Three years have passed since I finished my Master’s thesis and I have been able to track a couple of commercial product that emerged in the market that my work could have been anticipated. One of them was the Domestic Greenhouse designed by Renzo Piano, which costed around 1000 euros.

This one is from Matsushita and it seems to add the ability of controlling the climate via Internet or SMS (cost around 3000 USD):

On October 11, Matsushita Electric Works, Ltd. announced plans to begin selling an indoor gardening system whose lighting, temperature and water supply can be remotely monitored and controlled via the Internet. The system, called Aiterrarium, is slated for release on December 20 and will initially target research facilities for universities and businesses.

The system consists of a growing chamber that is 50 centimeters wide and 1.2 meters tall. The chamber is outfitted with 190 watts of fluorescent lighting on the walls and ceiling, and sensors measure 15 different growing conditions, including soil temperature and moisture level. If a heater and automatic watering system are added, users can connect to a Matsushita server over the Internet to set ideal temperatures and perform watering. A webcam allows users to monitor growing conditions from anywhere in the world via cellphone or computer.

This is the link to my master’s thesis on the Biosphera project. Our prototype was around 5000 euros but it could easily drop in a serial production.

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Tags: ecology, education, environment, interaction design, pedagogy, plants

A new initiative by Israel’s parliament will soon allow every Israeli citizen to share his or her proposal for new legislation by cellular phone text messaging. This seems to me an excellent idea to raise the citizenry involvement in the politics life of the country.

A couple of question arise:

1. Who is going to waive each proposals?

2. What is going to be the decision process to select the proposition that will take a broader audience?

3. What about conflicting propositions?

I think the basic question hinges in our definition of democracy. What do we mean by that?

Copyright notice: the present content was taken from the following URL, the copyrights are reserved by the respective author/s.

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Tags: collaboration tools, education, eGov, politics, Short Message Service

B. Galantucci. An experimental study of the emergence of human communication systems. Cognitive Science, (29):737–767, 2005. [pdf]

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The emergence of human communication systems is typically investigated via 2 approaches with complementary strengths and weaknesses: naturalistic studies and computer simulations. This study was conducted with a method that combines these approaches. Pairs of participants playedvideogames requiring communication. Members of a pair were physically separated but exchanged graphic signals through a medium that prevented the use of standard symbols (e.g., letters). Communication systems emerged and developed rapidly during the games, integrating the use of explicit signs with information implicitly available to players and silent behavior-coordinating procedures. The systems that emerged suggest 3 conclusions: (a)signs originate from different mappings;(b)sign systems developp arsimoniously; (c) sign forms are perceptually distinct, easy to produce, and tolerant to variations.

Tags: human communication, situated cognition, universal cognitive distance

One of the latest articles in Make Magazine inspired me a logging technique to be used for Ubiquitous computing research. One of the big problem related to recording people interaction is that is very difficult to understand where they are facing and what they are looking at. Some sophisticated solutions include cameras that can be mounted on a person’s glasses.

Recording the scene does not help, especially if the participants are moving around or worse they move across the city!

John Maushammer, in his article, propose an hack to a disposable camcorder so to fit in a rocket. Using the same hack it could be possible to have a cheap video recording unit that could be easily incorporated in the clothes of  the participants, a la SenseCam.

 

On the left hand-side the CVS Camcorder used in the Make Article. On the right hand-side Microsoft’s SenseCam.

Patrick pointed me to this great collection of SMS (Short Message Service) messages collected for research at the Department of Computer Science at the National University of Singapore. As of April 2004, the corpus consists of about 10,000 SMS messages collected by students. The messages largely originate from Singaporeans and mostly from students attending the University. These messages were collected from volunteers who were made aware that their contributions were going to be made publicly available.

Using this collection it might be possible for me to verify some initial intuition on the relation of linguistic identifiers pertaining spatial information and the content disambiguation. It will be cool to parse these messages looking for keywords like “there”, “here”, “over”, “crossing”, etc. and comparing the relative frequencies of these words with the frequencies of the same words within a collection of geographical messages like that of UrbanTapestries.

This will tell whether the strategies of messaging are different in the two settings. However before doing this I’ll be looking for a taxonomy of these semantic markers.

P.S.: a Corpus of 30.000 SMS messages in French was recently made available at the cost of  ~300 euros.

Tags: data mining, ethnography, linguistics, Short Message Service, statistics, tagging, text data mining

It was about time to give this blog a fresh and sparkling engine!

One of the most quoted paper on this subject is Cohen, below. Not without controversy though. This page contains a nice review of the pros and cons of the method.

Cohen J. Weighted kappa: Nominal scale agreement with provision for scaled disagreement or partial credit. Psychological Bulletin. 70:213-20, 1968.

Tags: research methodology

From my understanding of German: the goal of Capture the Map is to place flags on the map using searches on Google engine: the player send a certain query string to google. The results are then parsed and geo-localized  through the database Netgeo. The goal of the game is to make a strategic placement of the flags.

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Tags: google, search engine

When I was doing my summer readings at Microsoft I came across a nice reference:

“Human actors routinely solve both the frame problem and the due process problem. They do so in a variety of ways, as noted both in the social science literature and in the frame problem literature, and in  variably democratic ways.

…

We analyzed issues that arose in the context of artificial intelligence research by looking at how human communities resolved them. These included issues such as due process [Gerson 1987], …, resolution of local uncertainty into global certainty [Star 1983], …”

The quote was taken from S. L. Star.  Distributed Artificial Intelligence, Vol. 2. Chapter The structure of ill-structured solutions: Bounday objects and heterogeneous distributed problem solving. Morgan Kaufman Publishers, pag. 37-54, 1989.

The quote refers to S. L. Star, Simplification of Scientific Work: An Example from Neuroscience Research. Social Studies of Science, Vol. 13, pp. 205-228, 1983.

In these days I am looking for a method to log the interactions of users of ubiquitous systems, namely the exchange of SMS and the influence of location on those exchanges. The current methodology adapted from Grinter and Eldridge is very basic but effective. Somehow I am trying to enhance this with an easier location logging techniques.

I had in mind this idea of providing a separate map to the observed participants but how do people should carry around the logging sheet and the map? It seems a bit inappropriate to ask them to have all this material floating around in their pocket or backpack. The big risk is that they will loose it with the contained information.

So I had an idea combining an intuition of Nicolas and a solution found in a book of 1906! First of all, as Nicolas noted, the log material should be pocket size in the form factor of a sketch book. A single page can be assigned to a single SMS, leaving the annotation much more compact than on a letter-page.

The second intuition, suggested by the book [1], is that a foldable map should be attached to this small log-book, in such a way that could be unfolded when annotating an folded back when moving around. The participant will use the small log-book to register incoming and outgoing SMS, annotating extra information like time, motivation to the communication, content, length, etc. Additionally, using the foldable map it will be possible to indicate his/her position at the moment of reception and the inferred position of the recipient/sender of the message.

Below are the pictures of the book which inspired this solution. In the extended part of this post, I will report some more research I did on how to fold a map.

[1] Karl Baedeker. Italy: Handbook for Travellers, First Part, Northern Italy. Karl Baedeker Publisher, Liepsic, 1906.

Tags: data mining, research, research methodology, smart mobs, ubiquitous computing

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