Mosquito sounds to avoid teenagers loitering

The IHT has a strange story about a device, called the Mosquito ("It's small and annoying,"), that emits a high-frequency pulsing sound which can be heard by most people younger than 20 and almost no one older than 30.

So far, the Mosquito has been road-tested in only one place, at the entrance to the Spar convenience store in this town in south Wales. Like birds perched on telephone wires, surly teenagers used to plant themselves on the railings just outside the door, smoking, drinking, shouting rude words at customers and making regular disruptive forays inside. "On the low end of the scale, it would be intimidating for customers," said Robert Gough, who, with his parents, owns the store. "On the high end, they'd be in the shop fighting, stealing and assaulting the staff." (...) The results were almost instantaneous. Where disaffected youths used to congregate, now there is no one. (...) Stapleton is considering introducing a much louder unit that can be switched on in emergencies with a panic button. It would be most useful when youths swarm into stores and begin stealing en masse, a phenomenon known in Britain as "steaming."

Kind of scary, will we see that in France to avoid car fires?

Conference backchannels: distributed intelligence or divided attention

Jacobs N, Mcfarlane A. (2005) Conferences as learning communities: some early lessons in using `back-channel' technologies at an academic conference - distributed intelligence or divided attention? Journal of Computer Assisted Learning, Vol. 21, No. 5., pp. 317-329

researchers attend conferences as a part of their practice, and yet it is an under-researched activity. Little attention has been paid either to developing a theoretically informed understanding of conference practice as knowledge building, or to assessing the extent to which conferences are successful. This paper addresses these issues in the context of a small empirical study of the introduction of mobile, interactive (‘back-channel’) technologies into a conference setting. Science studies and learning theories literatures are used to develop an eight-point statement describing the aims of an idealised conference. This is then used as a framework through which to make sense of what happened when ‘back-channel’ technologies such as internet relay chat (IRC) and blogging were introduced into the 2004 Colston Symposium ‘The Evolution of Learning and Web Technologies: Survival of the Fittest?’. Focusing on sequential issues and the conference as a forum for knowledge building, the analysis shows that conference order is disrupted by the introduction of the back-channel technologies. Nevertheless, other pressures on academic and professional practice (the governance agenda, calls for greater collaboration and a more consensual approach, and so on) suggest that the potential of the new technologies to help open up the black box of scientific and professional practice will be seen as increasingly important. If these tools are to be used effectively in the future, conferences will need to be supported by new skills and practices.

Why do I blog this? my interest in this is twofold. First because we're organizing a conference (LIFT) and we're wondering about setting a backchannel system. Second because I think it's an interesting CSCW topic.

Notes about spatial features in Japan

Two weeks ago, Matt Tiessen wrote this thoughtful post about spatial concerns in the city of Lyon, France. Wandering around in Japan, I tried to adopt the same perspective to briefly describe some intriguing phenomenon related to space and culture in Japan.

  • my first impression was the tremendous importance of bridges, viaduct, raised highways. Since Japan is an archipelago, there was a need to connect island, which is reflected by this importance of such structures.
  • another strikening feature is that fact that places and things are smaller: especially bathrooms, tables/chairs, ceilings, hotel rooms, appartments.
  • this morning I also notices an intriguing phenomenon: there are intersitial spaces between buildings as seen on the picture below. This might be due to earthquake prevention (to avoid waves propagation?).

intersititial space

  • There are no street names but they seem to refer to areas or blocks

Ubiquitous-Computing System for Learning Japanese Polite Expression

Tonight, Hiroaki Ogata will present their paper about an ubiquitous-computing system for learning japanese polite expression. I think it's going to be close to the demo we had at CRAFT when he visited us last year. At that time he showed us 2 systems:

JAPELAS (Japanese polite expressions learning assisting system). This system provides learner the appropriate polite expressions deriving the learner’s situation and personal information. (...) JAPELAS provides the right polite-expression that is derived from hyponymy, social distance, and situation through the identification of the target user and the place.

The second system is called TANGO (Tag Added learNinG Objects) system, which detects the objects around learner using RFID tags, and provides the learner the educational information.

In those projects, the context (room for instance) is detected using RFID tag and GPS.

