Monthly Archive for July, 2004

EWall

Published on 7/15/2004 in Diary. Closed

EWall is an interactive installation that enables the concept of inhabitable interfaces. Basically a building is transformed to a maze display which can be used for collaboration over distance or in presence:

EWall proposes a computational solution to help problem solvers work faster and produce smarter solutions through easily collecting, organizing and viewing graphical and contextual information. It will also facilitate user collaboration in large, distributed and decentralized teams while maintaining individual ways of working.

An interesting concept was the idea of building an EWall Operating System for the personalization of the kind of interaction with the wall:

Interactive Systems for Knowledge Sharing

Published on 7/15/2004 in Diary. Closed

TITLE OF PAPER: Designing Interactive Systems for Knowledge Sharing
PRESENTED BY: Jeffrey Huang, Design School, Harvard University

DATE: July, 15, 2004
LOCATION: I&C

–
REAL-TIME NOTES:

Nowadays, it is not possible for a single person to have all the knoledge necessary for buyilding a skyscreaper. So there is a trend from Masterbuildres to Design Teams. There are lots of problems of knowledge sharing: the more distance there are between the specialists, the tranfer of knowledge cost.

The 3 dimensions over which this work develop is a) to reduce the costs of knowledge transfer, like making it more trnsparent; b) reducing the agency costs to make results more transparent; c) making the specialist and the architect closer (collocate participants virtually).

The background of this research is as follows:
- Design of Online Communities (Activity patterns, …) -> Eventspace [Urs Hirschberg]
- Visualising interaction history (visualise abstract data) [Eva Papadimitriou, 2002]
- Situational Instant Messaging System !!!!
- Physical Communication Interface [Surapong Lerthisichai, 1999-2003]

The focus of this presentation is on how to solve the bottleneck effect of the joint of the virtual system over the physical one. The approach is to turn the whole building as an interface. [Information Visualization, CSCW, Ubiquitous Computing] -> Mediaspace

A napkin idea!

Concept of “inhabitalbe interface”: the bought a building in cambridge as a testbed they installed lots of IT in it. Walls were transformed in displays so that a research could be projected on the walls for the viewer to navigate physically. Other functionalities could help the visitor to arrange for a meeting in which two walls coud be used for projecting distance places or people far away.

Later on the house was connceted with the Swiss embassy and with the EPF-Z.

An interesting point is the attempt to create a software to merge all sorts of different media to interoperate withe these e-walls: EWall Operating System [1]:
- Cards are handles for knowledge (containers of informations\
-Algorithms for detecting how people arrange cards
- Algorithms for analysing and extracting facts from interaction history

Flows:
1. User create cards
2. EWalls formulates probable relations amonng the cards
3. …

Principles:
1. Adaptation to rather than imposition of human work process
2. Interpretation of user activities through observation tather than user responses
3. Focus on ispiring rather than directing
4. Focus on context rather than content of information
5. Focus on modular rather than integrated solution

-
Things to check:
- swisshouse: nodes of the swiss embassy around the world
- ewall[1]
–
REFERENCES: {as documents / sites are referenced add them below}

[1] http://ewall.mit.edu/abstract/index.html/
…

–

Leaving Kibbutz

Published on 7/15/2004 in photoblog. Closed

Sad but true: the kibbutz community is over. The ages of pasta and vinegar will remain forever and will become legend.
kibbutz_living

digital street game

Published on 7/14/2004 in Links. Closed

Digital street game seems to reflect the philosophy initially behind MapTribe:

By using a game as an open-ended platform for research we hope to encourage creative expression and collaborative play. As part of the game, players generate documentation and commentary that traces their paths through the game – and the city. Different views of these traces create a prismatic portrait of urban places as mediated through technology use and social relationships. The game becomes a methodological experiment in producing a rich environment for community engagement and social research.

Meeting with Enrico Franconi

Published on 7/14/2004 in General. Closed

There is a competition on building categorization on the fly which is called TRECK? Natural Language Processing.

Some good approaches to my particular field are the Cataloging provided by Ontologies, but this is not enough because ontologies do a very precise thing and they do it very precisely, on the other side we want to have a very specific solution which accomplish a very definite task.

The other theoretical field to look at is the Spatial Reasoning, particularly in the field of AI. On the the examples may be provided by the Discourse Rhetorical Theory (DRT) [Ludwig, 2000]. Also, Brendan Bennet, University of Leeds.
Also the text categorization as per Moore and Paris.

Another extra piece of work to look at is the Question Answering, particularly the work of Maarten de Reijke.

Concerning the Ontologies, probably the best approach is to look at Formal Ontologies which mix psychological, logical and philosophical approaches. Two researchers to look at may be Berry Smith and Cristiano Castelfranchi.

