An esperanto for toasters to do what?

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Speaking about the 'Internet of Things' the other day, this Technology Review also makes sense to be read. It's about an "esperanto for toaster" concept: ZigBee, namely a wireless standard that could be used a a "common language" to lights, appliances, doors or cell phones. Specifications could be downloaded here.

In the not-too-distant future, your cell phone might become the key to your home. By transmitting a signal to a sensor, your phone will announce your arrival and the front door will unlock. (...) But before a swarm of sensors can turn into an intelligent network, though, they need a way to communicate with each other. Enter ZigBee. Based on an IEEE radio standard called 812.15.4, it allows digital transmissions of up to 1Mbps in one of two frequency ranges, 2.4GHz or 915MHz (in the Americas).

That is surely another step towards integrated computation. Besides, some big guys are following this, so that interoperability can work out:

More than 150 member companies already belong to the ZigBee Alliance, including such electronics heavyweights as Honeywell, Motorola, Philips, and Samsung. Alliance chairman Bob Heile claims that ZigBee will enable any compatible device -- regardless of the manufacturer -- to communicate with any other ZigBee device, right out of the box. What's more, the specification allows ZigBee devices to form mesh or cluster networks spontaneously, without any intervention from end users, installers, or (gulp) system administrators.

Also, after reading about this Zigbee, I stumbled across this cool article about ambient findability by Peter Morville. The authors adresses this notion of being able "to find anyone or anything from anywhere at any time". The article also tackles various location-based services which are directed towards this goal.

A clear sign of progress is the emergence of ubiquitous findable objects (UFOs). GPS, RFID, UWB, and cellular triangulation enable us, for the first time in history, to tag and track products, possessions, pets, and people as they wander through space and time

Today, a UFO is not longer a UFO. Of course, this definitely echoes with the Bruce Sterling's last book and the very concept of spime (one of the characteristic of spime is to be a ubiquitous findable object). They are "searchable, like Google. You can think of Spimes as being auto-Googling objects" as he says (more about it here).

On a different note, I find interesting what Peter Morville's points out about the social control created by this (LBS):

On a voyeuristic note, we'll all be secretly interested in collision detection. Most likely, Google Alerts will notify us of brief or sustained meetups between two or more individuals from within our social networks. In fact, we'll all come to rely on anomaly detection to highlight meaningful deviations in individual habits or in the flocking behavior of crowds.

Record tracking data from your bluetooth GPS receiver

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GETrack is a pertinent application that allows you to "record tracking data from your bluetooth GPS receiver and send the track via bluetooth to your PC for direct use with "Google Earth.":

The tracking data is ready to be used with "Google Earth". These files can then be sent by email to your friends or put them on your website.

On the PC side you only need a bluetooth dongle and the ability to receive files from your phone.

You can choose a logging interval from 5,10,20,30,60 and 300 seconds which covers driving speeds by car and bike and is also suitable for hiking tours.

You can choose to send a file in plain Google Earth format, extended Google Earth format including automatic waypoints including altitude, driving speed and time/date and CSV (Microsoft Excel or OpenOffice) format. Compatible with Series 60 devices (6600 FW 4.09.1 and better and later models).

Cell phones and toilet-related accidents

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Via Antony Townsend's mailing list, this improbable fact:

More and more mobile phones are turning up in the sewage system of the Helsinki Metropolitan area, according to Helsinki Water, which serves over one million households. It's not known if the phones are purposely or accidentally disposed of, but with 4.8m mobile users in Finland, it's reasonable to expect a certain number of toilet-related mobile incidents.

A possible reason is that "Most mobiles apparently come a cropper as a result of tight jeans.".

High-Altitude Platforms to deliver WiFi

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Laurent sent me this intriguing news: High-altitude platforms for wireless communications by T. C. Tozer and D. Grace:

The demand for high-capacity wireless services is bringing increasing challenges, especially for delivery of the ‘last mile’. Terrestrially, the need for line-of-sight propagation paths represents a constraint unless very large numbers of base-station masts are deployed, while satellite systems have capacity limitations. An emerging solution is offered by high-altitude platforms (HAPs) operating in the stratosphere at altitudes of up to 22 km to provide communication facilities that can exploit the best features of both terrestrial and satellite schemes.

