People can be divided in two categories: chocolate eaters and chocolate buyers. To survive in this world one should try hard in not falling in any of these two.
Mauro Cherubini, 28-04-2005
Monthly Archive for April, 2005
Y. Jung, P. Persson, and J. Blom. Dede: Design and evaluation of a context-enhanced mobile messaging system. In Proceedings of CHI 2005, Portland, Oregon, USA, April 2-7 2005. Association for Computing Machinery. [url]
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This paper present the mobile phone messaging system called DeDe, which central feature is to offer a definition of the delivery context for multimedia messages. The starting statement is that people need better suppor for conversational timing. From this need the authors define an application that enable the user to define the delivery context of a certain message. The context is defined either as a certain time of the day or a certain location (defined by the user and tracked with the Cell-ID). Additionally the user can define the context as the proxemics to another user or the activity of making a phone call to a certain user.
The paper also report the results of the field test, documenting in detail the starting research questions and the obtained results. The results showed that the DeDe system was used only when the use could predict in advance the context of delivery basing the inference on the knowledge of the receiver schedule and movements in the city. Otherwise, the main concern expressed was on the reliability of the delivery of the messages.
How do people use a mobile shared map annotation system to communicate?
The goal of this initial exploratory part of the research will be to define some statistical traits of this kind of communication. As for instance:
- what do they talk about (manual categorization);
- where are they when they talk about something?
- what are they reading?
- where are they when they are reading something?
- when are they interacting to what?
- which part of the city do they talk more about?
- which kind of search do they perform?
- which answers do they check?
- are the messages chained?
Additionally, if we implement a concept of buddy list or foaf, we can enquiry more on this communication process in the following:
- to whom is the message directed?
- is it kept private or not?
- where the receiver retrieved the message?
- when the receiver retrieved the message?
- how many messages rested within the group?
On the spatial distribution of the messages we can try to enquiry what is the unit of analysis that defined the “cluster” to which different messages belongs to. How to define this grouping may be determined by the results of the other enquiry.
Using some extra layers derived from a commercial GIS might be possible then to assign other characteristics or values to the point underlying the definition of the clusters.
In addition, it might be possible to give people the ability to assign a social weight to the messages. Using this hierarchy of the messages, we can abstract the categories or messages which emerge from the interaction of the users. [folksonomies]
The last interest of research might be to define common sense knowledge based on the emerging categories in the system. [AI]
Fabien did not sleep yesterday to install the Python interpreter on his phone. Finally we managed to upload a small script that retrieves the Cell-id of the GSM antenna to which the telephone is connected (see picture).
Recently I have been rethinking the approach for my thesis because of the concerns I expressed before. To sum up, my previous focus was on the user’s interaction and on the communication process. To offer support in this context I was planning to use a device able to track constantly the user, with a certain degree of resolution.
As it turned out in the implementation we are working on, this was not possible due to the technological constraints of the positioning technique we choose and the integration in the mobile platform.
Therefore, here we are, with a mobile system that allows the user to attach a text message to a shared map. Nothing more. What we miss:
- the background of the user;
- the continuous tracking of his/her movements in the space (we have in fact a discontinuous information);
- a precise task on which to orientate the support system.
For these reasons I proposed to refocus the thesis on the clustering of the messages in space: namely on the content rather than on the user. This is based on a simple idea: usually information visualisation research proceed from the clustering of the words composing a certain amount of text, to the visualization of this clusters. Here I want to re-orientate the approach the other way around: we have a certain graphical distribution of messages, which is subsequent to a certain context pertinence and we want to reconstruct the topic descriptor of that context that generated the aggregation of messages.
The research question can be reformulated as:
Q_ How can we define the context of a place analysing the shared annotations that people do on the representation of that place, in such a way that this context is maximally useful for the information retrieval and the fruition of the information by the same users?
J. A. Wise. The ecological approach to text visualization. Journal of the American Society for Information Science, 50(13):1224–1233, 1999. [url]
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This paper describes the SPIRE text visualisation system, which core principle is that humans are genetically selected from their species history to preceptually interpret certain informational aspects of natural environments. The authors argues that if informations from the text documents is visually spatialised in a manner conformal with these predilections, its meaningful interpretation to the user becomes relatively intuitive and accurate.