A possible procedure that I should try to put in place for the thesis’ work is to define a psichological model, then translate this model into a logical description and finally translate this into a software implementation. After this it is possible to run the “Prova di Completezza”, which verifies if the algorithm is actually responding to the logical method. Logic is based on semantics therefore a model can be validated from the right semantic implications (meaning).

(0)

Approach for developing Ph-D work

Published on 7/14/2004 in General. Closed

During my weekly meeting with Pierre, I tried to understand from which approach to tackle the PhD work I am involved with. At first we defined the approaches we did not want to pursue further: a) the Mental Representation of Space; b) the cognitive Navigation of space; c) the forming of the idea of the city.

Instead we decided to focus on the language and psycho-linguistic studies, particularly the mutual modeling which happen through the language and the dialogue. Language uses context, in particular space and history, following the principle of the least collaborative effort (Clark)

However other approaches and theoretical branches will be needed, like the cognitive understanding of maps.

(0)

How to use an ontology

Published on 7/14/2004 in Diary. Closed

Description Logics for Information Modeling and Access

presented by Enrico Franconi, Open University of Bolzano

what is an Ontology? It is a formal conceptualization of the world: a conceptual schema, a set of constraints.

an ontology language introduces concepts (classes/entities), properties of concepts (slots/attributes/roles), relationships (associations) and additional constraints. [it may be simple, frame-based, logic-based]

UML is a kind of ontology
—–

The database technology widely available today relies on the assumption of the completeness of the dataset. This structure is designed in a logical schema (tables, relations) that enables for queries at a logical level. An ontology expands of one level this framework, enabling for conceptual schema, which give the user the ability to use constraints for deductions. The ontology has a richer vocabulary than the database and enables for conceptual query on the dataset.

[see also DLR description logic]

Enrico Franconi

Published on 7/13/2004 in People. Closed

Enrico Franconi is associate professor at the Open University of Bolzano, Italy. His interests are in Description Logic, Knowledge Representation, Ontologies and Conceptual Modelling, Artificial Intelligence.

[More...]

Collaborative filtering

Published on 7/13/2004 in References. Closed

D. Goldberg, D. Nichols, B. Oki, and D. Terry. Using collaborative filtering to weave an information tapestry. Communications of the ACM, 35(12):61–70, December 1992.
——————————-

This paper illustrates a simple intelligent mechanism by which people collaborate to help one another perform filtering by recording they reactions to the document they read. These reactions, called annotations, can be accessed by other’s filters.

Buddyspace

Published on 7/12/2004 in Diary and General. Closed

Buddyspace is an instant messaging system which combines a map visualization system to see where are the other partners:

BuddySpace is an instant messenger with four novel twists: (1) it allows optional maps for geographical & office-plan visualizations in addition to standard ‘buddy lists’; (2) it is built on open source Jabber, which makes it interoperable with ICQ, MSN, Yahoo and others; (3) it is implemented in Java, so it is cross-platform; (4) it is built by a UK research lab, so it is 100% free with full sources readiily available. But BuddySpace is about more than just ‘messaging’, as we explain below.

[more...]

(0)

Buddyspace

Published on 7/12/2004 in References. Closed

I. T. Vogiazou, M. Dzbor, J. Komzak, and M. Eisenstandt. Buddyspace: Large-scale presence for communities at work at play. In Inhabiting Virtual Places, Workshop at E-CSCW-03, Helsinki, Finland, September 2003.
———————————–

This paper describe the author’s concern towards the spontaneous establishments of human groups and interaction, which they think leads to a powerful collaboration. The framework in which they develop their research is based on some fuzzy ideas of how providing people location is useful in terms of their collaboration. Two points are interesting: the grounding in familiar visual metaphor enables people to focus on the content rather then incurring in the cognitive overhead to make sense of what is shown. The second is that context matters for interacting meaningfully. The testbed they used to explore these concept is an instant messaging client for Jabber that was specifically redesigned to give the user the ability to see the partners on a customized map. Finally, this study was not grounded into a strong experimental framework.

Transparent desktop opens new forms of collaboration

Published on 7/10/2004 in Diary and General. Closed

Sometimes it is difficult to collaborate over the network, if not impossible. This recent project, developed at university of North Carolina, helps users to interact over distance sharing the same desktop. In fact, a transparent image of a desktop computer is blended into a video-conference feed, allowing two colleagues to work on the same document, while communicating face to face.

[more...]

(0)

Tag and Scan

Published on 7/1/2004 in Links. Closed

TagandScan is a mobile service that enables our members to digitally tag real physical locations with text and images. Although only mobile subscribers in the UK can currently tag locations, anyone can signup and join the TagandScan community to view tags and be prepared for the day when TagandScan is available in their area.

[More ...]