What is a Digital Library Anymore, Anyway ?

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Great article in the last issue of D-lib: What is a Digital Library Anymore, Anyway ? Beyond Search and Access in the NSDL by Carl Lagoze, Dean B. Krafft, et Sandy Payette, Cornell University, et Susan Jesuroga, UCAR-NSDL.

Based on a variety of calibrations1, we are now in the adolescence of digital libraries. Like any adolescence, there is reason for optimism and concern.

The optimism comes from the successes resulting from a decade of research, development, and deployment. Any list of these is inevitably incomplete, but certainly includes Google, the Handle System, Dublin Core, OAI-PMH (Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting), OpenURL, arXiv, Dspace, and LOCKSS . These and other accomplishments, in combination with the general explosion of the Web itself over the last decade and a half7, approach the digital library vision of "Universal Access to Human Knowledge" articulated in the 2001 report of the President's Information Technology Advisory Committee

Why do I blog this? Normally, I don't like the statement that sometimes technology is seen as the ultimate solution for lots of problems but in this case IT can be a good earthquake for librarians (or a wake-up call) to encourage them to move forward and pay attention to some better user-centered tool than their services. Well.. anyway.. the article is very interesting and presents good insights about the future roles of libraries, based on their answers to the neverending discussion about "In the age of Google, what is a digital library anymore, anyway?"

Proximity Lab: the implications of physical proximity in social communication

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Via Timo's excellent del.icio.us, Proximity Lab is an interesting participatory installation and experimental interface platform. It's meant to visualize relationships between users and mediated spaces.

Built on the premise that physical proximity is a basic unit of social communication, this study seeks to examine the role of physical interaction in social communication. (...) The purpose of this study is to examine the implications of physical proximity in social communication. The study seeks to stimulate inquiry on this topic through facilitated experiences where algorithmic logic, system observation of user behavior, and dynamic role assignment are central elements made accessible to participants for contemplation and discussion.

User perception and response to the overlay of information drawn from the fusion of user actions and system rules is also central to this study. (...) The platform is an 8-foot by 16-foot walkable surface fitted with radio frequency ID (RFID) technology. Participants wear shoes fitted with RFID tags, enabling the system to track and record their positions in real-time. Images projected directly onto the floor are accompanied by stereo sound as a continuous response to the actions and interactions of participants.

The website describes the test platform and shows nice visualizations:

If the changing positions of participants are the primary input for the system, then the visual material projected onto the platform floor is the primary means of output utilized by the system.

Toys trends

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The Christian Science Monitor has a good piece about adult technology mimicked by toy manufacturers. Some excerpts I found relevant:

This Christmas, tech-peddlers are turning their gaze toward kids, with new lines of grown-up gadgets built for tiny hands.(...) "There's a shift in need in terms of what a child finds fun and entertaining," says Jim Silver, editor of the toy trade publication Toy Wishes. "A lot of that has to do with the computer age. If a 3-year-old is entertained by software, the toys that might normally entertain him might not have the same value." (...) "Toys mimic what children see in real life. As we look around the house, everything is getting consistently tech-driven." (...) While traditional adult gadgets are fertile ground for "juvenilization," you're still unlikely to see "Baby's First Spreadsheet Application" on store shelves. (...) But despite the introduction of some interesting and inspiring new electronic playthings, some parents and child psychologists question the wisdom behind high-tech play.

