Monthly Archive for June, 2004

Research question 1.1

Published on 6/28/2004 in General. Closed

Research question

Q_ What are the cognitive processes by which people infer elements of the communication, subsequently economizing the process, only considering the history of the receiver/emitter position and the connected communication content?

Sub1_ Can we build an Agent that will build a semantic description of the communication content based on an algorithm constructed on these cognitive processes?

Sub2_Is this autonomous agent able to maximize contextual spatial cues through providing this semantic description of the spatialized communication between peers?

Sub3_How is this description/knowledge reflecting in the way people use the space in their daily life?

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A visual representation of an Ontology

Published on 6/28/2004 in General. Closed

After reading the paper by Tom Gruber, I decided to put visually all the terms he used for describing what is an ontology. Basically an Ontology is the statement of a logical theory, or a specification of a conceptualization. Therefore of interests seems to be the role of the Agents, which operates the translation from the real world to the conceptual one. This agent commits to the ontology if its discoverable actions are consistent with the definitions of the ontology.

Agent_mapping

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A chacun son guide de la ville sur son mobile

Published on 6/28/2004 in Diary. Closed

Today I have been pointed to this interesting article (by my sparring partner Nico) published on “Le Temps”:

A Londres, des chercheurs ont mis au point un prototype de réseau. Grâce à leur téléphone portable, les utilisateurs échangent leurs connaissances locales, leurs bons plans et même des morceaux de journal intime. Une nouvelle façon de se connecter et de tapisser l’espace urbain, qui démode le guide touristique classique.

Principles for designing ontologies

Published on 6/24/2004 in References. Closed

T. R. Gruber. Toward principles for the design of ontologies used for knowledge sharing. In N. Guarino and R. Poli, editors, Formal Ontology in Conceptual Analysis and Knnowledge Representation, Padova, Italy, March 1993. International Workshop on Formal Ontology, Kluwer Academic Publishers.
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This paper describes some design principles useful when designing an ontology. The starting argument is that ontologies can play a specification role in the establishments of agreements among communication peers. Ontologies are specification mechanisms. Knowledge is based on some conceptualization which are simplified, abstract, representation of the world. Therefore, an ontology is an explicit specification of a conceptualisation. Two interesting ideas emerge from the paper:

1) an agent commits to an ontology if his observable actions are consistent with the definition of the ontology: the implicit idea is that the agent has to follow 100 per cent the specification of the ontology, whereas there may be the case in which the agent is following only partially the ontology specification. Can we talk about progressive commitment?

2) Knowledge is attributed to agents observing their actions: here a more epistemological consideration can be asked: is knowledge in the community, in the individuals rather than into the system?

The five criteria for the design of an ontology are:
1. Clarity: definitions should be objective;
2. Coherence: defining axioms should be logically consistent;
3. Extendibility: it should anticipate tasks monotonically without the revisions of the existing definitions;
4. Minimal encoding bias: representation choices should be made as less as possible for the convenience of notation;
5. Minimal ontological commitment: the ontological commitment should be sufficient for supporting the intended knowledge sharing.

The author says that ontology design will require making tradeoffs among the criteria. My point is that: should this be part of the collaborative negotiation process?

MapTribe: core idea description

Published on 6/24/2004 in General. Closed

The project core idea is to give the ability to users to collaboratively annotating a two dimensional representation of the city. The users can see a map of the city on the screen of their mobile. They can see their position plus the position of their peers. Using some editing tools offered by the platform, they can add small text (or pictures or video) to their position for other user to retrieve.

Consequently to this layering of information, a social representation of the city is constructed. The aim of the project is to give people the ability to represent their ideas of the space, communicating using this space and then navigating the space using marks that other users have left into the system.

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Realistic versus cognitive semantics

Published on 6/16/2004 in References. Closed

P. Gärdenfors. Conceptual Spaces, chapter Six Tenets of Cognitive Semantics. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2000.
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On of the core concepts of cognitive semantics is that meaning of expression is mental in the first place. The author describes the six tenets that he consider foundamental for supporting this statement.
1. Meaning is a conceptualization in a cognitive model (not truth conditions in possible words): a semantic for a language is seen as a mapping from the expressions of the language to some mental entities. Truth concerns the relation the mental structure and the world.
2. Cognitive models are mainly perceptually determined (meaning is not independent of perceptions): we can translate between the visual form of the representation and the linguistic code. A central hypothesis of cognitive semantics is that the way we store perceptions in our memories has the same form as the meanings of words.
–> Because of this bound between what we see and what we say what is the cognitive process of putting meanings to places? This can be one of the angle of the thesis.
3. Semantic elements are based on spatial or topological objects: the mental structures applied in cognitive semantics are the meanings of the linguistic expressions. The framework the author proposes is called “conceptual space”, which consists of a number of quality dimensions. Examples of quality dimensions are: color, pitch, …
4. Cognitive models are primarily image–schematic: image–schemas have an inherent spatial structure.
5. Semantics is primary to syntax a partly determines it. (example: tenses)
6. Concepts show prototype effects: a concept is often represented in the form of an image schema and such schemas can show variations just like concepts normally do.

