This week end we visited Canon Beach, in Oregon. It was truly one of the best w.e. ever here in America. The landscape was astonishing. We spent hours on the beach, playing with the sand, walking, bird-watching. It was a great emotion: our first time facing the Pacific ocean (my foot in the water). The water was freezing, I couldn’t believe that people were swimming in that cold.

On Saturday, we ate at the Lumberyard, a nice and cosy restaurant. We had crab and shrimps pankakes! On Sunday I managed to buy a kite that I am planning to fly next Saturday. We found this nice place called Pinky’s Kite Factory: they had tons of different kites and it was very hard to choose.

Interaction Design Lab, a startup created from the Interaction Design Institute at Ivrea, is conducting an interesting research on participatory design of art installation. Their approach is “to go on the field” and ask people how the art installation should look like:

In the beginning of July 2006 we have installed our work base in Cagliari. From this privileged observatory we will develop our project for the Mediterranean Museum of Nuragic and Contemporary Art architectural competition.

Now we start off by launching a first base camp: for two whole months, July and August, a hangar in the port of Cagliari is the place we start from to discover and learn about Sardinia. It is a place for work, fun, exchange and research. We want to take advantage of this fantastic site to meet people and listen to their experiences, ideas and suggestions. We look forward to invite you inside our landscape to show you the conceptual frame of our project. This Wednesday 2 July at 19:00, we will present our explorations of Cagliari going from our base camp to the Lazzaretto peninsula – to the airport – along the Salina –then through Cagliari downtown and onwards to Pirri.

We will take you to a media landscape and we will explore together your city.

 

See you at Marina di Sant’Elmo, Calata dei Mercenari, Loc. Su Siccu, Darsena del Sale, Cagliari, Italy

Tags: art, interaction design, urban exploration

I had the great opportunity to discuss with S. Dumais of my thesis’ project. One of the main questions I had was how to evaluate the goodness of a retrieval algorithm for geographical messaging. Dr. Dumais pointed out that any implicit measure of effectiveness is extremely dependant from presentation. How results are arranged, which font was used, which color and which position in the rank list is going to affect the way people will use the system.

Additionally, users have different speed while browsing. They have different cognitive styles that bring them to formulate queries in a different manner.

In my situation is very difficult to propose a way to establish similarities and to measure effectiveness because I do not have a clear model of what tasks the users are trying to accomplish. The system support open ended conversations which reflects in the lack of specific tasks. Along the same argument, it is very difficult for me to define which factors are important in the query / selection. My top list currently includes: semantic matching, geographic proximity, social rating, and contextual appropriateness (a mix of spatial and temporal factor in relation with personal objectives).

On the other extreme of the spectrum, we have the standard IR evaluation techniques that suggest having the effectiveness measured a priori by judges. The challenge of this approach resides in the fact that detaching the application from its natural constraint invalidates completely its ecological validity. Also to evaluate with this technique one needs to keep the query constant between two different algorithms.

A live system introduces noise in the evaluation process. Dr. Dumais pointed me to different studies trying to evaluate different presentation techniques (like Optimizing Search by Showing Results In Context).

Finally we brainstormed a bit on possible ways to tackle the problem and find a new approach to give the best matches. One of the ideas that emerged was that of the batch measurement of relevance (the user throws a query, the system returns a list of all the results and the user is asked to define the relevance). Another idea was that of leaving the community decides on the relevance of a certain result.

I am planning to attend this workshop on Geographic Information Retrieval, which is part of the SIGIR this year in Seattle.
This is the list of the accepted papers. I am looking forward to read them (top rank in bold 🙂 ).