"A growing concern of the preschool teachers that I'm talking to is that children are coming to preschool not even knowing how to play," says Susan Linn, a psychiatry instructor at Harvard Medical School (...) Another pitfall for toy companies that "juvenilize" products: Adult products will soon be cheap enough to give to a child instead of a toy. Hasbro's "ZoomBox" is essentially a cheap video projector that is made and marketed for children. This $299 "toy" lets kids project and play video games on blank walls. Another example is Hasbro's $99 imitation cellular phone called "Chat Now." Despite its flip-phone fanciness and built-in black-and-white camera, Chat Now cannot actually place a telephone call.

I like their list of hot toys and in particular:

iZ (Zizzle, 5 years & up, $39.99) By plugging a music player into this alien creature, children can manipulate the sound by turning its ears and flicking its antennae.

Shell Shocker (Tyco, 8 years & up, $79.99) This high-powered vehicle can morph into a "cyberball" or a "cyberbeast" on the fly.

Extending the CSCW boundaries to games

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One of the most interesting journal paper I've read for months is this Moving with the Times: IT Research and the Boundaries of CSCW by Andy Crabtree, Tom Rodden and Steve Benford, in Journal of CSCW, Issue: Volume 14, Number 3 (June 2005), pp. 217 - 251. The authors advocates for extending the boundaries of Computer Supported Collaborative Work to fit with new research agendas in computer science: mobile/ambient/pervasive/mixed reality/ubiquitous computing and to correspond to the movement which makes computing going from workplaces to other "spaces": home/art performance and other domains like games or photography.

Their point is that CSCW, as an interdisciplinary research field, is still relevant to address new fields than just 'work'. Using an ethnomethodological study of a location-based game, they exemplify this issue to demonstrate the continued salience of existing CSCW approaches and concepts that were developed in the study of work to study ludic phenomenon.

We employ it here to show that ludic pursuits such as games may be studied as collaborative or cooperative activities that rely on, exploit, and exhibit some familiar social organizational characteristics, and that those characteristics may be drawn upon to inform the design of technologies supporting ludic pursuits as they have been used to inform the design of technologies supporting what Gaver (2001) describes as ‘rational’ pursuits in the workplace. The study is used as a concrete example then and followed by further discussion of the boundaries of CSCW, and the salience of existing CSCW approaches and concepts to new and emerging agendas of IT research.

Why do I blog this? The underlying take in this paper is to make computer scientists and interaction designerss (well the reader of this Journal of CSCW) aware that games and playful activities are not kid stuff and deserved to be included in the CSCW research repertoire because it's relevant and important. I like this statement. In addition, the paper offers great insights about their ethnographical study of the Can You See Me Now? location-based game, which addresses various issues of interests to our projects (like how players dealt with uncertainty).

Google 8bits maps

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It seems that some folks came up an 8 bits version of the google maps: google 8-bits maps:

According to aeropause:

Google 8 bit maps has taken some of the old maps from the first Sim City game on the SNES and introduced Googles map search. There's no pages to go to really. It's just something to look at and ponder. Dig that isometric Sim City view, eh! This piece was created by YTMND which is an acronym for "You're The Man Now, Dog!", is a website community that centers around the creation of YTMNDs, which are pages featuring a juxtaposition of a single image, optionally animated or tiled, along with large zooming text and a looping sound file. YTMND is also the general term used to describe any such site.

Why do I blog this? a funny and old-school mash-up + I like this "You're The Man Now, Dog!" concept.

Update on LIFT conference in Geneva

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Now we're in the tuning phase of LIFT, this tech conference I co-organize with pals like ballpark.ch. We managed to get an interesting european figure: Thomas Sevcik, a guy who defines himself as a "corporate anthropologist". His company is called Arthesia. Here is how he desrcibes what he does:

As a Corporate Anthropologist I create atypical communication projects to capitalize on intangible assets of companies and brands. I did plenty of brand experience projects worldwide. And I still do them.

What is also interesting is that one of my project is directed towards the investigation of creative economy in Switerland/Zürich, the report is available here (even though it's very zurich-centered, it offers relevant insights about existing companies as well as links between creative groups and innovation).