The procedure the author suggest to build a semantics, which is the relation between the language and a cognitive structure, is building a conceptual space: a) specifying the mapping between the lexicon of the language and the appropriate conceptual space; b) describing the operations on the image schemas (which are defined with the aid of the conceptual space. that correspond to different syntactic formation rules. A function which maps the individuals onto a conceptual space will be called a location function.

The author argue against Putnam arguments about the social meaning of semantics saying that there is a social structure of language: social meanings of the expressions of a language are indeed determined from their individual meanings together with the linguistic power that exists in the community.

Supporting group collaboration

Published on 6/16/2004 in References. Closed

Holmquist, L.E., Falk J. and Wigström, J. Supporting Group Collaboration with Inter-Personal Awareness Devices. Journal of Personal Technologies, 3(1-2), Springer, 1999.
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This paper describes one of the initial attempt to build an inter–personal awareness device. The system known as Hummingbird is in essence an active RF-id tag that emit a sound when a colleague or teammate happen to be close by.

Urban Mobilities project @ INCITE

Published on 6/16/2004 in Links. Closed

Technological developments seem to be making ‘place’ less important. Many visions about future technology suggest that information will be ‘anytime’, any place’ and will make location irrelevant. However the use of mobile devices in specific urban spaces and the heavy use of cybercafes by those who might log on elsewhere suggests that the experience of location is central.

The research is a qualitative study of cultures of new media technology consumption and production in London. It includes an examination of the kinds of spatial and temporal regimes that accompany specific technology deployments. Interest also centers on the relationship between technology and literary cultures. Among the urban sites considered are public transport routes, but also local authorities or boroughs and the city as a conceptual whole. The Research Fellow (in association with the Project Director) conduct ethnographic observation and interviews with various individuals and groups in these spaces. As well as ethnography, the data includes socio-demographic information about these London spaces (e.g. the communities around particular bus or train stops) and indicators of technological infrastructure (e.g. the number of local public access points to the internet).

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Urban Tapestries: public authoring

Published on 6/16/2004 in References. Closed

G. Lane. Urban tepestries: Wireless networking, public authoring and social knowledge. Personal Ubiquitous Computing, (7):169–175, April 2003.
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Urban Tapestries is a collaborative mapping project where people can participate in building sound map of the city and leave multimedia content attached to the map of the city while walking. Their core idea and the metaphor to attach this to the 2D representation of the city is pretty similar to my view of the MapTribe project. Their concept is to use a PDA combining a GPRS access with a WiFi communication system. The idea underneath is that combining the different systems of comjunication is possible to have a full coverage of the city space.

The system is designed to propose spatial threads which corresponds to geographical paths connecting places with a common history of feature that the thread whants to highlight. Joint with this fruition activity, the user is also asked to author the map adding comments and other multimedia material while walking. An extra step is to give the user the abilit y to share this informaiton with other wlakers using Bluetooth beams.

Three point constitute the distinctiveness of the project: 1. UT is cooperative and not hirarchical: it relies on the community and not on the network provider; 2.Co-creation not consumption: the content is not preparated but is co-created by the user; 3. accretive and organic not static: UT grows with time at the pace set by the users, a microcosm on how our cities and communities develop, prosper and die.

Lars Erik Holmquist

Published on 6/15/2004 in People. Closed

Lars Erik Holmquist is leader of the Future Applications Lab at the Viktoria Institute in Göteborg, Sweden. Before this, he founded and led the PLAY research group from 1997-2001. He received his master’s degree in Computer Science in 1996, and his Ph.D. in Informatics in 2000, both at the Göteborg University.  His research interests include human-computer interaction, information visualization and ubiquitous computing. He has been member of many international conference committees and published extensively in these research fields. In 2002 he chaired the international conference on ubiquitous computing, UbiComp 2002, which attracted almost 500 visitors from companies, universities and research institutes all over the world. He is an associate editor of the Springer journal Personal and Ubiquitous Computing.

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Biosphera thesis

Published on 6/15/2004 in Links. Closed

Finally after two years and half of crazy work my Master thesis has been completed. This is the abstract:
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Microworlds for Ecology Explorations:

From DigitalSeed to Biosphera in fostering children’s

understanding of plant biology

by

Mauro Cherubini

Master of Arts in Education by research
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The essence of this study is the idea to use the human ability to notice patterns in the environment, alter these patterns and observe the consequences, as the key manipulatory experiences to grasp some ideas about plant biology. Some of the findings here contained show a positive impact of this framework in children’s interaction with plants. In addition, observations suggest that plant’s fragility and slow reaction to stimuli are factors responsible for children’s misconceptions and lack of interest in them. Two solutions found here will be described in terms of their design and evaluated. They are the DigitalSeed and the Biosphera, for each of which, an interplay between virtual reality and physical elements will constitute the strategy to facilitate development in children’s representations. The former highlights the concept of life cycle enabling the learner to “physically” feed a virtual seed; the latter enables the learner to define a “growth program” for a virtual plant bound to an actual plant. A key aspect of the design is the use of physical and virtual avenues of discovery, freeing the user to interact with the system, following non-linear paths of interaction, and testing multiple possible futures of the “plant story”. The main value of this work will rest in the design domain because no systematic study has been completed on the long–term impact of this technology on children’s understanding of plant biology.