Autonomous sharing of music files on mobile devices

Designing a Mobile Music Sharing System Based on Emergent Properties by Maria Håkansson, Mattias Jacobsson, Lars Erik Holmquist (Future Applications Lab, Viktoria Institute, Sweden), short paper for the conference on Intelligent User Interfaces. It discusses a system for autonomous sharing of music files on mobile devices:

In our approach, songs are treated as individual agents that act autonomously according to input (e.g. listening habits) and given rules.introduce new music based on peoples’ shared music interest. (...) Imagine that you carry a mobile device that has the ability to store and play back music files, e.g. a mobile phone with an MP3 player. As you encounter various people, the devices you are carrying connect to each other, e.g. via Bluetooth. Media agents from other nearby devices check the status of your media collection. Based on what you have been listening to in the past and which files you already own, some other music might spontaneously “jump” from another device to yours (and vice versa), on its own accord. Later, when you listen to your jazz songs, the system also plays a newly obtained Frank Sinatra tune that you had not heard before.

Why do I blog this? this is a clever design, it may be great if there is a critical mass of users.

Micro-GPS to track birds and study their navigation

Via nouvo.ch, an curious project carried out by Hans-Peter Lipp. They studied pigeon navigation using small GPS attached to the birds.This led them to "the best evidence yet of pigeons following roads" as reported by science week:

The authors present an analysis of 216 GPS-recorded pigeon tracks over distances up to 50 km. Experienced pigeons released from familiar sites during 3 years around Rome, Italy, were significantly attracted to highways and a railway track running toward home, in many cases without anything forcing them to follow such guide-rails. Birds often broke off from the highways when these veered away from home, but many continued their flight along the highway until a major junction, even when the detour added substantially to their journey. (...) The authors suggest their data demonstrate the existence of a learned road-following homing strategy of pigeons and the use of particular topographical points for final navigation to the loft. Apparently, the better-directed early stages of the flight compensated the added final detour. .

Using tangible interactions to teach astronomical phenomenon

One of the project I bumped into this afternoon: Smart Planets is a project that aims at enhancing the teaching of astronomical phenomenons like eclipses and motions using tangible interactions. It's a project carried out by Bjorn Eisen, Marc Jansen and UlrichHoppe.

Usually, the teacher takes different objects and whirls around with these. We provide Smart Planets, which consists of a polyfoam ball and an RF-ID Tag, which looks like a planet, but they can be used as an entrance into the virtual world. In virtuality, the Smart Planets can be animated with two different animation models according to the helio- and geo-centric view of universe. The shadows are also shown to allow for the examination of eclipse phenomena. With the help of Smart Planets the students can design their universe and can have an enriched view of it.

Why do I blog this? I like the project (not because I am crazy of poly/styrofoam) but because I finf interesting to embed such interactions.

Current trends in mobile learning

Plenty of systems are presented at the Wireless and Mobile Technologies in Education Conference. I don't know if had to refer to them by 'current' or 'future' trends (it's 'current' for academics but certainly 'future' for practitioners though some teachers already use them). Current (future?) trends:

  • student ID constructed using a cell-phone (Kobayashi et al., 2005)
  • augmenting class-rooms with a digital pen and RFID tags (Miura et al., 2005)
  • an intelligent tutoring system that adapts to location-related features (as well tolearner knowledge and to time available for study) (Bull et al, 2005)
  • Using SMS for quizzes (Tretiakov et al., 2005) which gave a good user acceptance.
  • PDA used as a remote-control lab (wu et al., 2005)
  • An interactive logbook to support learning across institutions/workplaces (Chan et al, 2005)
  • Using mixed reality simulations to embed tangible interactions in order to create relevant metaphot, for instance to explain astronomy (Eisen et al., 2005)
  • Dual-device architecture for learning using both cell phone and interactive television (Fallakhair et al., 2005)
  • Using wireless devices as response devices/polls (Chen et al., 2005)
  • Handheld and large-display groupware (Liu et al., 2005)
  • Using PDAs for speech testin g(Yang et al., 2005) (Uther et al., 2005)
  • Usage of lifeblog in mobile learning: recording aspects of living on a blog, by mobile phones (Hartnell-Young and Vetere., 2005))
  • Course-management, student-support or mobile access to course material through cell-phone (Houser and Thornton, 2005) (Riordan and Traxler, 2005) (Mermelstein and Tal, 2005)
  • Usage of computationaly-enhanced construction kit to teach programming (Buechley et al., 2005)
  • Usage of a programmable set of construction kit for teaching (Elumeze et al., 2005
  • Using RFID for digital library infrastructure (Morales-Salcedo et al., 2005)
  • Usage of camera-phones to create a large repository of multimedia information (connected with location and context information through visual codes) (Mitchell and Race, 2005)

Of course all are not interesting or relevant, I just wanted to give an overview of the picture. The conference also had papers that concerned systems evaluation.