Mascarillons: flying swarm intelligence for scientific, architectural and artistic research

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Patrick pointed me on this cool project: Mascarillons, carried out - partly - at our school. Their tagline is very appealing: "Flying swarm intelligence for scientific, architectural and artistic research" and those flying cubes with an exo-skeleton all around them are terrific! They fly/float in the air and self-assemble.

The Mascarillons are the first rigid aerobots developed for the [ SAILS ] project. They are flying cubic automata able to develop collective behaviors and assemblages through swarm-intelligence protocols. Standing at a crossroad between Art and Science, the [ SAILS ] project aims to bring together researchers both in artistic and scientific domain to collaborate towards the production of a robotic environment dedicated to architectural, technological and scientific research, with a major potential for multi-media performance. The final result will see a flock of 12 to 20 Mascarillons evolving within a spherical inflatable dome equipped with panoscopic projectors.

More about it in this paper: Nembrini, J., Reeves, N., Poncet, E., Martinoli, A. and Winfield, A. "Flying Swarm Intelligence for Architectural Research" Communication at the 2005 IEEE Swarm Intelligence Symposium, Pasadena, June 2005.

Plus, there is a video about it on Discovery Channel.

Mobiluck: bluetooth tracking

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Mobiluck, an interesting location-based application which offers the following services:

Send messages for free and meet people with your mobile phone, Today, with MobiLuck you can already: Detect all nearby Bluetooth devices. Your cell phone rings or vibrates when it finds one. Send messages and photos for free to friends or strangers with no need of their phone numbers. Hear when you receive a Bluetooth message and reply to the sender! Send your profile and receive profiles from other MobiLuckers including their photo.

Their agenda is also compelling:

Play multi-users games, download ringtones, logos, music and games. Meet people, recognize friends of friends and share your passions. Attend professional exhibitions, exchange business cards and find new customers. Find a job, an apartment, a second-hand car, a pub, an unoccupied cab, win miles and do some shopping. Save time in public transportations and lines, enjoy cities and museums… and many other things…

In the description there is this "You're surrounded by great people who are open to new experiences like you! At this point, if you're not too shy, you can contact other MobiLuckers who are having fun with their devices by using their screen name to call them: "Is that you, Bulldozer?"". It's a bit strange to assumed that having a bluetooth phone activated makes you willing to have 'new experience' (it can be activate right from the beginning) but...

Google and the networked economy

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Red Herring latest piece about Google is an insightful explanation of how the company from Mountain View stay in touche with open-source projects.

Google founders (...) wanted some way to support young geeks, and hey, maybe it could tie into open source at the same time. (...) Mr. DiBona, a veteran advocate of open source, came up with a scheme of farming out coding projects to various open-source organizations and paying both students and mentors a stipend. The “Summer of Code” got the thumbs up —and $1 million to pay 200 students $4,500 (if their projects were successfully completed by September) and their mentors $500. (...) rather than earmark that money for charity or a public relations campaign, showing a little bit of goodwill to the geek crowd—even if somewhat haphazardly—could go a long way. The company’s leadership obviously likes the feeling of playing the role of benevolent university rather than corporate machine. Plus, Google uses the Linux kernel and plenty of open-source code, and it always wants to know about young developer talent, points out Mr. DiBona, so some benefits are more direct. “Some of these kids have done such a good job that we’d be fools not to hire them,” he says.

What is striking here is how Google benefits, supports and also sets the trend of a new economy based on networked and competent persons who jointly work together all around the world:

the company is functioning as a university as it creates a new kind of distributed lab. The Summer of Code students essentially sat in front of their personal computers in 49 countries for two months. Each one’s communication methods might have included message boards, phone, VoIP, email, instant messaging, video conferencing, and blogging—but hardly ever face-to-face conversations. “Developers should get used to the idea of globally distributed work groups all over the place, all over the time zones,” says Mr. DiBona. “It’s the future of software development.”

