exemplify the soon-to-come ‘Internet of Things’, i.e. a network of tangible, mobile, chatty things enabled by the miniaturization, the ubiquity of consumer electronics and a pervasive Internet. In its most basic form, a blogject is not dissimilar to people that blog – it is an artifact that can disseminate a record of its experiences to the web. It would report the history of its interactions with other objects and with people. (…) this topic ties into the idea of proximity-based interaction and usage scenarios for mobile contexts.

The aim of the workshop: is to discuss usage scenarios of blogjects, the design issues they raises as well as their significance in various usage and design contexts.

I hope to bring an engineering perspective that takes into account real-world constraints .

Objects become networked components
Technically, interconnecting things is nothing new. The industry has already come up with frameworks like Jini, the Java-pushed framework for spontaneous interaction between devices regardless of their hardware/software implementation, or UPnP an industry initiative designed to enable connectivity among stand-alone devices. These technologies that make devices become network components have mainly be used to design the good old house or workplace of the future (some of them you would definitely like to avoid in the future). The emergence of IPv6 is key for some of the “Internet of Things” scenarios to become reality (for example to associate an RFID tag with an Internet address). The current vision of a blogject is humble. A blogject is meant to have a web presence and not necerraly to be network centric. However, to become context-aware, a blogject will need to really on its network-centric

Context-awareness
Blogjects record their experience and interactions with other objects and people, therefor need to be context-aware. Valuable context-awareness (i.e. making sense of contextual data like a position, temperature, luminosity, speed, noise, user inputs,…) is hard to achieve in uncontrolled environments. Mismatches between the physical, measured and virtual spaces might become important. People will need to grasp these mismatches and not expect ubiquity. Blogjects might even play with their own limitations instead of shamefully hiding them.

Social features
Blogjects might be the first objects to enter the social virtual spaces only occupied by humans so far on the web. Blogjects might just be the physical replacements of the virtual bots that still inhabit the web and some Internet applications. Since, blogging is also about nurturing the ego, I would expect a blogject to have something similar to an ego. Blogging is also about false information, biased analysis, over-simplification, bad mental models and transactive memory. Should we prevent blogjects from acting like human bloggers or should they embrace these features? In terms of scale up, how do we overcome the “web noise” generated by millions of blogjects?

Michel Serres sur les Nouvelles Technologies

Conférence de Michel Serres sur les nouvelles technologies: Les nouvelles technologies, que nous apportent-elles ?

La masse d’informations, vitesse d’information ne sont pas nouveaux. Ce qui a de nouveau dans les nouvelles technologies c’est notre rapport avec l’espace, nouvelle notion d’adresses non physique (e-mail, téléphone portable, …) qui n’appartiennent pas à l’espace métrique mais à un nouvel espace. C’est un nouvel espace de non droit dans lequel le droit va se constituer.

Depuis l’arriver de l’imprimerie nous avons perdu la mémoire qui est porté par l’objet (papier, livre, ordinateur, …). Maintenant, les nouvelles technologies externalisent les autres facultés cognitives (la raison et d’imagination). Nouvelles technologies = du vivant externalisé. Nous objectivons des fonctions et systèmes du corps (exo-darwinisme).

L’externalisation et la perte des fonctions permet de nous liberer de leurs contraintes et d’évoluer.

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.