Interacting with Computers Journal: call for paper about computer games

CALL FOR PAPERS: INTERACTING WITH COMPUTERS JOURNAL, Special Issue of Interacting with Computers on “HCI Issues in Computer Games”:

Computer Games are at the forefront of technological innovation and their popularity in research is also increasing. Their wide presence and use makes Computer Games a major factor affecting the way people socialize, learn and possibly work. Computer Games are also beginning to attract the attention of educators and education technologists.

With this special issue of Interacting with Computers we wish to explore the relationship between Computer Games and Human-Computer Interaction (HCI). Are current HCI techniques and methodologies appropriate for designing Computer Games? Do we need new Computer Game focused HCI methods, theories and paradigms? What are the new challenges when it comes to evaluating Computer Games?

Potential topics include (but are not limited to) the following:

* Design approaches and techniques suitable for Computer Games * Usability studies regarding Computer Games * Theoretical and/or pedagogical foundations for analysing Computer Games * Within-game and/or out-game activities and their HCI analysis * Computer Games and Online Communities * Social and Cultural Issues and Computer Games * Accessibility of Computer Games * Transfer of gaming metaphors to business applications

IwC special issues contain only 5 - 6 papers, each of no more than 10,000 words (so acceptance will be fairly selective). Papers should be submitted through the manuscript management system at http://ees.elsevier.com/iwc/ by the 10th of April 2006.

Why do I blog this? we may submit something here.

Wireless and Mobile Technologies in Education Conference

Here are my running notes of the Wireless and Mobile Technologies in Education Conference.

paper repartition: asia 46% europe: 25% US: 15%

acceptance rates: a total of 84 submissions were received from 22 countries. 10 papers were accepted in full paper (with acceptance rate of 11.9%), 22 papers in short paper, and 34 papers in poster category. The accepted papers represent 19 countries from all over the world."

Switerzland is doing very well since their 2 papers has been accepted. :) though both presenters are not swiss... maybe that's a sign of a wealthy country with good R&D structures (european brain drain?).

WMTE 2005 conference room

distellamap: visualizing goto instructions on atari 2600 code

Via the excellent french blog gamism, Ben Fry's new project: distellamap: a computer generated visualization that depictes all the "goto" connections in Atari 2600 games.

Seeing the operation of code in Atari 2600 games. Like any other game console, Atari 2600 cartridges contained executable code also commingled with data. This lists the code as columns of assembly language. Most of it is math or conditional statements (if x is true, go to y), so each time there’s “go to” a curve is drawn from that point to its destination.

Why do I blog this? it's an interesting way to visualize a video-game 'space' with a different perspective.

Off to Wireless and Mobile Technologies In Education Conference

Tomorrow I go to Wireless and Mobile Technologies In Education Conference in Tokushima, Japan. I'm going to present our study about CatchBob!. It will be a summary of this paper: Nova, N., Girardin, F. & Dillenbourg, P.: ‘Location is not enough!’: an Empirical Study of Location-Awareness in Mobile Collaboration (.pdf). Full paper for IEEE International Workshop on Wireless and Mobile Technologies in Education, Tokushima, Japan.

My slides are here (.pdf).

Play Counterstrike while running

Gamerunner = playing a first-person shooter while running:

The GameRunner (patent pending) is an innovative new game controller that fuses the technologies of exercise and video gaming.

There has never been a better way to play First Person Shooters like there is with the GameRunner. The GameRunner brings players one step closer to actually being inside the game. We've worked hard to design a controller that is not only intuitive and easy to learn but is also capable of delivering a fresh breath of life into the overall immersiveness of first person shooters. Naturally this makes playing games on the GameRunner beneficial to your heath by burning calories and keeping your heart rate up.

When you get on the GameRunner you won't want to get off (unless you need to catch your breath!). Playing on the GameRunner allows you to exercise while having all the fun of playing your favorite FPS. Exercising has never been more fun!

duuh?! what a weird reason to play... The interface is pretty intriguing:

The GameRunner plugs in to your USB port and functions as a keyboard and mouse. The entire unit draws all the power it needs through USB. Aiming with the handlebars controls the mouse and walking on the treadmill controls the keyboard. Righthand controller buttons are designated as mouse buttons and lefthand controller buttons are designated keyboard buttons. Treadmill motion is measured optically and movement keys follow internal 'steps' that the GameRunner sees with treadmill motion to allow for the ingame movement speed to correspond with treadmill speed

Shown at Next2005.