Course about pervasive computing and the socio-cognitive affordances of space

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Tomorrow, I'll give a lecture about pervasive computing and the socio-cognitive affordances of space, which is my research topic. It's the second time I do this talk (the first time was last year) and now that I am reshuffling the presentation, what struck me is that nothing really changed in one year: for instance, there are still boring scenarios of LBS usage and techno-push is still the norm. Julian's take about this is that "maybe when we stop calling Location Based Services "Location Based Services" we'll finally be onto something". The presentation is here (10.5pdf, Mb). To put it shortly, it's about the emergence of pervasive/ubiquitous computing and how it relates to fundamental of human behavior. I describe how space/place affords various social and cognitive functions, which might be the starting points of relevant design ideas for user-centered applications/services.

By 'socio-cognitive functions of space', I refer to all the processes influenced by spatial features. This relates to phenomenon such as: proxemics, cultural values of a place, schelling points, territoriality, copresence which eases referential communication, functional values of a place (a waiting room is meant to foster a 'sit and wait' behavior), topology that foster specific behavior like division of labor, behavioral framing based on places (communication is different in a lecture room than in a café)... social navigation based on spatial features (footprints in the snow to find your way).

The conclusion is that space (and consequently all its affordances) should be taken into account when designing environment that supports collaborative Work/learning and play.

This is part of a course about Computer Supported Collaborative Work given by Pierre Dillenbourg and myself at the faculty of computer science at EPFL.

Giger's Alien should be removed from the outside of his museum

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I just saw that Giger's Alien model must be removed from the outside of a museum of his work in Gruyère, Switzerland (in Ananova):

Councillors in Gruyeres, Switzerland, decided the mucus-dripping monster was not a good advert for the tourist town's image. Local artist H R Giger, who designed the aliens for all four sci-fi horror films, put the creature up on a wall outside the museum to attract visitors. Gruyeres mayor Christian Bussard said: "The council is not harassing an internationally recognised artist and we agree his work is of superior quality, if not to everyone's taste. "We like him and want him to stay. It's just that sometimes you need to put him back on the right track." Giger said: "I need this type of sculpture to be outside so visitors will stop and look and then maybe come into the museum."

Here it is (one month ago when I visited the place): giger_alien

ITU report about the Internet of Things

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The ITU (International Telecommunication Union, this big building in my neighbourhood) is eventually releasing a report about the so-called Internet of Things:

The report takes a look at the next step in "always on" communications, in which new technologies like RFID and smart computing promise a world of networked and interconnected devices that provide relevant content and information whatever the location of the user. Everything from tires to toothbrushes will be in communications range, heralding the dawn of a new era, one in which today’s Internet (of data and people) gives way to tomorrow’s Internet of Things. (...) With continuing developments in miniaturization and declining costs, it is becoming not only technologically possible but also economically feasible to make everyday objects smarter, and to connect the world of people with the world of things. Building this new environment however, will pose a number of challenges. Technological standardization in most areas is still in its infancy, or remains fragmented. Not surprisingly, managing and fostering rapid technological innovation will be a challenge for governments and industry alike. But perhaps one of the most important challenges is convincing users to adopt emerging technologies like RFID. Concerns over privacy and data protection are widespread, particularly as sensors and smart tags can track a user’s movements, habits and preferences on a perpetual basis. Fears related to nanotechnology range from bio-medical hazards to robotic control. But whatever the concern, one thing remains clear: scientific and technological advances in these fields continue to move ahead at breakneck speed. It is only through awareness of such advances, and the challenges they present, that we can reap the future benefits of a fair, user-centric and global Internet of Things.

Why do I blog this? the report would certainly be interesting to skim through since it can give insights about how an international structure think about it. My biggest concern is that the summary addresses complaints about problems related to users' fear but they just put the emphasis on the techno-push development in the field. Those guys might benefit from reading Bruce Sterling's last book:"Shaping Things (Mediaworks Pamphlets)" (Bruce Sterling). However, the value of ITU's report (as well as other reports coming from International Organisations like this) is the presence of relevant statistics. Well... it's going to be CHF 100.- (available november 17th).