F. A. Twaroch and A. U. Frank. Sandbox geography – to learn from children the form of spatial concepts. In P. F. Fisher, editor, Proceedings of Spatial Data Handling ’04, pages 421–433, Leicester, UK, 2004. [url]

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The goal of this paper is to propose a working methodology to revise the understanding and the communication of spatial concepts through a Geographical Information System. Their approach is to use an Algebra Based agent which follows the same implicit rules derived from developmental cognitive psychology. The author start from the theoretical ground of the theory thory, which states that children’s acquisition of knowledge is based on forming and revising theories. Within the same framework, their research assume this hypothesis: theories of space can be described by a set of axioms. It is possible to revise such a theory by adding, deleting, or exchanging axioms.

Their working agent iterates proof of the current beliefs against reality. If the current hypotesis is not verified then the agent makes use of an alternative hypothesis and test it. If no rule explains the model of reality the agent has to form a new ad-hoc rule that fits. If all rules fail and ad-hoc also do not work, the agent has to exchange its complete theory.

I wonder hom much of this cognitive strucure is applied in human reasoning. Most of the time we operate without this rigor when reasoning.

Write2File allows Flash Lite  to write to file on mobile phones, to save and store persistent  information or preferences. Write2File will allow Flash Lite  applications to store textual information on-handset and call upon this information within the application. By using Write2File,  developers can present users with the information most relevant  to them, or save information on application usage such as top  scores for mobile games.

My EPFL co-worker Fabien wrote a postmortem report (.pdf) about our CatchBob! project in which he describes the whole development process. He presents how we designed CatchBob on two platforms (namely iPAQ and TabletPC) and how he implemented it. The report goes throught the whole thing, dealing with the game architecture, the user interface, the positioning feature as well as the communication tool (that allows to annotate the map).

A. U. Frank, S. Bittner, and M. Raubal. Spatial Information Theory – Foundations of Geographic Information Science (Int. Conference Cosit 2001, Morro Bay, USA, September 2001), volume 2205 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science, chapter Spatial and cognitive simulation with multi-agent systems, pages 124–139. Springer-Verlag, Derlin, Heidelberg, 2001. [url]

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This article describe a method for simulating human behavior in space using multi-agent systems: mutiple agents that acts in an environment that represents the simulated world. They each have a certain base knowledge, processes, and perceptions about the world. This information, which is not necessarily correct, is used to make decisions, to act and to communicate. Other agents can see their actions or ‘hear’ their communication and use this information together with their perception of the world to make decisions for actions.

J. Coutaz, J. L. Crowley, S. Dobson, and D. Garlan. Context is key. Communications of the ACM, 48(3):49–53, March 2005. [url]

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This article offers a nice introduction to threating context as the key element of the development of every ubiquitous computational system. The authors point out that context can be seen in two different way: as a process (part of the problem-solving activity of the agent); or as a state.

The author also propose a conceptual framework for context-aware systems based on an ontological foundation that comprehend entities, roles, relations, and observables. 

I found this nice call for a talk held in Cambridge. I have to chase the organizers to see if the recorded the talk:

Most recent work on giving computers such “common sense” has focused on the use of formal logic and manual knowledge engineering. Instead, can we try a wider range of approaches? Can we build commonsense models using graphical models learned from sensory data or the web? Can we adopt a Wikipedia-like divide-and-conquer strategy? Can we use case-based reasoning, genetic programming, or reinforcement learning? The jury is still out about what methods people themselves use, but in building “human aware” systems we can look to a broader array of strategies that, together, could far exceed our own capabilities at commonsense thinking — leading, perhaps, to systems that understand people better than people understand themselves.

The primary focus of the database is device audio capability and the means to deliver audio content. We also include general information about the device and other developer specific information. The database contains information about phones from a wide variety of manufactures, from different regions around the world and devices at different levels of sophistication.

Here once again a nice article on these two different systems to use cryptography in a seamless way. What I discovered recently is that there is a list of certificates of authorities that comes preloaded in every mail client. This gives an advantage to the users of these system to have already a degree of international trust. Here at EPFL, for instance, we have our own CE certificate but is not going to be recognized when you open a message signed by our system.

Now, who is going to decide which authorities are going to be trustable by default?

Found a great site of applications developed in Flash Lite 1.1. Lots of simple ideas in a very interesting interface design. Worth to have a look.

I started reading the book Vehicles: Experiments in Synthetic Psychology, where Valentino Braitenberg describes a series of thought experiments in which “vehicles” with simple internal structure behave in unexpectedly complex ways.  The author describes simple control mechanisms that generate behaviors that, if we did not already know the principles behind the vehicles’ operation, we might call aggression, love, foresight and even optimism. Braitenberg gives this as evidence for the “law of uphill analysis and downhill invention,” meaning that it is much more difficult to try to guess internal structure just from the observation of behavior than it is to create the structure that gives the behavior.

This is a bit discouraging for my research in how to model people communication in space but, on the other hand, it is kind of obvious. What I also think of this book is that it came ages before Wolfram’s A new kind of science, of which it is claiming the same principle.

[some simulators]