A Mobile Laser for Tracking Pollution or Warding off Lightning

Teramobile is a project that aims at studying the nonlinear propagation of femtosecond-terawatt laser pulses over long distances in the atmosphere, and their applications to atmospheric research. This includes Lidar remote sensing of atmospheric pollutants as well as lightning protection and triggering by a mobile Terawatt laser system. It's eveloped jointly by two French laboratories – the Laboratory for Ionic and Molecular Spectrometry (LASIM, CNRS/University of Lyon I) and the Applied Optics Laboratory near Paris in Palaiseau (CNRS/Ecole Polytechnique/ENSTA) – and two German laboratories (The Free University of Berlin and the F. Schiller University in Jena).

A Location Based game for mobile phones using Assisted GPS

Spacerace – A Location Based game for mobile phones using Assisted GPS by Stephan A. Drab and Gerald Binder, Pervasive 2005 Workshop: PerGames 2005. Spacerace is a mobile game especially designed to demonstrate the possibilities of an Assisted GPS empowered mobile phone:

The goal of the treasure hunt game Spacerace is to collect as many virtual crystals as possible in a small outdoor area. In order to collect a crystal, the Captain has to get near the virtual position of the selected crystal. He is guided by an Assisted GPS phone which shows the current distance to it. He is supported by the Navigator who has an overview of the position of the Captain and all the crystals they have to collect.

The Navigator tells the Captain which crystal to go after and where it is located by giving him directions in terms of points of the compass. The captain selects the suggested crystal number and tries to find it using the Navigator’s directions and the distance displayed on the screen of the mobile phone. After getting close to the desired virtual destination the crystal is collected and the team scores an amount of points. Crystals have a lifetime after which they disappear. The amount scored by the team after finding a crystal is dependent on the remaining lifetime. The faster the team finds the crystal, the more points they get.

Worst technologies for girls

The Worst Technology for Girls? is a paper presented by Wendy March (Intel Research) and Constance Fleuriot (Bristol University) at the EPIC 2005 Conference (Ethnographic Praxis in Industry Conference ).

The aim of the research was to discover how teen girls use technology in relation to privacy practices in their everyday lives. Asking teenage girls to describe the worst technology they could imagine was a fruitful way of exploring their feelings towards location-awareness, tracking and surveillance in particular and served as inspiration for the design of concepts which embody many of their concerns.

What is interesting is the focus on participants' view of the potential impact on their privacy of technologies such as location-aware computing. With a peculiar emphasis on this question: "How do they feel about technologies that reveal their locations to their families and friends? " (joint photo blog for two weeks +i n-depth individual interviews of 24 teenage girls, aged between 17 and 18)

The approach of asking for the worst technologies is very relevant with regard to thoses goals. And the winners are:

  • Family Video: A small video camera attached to a flotation device acts as a personal CCTV which sends back a constant video stream to home.
  • Constant Connection provides a continuous open communication channel for parents and children ( the home audio device, which is ideally suited for a kitchen counter.)
  • Ticker Text converts all communication from designated cell phones into an easy to read text format. Each text message that is sent or received on the phone is printed out on a paper roll.
  • Teen Monitor provides a simultaneous broadcast of all your teenager’s conversations through an audio speaker in your home.

Why do I blog this? I really like this approach, not for imaginer do's and donts but instead to get insights about participants' feeling towards privacy concerns. Besides, imagining a situation in which all the family could read teenager's conversation on a paper roll in the kitchen would be a funny but tough issue!

Another 'capture the flag' pervasive game

During his visit in his almost-homeland country, Mauro saw this pervasive game he point us to: Capture The Flag. It's done by Jani Toilonen and Heikki Tolonen from the MediaTeam in the university of Oulu:

Capture the Flag game is played in teams. The idea is to capture and defend virtual flag zones. Game is played with a mobile handheld device, in which player’s position and the flag zones are shown on the screen. Cooperation within a team is emphasized: players are forced to play as a team. Capturing flags is much faster, when it´s done as a team, but also flags situated nearby have effects. Players must also pay attention to the flags positions in their strategy and their affect to the game itself.

The game was tested on 12 - 16 May 2005 at the University of Oulu with some about thirty students.

The game can be played with Fujitsu LOOX610 PDA and other handheld devices including an Internet connection and a compatible browser. Game utilizes positioning technology developed by Ekahau Ltd. Positioning in the University of Oulu wireless local area network operates on excellent level. Capture the Flag game is an application for leisure time encouraging players to move around and spend time with other players.

Why do I blog this? Thought the game motivation is a bit frightening in terms of social meaning, it's another interesting example of 'capture the flag'-related pervasive game. I'd like to see some screenshots and more importantly users' account/study of the game usage.

Connected pasta see also this project for cell-phone by Adrian David Cheok's team and this The Drop by Intel people