MapTribe: grasping structures in spatialised communication

Published on 6/15/2004 in General. Closed

I have been thinking around the concept for the thesis and the more I think about it the more I am excited by the idea of building this spatialised messaging system on mobile phones.

The core idea is to build a system where people can post messages attaching these messages to specific places where they happen to pass by. This was already implemented by GeoNotes but without any interesting long term study. Here I want to stress this concept further.

We can relate the context production to the communication intent and therefore at the social construction of meaning as last extent. The idea is to build something useful for people to play with, useful for me to do research and maybe cool for a company to put freely on their phones.

I see a great deal of convergence in this approach.

Now some notes on the things I see we can do with this phone system.

THINGS WE KNOW (Context):
- time of MSG/content
- position of content (x,y)
- position of the emitter, receiver
- words of the MSG
- history of the emitter, receiver (previous, current and future position and activities)
- self inputed categories
- friend of a friend chain
- social editing/rating of the message
- shape of the buildings and other geographical objects on the way

THINGS WE MAY INFER (statistically):
- average usage of that location
- clustering of the location (differences between places and locations)
- common interests based on common places frequentation

THINGS WE WANT TO KNOW (content):
- communication intent
- content categorization
- semantic description

In my idea of the system we have an initial ontology which provides the understanding of the content when the system starts (bootstrap), then over time messages gets categorised and put in relationship and new rules of semantic description are found by an agent (semantic network), this of course imply a better system of categorization of the messages which is therefore refined over time.

People using this system may also explicitly participate in the democratic definition of this ontology/categorisation, having the ability of voting and rating the accuracy of the system. From another point of view we could reason on this user ability to reflect upon the way they use the space if we provide this output as a community mirror. In addition we can have an evaluation of the effectiveness of people solving specific tasks related to space and group interaction.

These different approach are completely fine with me but we need to chose one of them so to circumscribe the approach and the field of interaction of the thesis.

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Social Net

Published on 6/15/2004 in References. Closed

M. Terry, E. D. Mynatt, K. Ryall, and D. Leigh. Social net: Using patterns of physical proximity over time to infer shared interests. In CHI, editor, Proceedings of the Human Factors in Computing Systems Conference (CHI 2002), Minneapolis, MN, 20–25 April 2002.
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The core idea of this paper is to infer from proximity people’s common interests. Example: if two people regularly exercise in the same fitness centre, Social Net detects this pattern and assume they share common interests. In addition a set of automated actions is carried out by the agent. For example, Social Net searches in the contact list of the persons “in proximity” and if a common friend is found then this person is suggested to introduce the two friends in common.

Social Net

Published on 6/14/2004 in Links. Closed

Social Net’s core idea is to use patterns an physical proximity over time to infer shared interests:

Social Net is a novel interest-matching application that looks at patterns of collocation over time to infer shared interests between people. When two people are frequently observed near one another, Social Net searches for a mutual friend to introduce the two. In this way, Social Net strikes a balance between the affordances and capabilities of the technology (i.e., the ability to detect long-term trends of collocation between people) and the natural ability for people to mediate interpersonal interactions (e.g., deciding if, when, and how two people should be introduced).

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Thad Starner

Published on 6/14/2004 in People. Closed

Thad Starner is an Assistant Professor in Georgia Tech’s College of Computing, where he founded and directs the Contextual Computing Group. Thad holds four degrees from MIT, including his PhD from the MIT Media Laboratory in 1999. Starner was an Associate Scientist with BBN’s Speech Systems Group in 1993 when he created one of the earliest high-accuracy on-line cursive handwriting recognition systems. Starner is one of the pioneers of wearable computing and has authored over 50 peer-reviewed scientific publications and book chapters in mobile computing, computer vision, augmented environments, and pattern recognition. Starner co-founded the IEEE International Symposium on Wearable Computers (ISWC) and is one of the founding members of the IEEE Technical Committee on the subject. He is also a founder of the MIT Wearable Computing Project and Charmed Technology. His work includes a gloveless, real-time sign language recognizer; various intelligent agents in support of everyday memory; theoretical frameworks for power generation and heat dissipation for wearables; several augmented realities; and a computer-vision based interactive workbench for which he received a “best paper” award at VR2000. Thad’s current work researches the use of computational agents for everyday-use wearable computers.

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