The author describes two interfaces, named Galaxies and ThemeScape, which worked using the concept of clustering. An elaborated mathematical algorithm was parsing the text creating a multi-dimensional array of the words contained in the text. Suybsequently, the same words were used to cluster the documents based on their similarities. The final step was the visualisation of the scaled array of the topic emerged from the parsing and clustering selection.
The Galaxies interface used the metaphor of stars and space, therefore the visualisation offered was a two-dimensional star field. ThemeScapes, was developed using the metaphor of the sedimentary deposition, therefore resulting in a three-dimensional landscape.
The following pictures was taken from the design of ThemeScapes, a software for the spatial visualization of textual information. What I like of this picture is that it shows the dynamism of the “sedimentary deposition” of the information on the visulalisation space.
“Words and rocks contain a language that follows a syntax of splits and ruptures. Look at any word long enough and you will see it open up into … a terrain of particles, each containing its own world …”
Robert Smithson (1996)
Searchscapes is a nice art project about information visualisation in the form of a cartographic representation:
The intent of “Searchscapes” is to design a tridimensional map of Manhattan using existing data from the web. The objective is to compare representations of the city’s “physical spaces” and “information spaces”. Taking the metaphor very literally, a specific address is searched on Google (ex: “1 Broadway” + “New York, NY”). Such a search will bring mostly results that correspond to this specific location. The total number of text results is parsed and then plotted on a map of the physical space. The height of the “building” on that location will correspond to the number of results found. More results will correspond to higher “information buildings”. This is an attempt to materialize information: to give it dimension, physicality.
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Eco Pod is an interesting project carried out at the Interaction Design Institute of Ivrea, that resemble much of the goals I had in mind while developing my Master’s thesis. The idea was to give access to children to some bits of System Thinking, namely the ability to understand simple rules of multi variate systems.
As a first step, the child places the Eco-pod in his classroom garden. The Eco-Pods start to monitor the water level in the soil, the amount of light, the temperature, and the wind. It also captures daily images of the plant. Every now and then, the child can take the Eco-Pods to the information retrieval system. This system allows him to transfer the recorded information to the “plant diary” software. Using this application, the child can view the changes of the different elements over time, and draw conclusions about their impact on the growth of the plant. Through this playful, intuitive interaction, children can learn Systems Thinking core concepts, such as feedback loops, stocks and flows, and changes over time.
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Fabien managed to hack the current J2ME version of ShoutSpace to allow messaging in the city centre of Ganeva, Switzerland. This is pretty cool. It is evident how the different scale and the degree of complexity of the represented geography reveals another set of possible usage scenario.
M. Raento, A. Oulasvirta, R. Petit, and H. Toivonen. Contextphone – a prototyping platform for context-aware mobile applications. IEEE Pervasive Computing, 4(2):51–59, April-June 2005. [url]
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The context software is an application for SmartPhone which enable the user to share is context with a list of contacts that are usiong the same application. The application subtly combines all the information available from the user’s interaction with the phone and it connects these information in an intellegible way with the communication intent.
The authors started with the assumption that 50% of the phone calls fails because they do not happen in the best moment. From this assumption, they try to convey all possible contextual information to the contact in the attempt of making a phone call, in order to avoid such misplacement of the phone call.
The paper report the detail of the application design and inform on the different features that are currently monitored by the application.
The context project aims at defining the user’s context considering the inputs provided by the cell id, the phone usage and the communications acts (SMS and phone calls). Looks like a super nice project for context recognition and user centered design
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Currently, LBSs require a user to actively request position information, by sending an SMS, for example. Spatial Triggers, however, is a network function that automatically informs applications when users meet certain conditions. …
The Spatial Triggers function is an Ericsson proprietary solution, which works for both GSM and WCDMA users and supports CGI, CGI/TA or Cell ID positioning.
Information related to Spatial Triggers is stored in a database server. The information contained in that database consists of trigger criteria defining the location conditions that must be fulfilled in order to inform the client. The following criteria can be defined:
• mobile terminal entering an area;
• mobile terminal leaving an area;
• two mobile terminals within a certain distance of each other.
[more...]
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There we are, another GeoNotes related service. Only this with pictures. Cool though.
Copyright notice: the present content was taken from the following URL, the copyrights is reserved by the respective author/s.
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