1. Relevance Ranking for Geographic IR
   Leonardo Andrade and Mário J. Silva
   Faculdade de Ciências da Universidade de Lisboa
2. Inferring Geographical Ontologies from Multiple Resources for Geographical Information Retrieval
   Davide Buscaldi, Paolo Rosso and Piedachu Peris Garcia
   Universidad Politécnica de Valencia
3. A Location Data Annotation System for Personal Photograph Collections: Evaluation of a Searching and Browsing Tool
   Chufeng Chen, Michael Oakes and John Tait
   University of Sunderland
4. Retrieval of Similar Travel Routes Using GPS Tracklog Place Names
   Aiden R. Doherty, Cathal Gurrin, Gareth J. F. Jones and Alan F. Smeaton
   Dublin City University
5. GeoSphereSearch: Context-Aware Geographic Web Search
   Jens Graupmann and Ralf Schenkel
   Max Planck Institut für Informatik
6. Geomodification in Query Rewriting
   Vivian Wei Zhang, Benjamin Rey, Eugene Stipp and Rosie Jones
   Yahoo! Research
7. Associating spatial patterns to text-units for summarizing geographic information
   Julien Lesbegueries, Christian Sallaberry and Mauro Gaio
   Université des Pays de l’Adour
8. On metonymy recognition for geographic IR
   Johannes Leveling and Sven Hartrumpf
   Fern Universität in Hagen
9. Handling Locations in Search Engine Queries
   Bruno Martins, Mário J. Silva, Sérgio Freitas and Ana Paula Afonso
   Faculdade de Ciências da Universidade de Lisboa
10. Identifying and grounding descriptions of places
    Simon E Overell and Stefan Rüger
    Imperial College London
11. The place of place in geographical IR
    Diana Santos(1) and Marcirio Silveira Chaves(2)
    (1)SINTEF ICT, (2)Faculdade de Ciências da Universidade de Lisboa
12. Towards Fuzzy Spatial Reasoning in Geographic IR Systems
    Steven Schockaert, Martine De Cock and Etienne E. Kerre
    Ghent University
13. Range-capable Distributed Hash Tables
    Alessandro Soro and Cristian Lai
    CRS4
14. Exploring Probabilistic Toponym Resolution for Geographical Information Retrieval
    Yi Li, Alistair Moffat, Nicola Stokes and Lawrence Cavedon
    The University of Melbourne
15. Indexing implicit locations for geographical information retrieval
    Zhisheng Li(1), Chong Wang(2), Xing Xie(2), Xufa Wang(1) and Wei-Ying Ma(2)
    (1)University of Sci. & Tech. of China, (2)Microsoft Research Asia
16. Detecting Geographical Serving Area of Web Resources
    Qi Zhang(1), Xing Xie(2), Lee Wang(2), Lihua Yue(1) and Wei-Ying Ma(2)
    (1)University of Sci. & Tech. of China, (2)Microsoft Research Asia

This is cool! When working on my master thesis I was always looking for this kind of games, which could help kids (and adults) to understand some more of the life of plants.

From the creators of Diner Dash comes Plantasia, a game of gardening delight. Enter your luscious gardens, where magical flowers and a fairy-in-training are waiting to show you the way. Plant seeds, harvest flowers, restore fountains, and watch as your gardens bloom. But beware! Weeds, rocks, insects and the clock are all waiting to make your game a fun-filled challenge.” Players restore one garden after the next, choosing flowers and gardening spells as they discover how a fairy wish unfolds. The game features 50 levels, more than 35 types of plants with varying blooms, five gardens, multiple emotional states for each plant, and two modes that consist of “Holly’s Story” or “Garden Challenge.

Tags: ecology, education, pedagogy

The text below is an excerpt from the commencement address at the American University that the President John F. Kennedy gave on June 10th 1963 in Washington DC. I found it extremely inspiring and appropriate in regards to the recent developments of the international politic situation.

What kind of peace do I mean? What kind of peace do we seek? Not a Pax Americana enforced on the world by American weapons of war. Not the peace of the grave or the security of the slave. I am talking about genuine peace, the kind of peace that makes life on earth worth living, the kind that enables men and nations to grow and to hope and to build a better life for their children–not merely peace for Americans but peace for all men and women–not merely peace in our time but peace for all time.
…
So, let us not be blind to our differences–but let us also direct attention to our common interests and to the means by which those differences can be resolved. And if we cannot end now our differences, at least we can help make the world safe for diversity. For, in the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children’s future. And we are all mortals.

This last week end we visited Portland. It is a nice city: lots of things to see and not chaotic at all. We did some shopping although most of the shops are closed on Sunday. The cool thing is that they do not apply the VAT for the goods. We rumbled around the city for the most part of Saturday, ending up on the park facing the Williamette river of Downtown. We had dinner at the “three degree restaurant“, on the river side. Funnily, the food was high quality and the prices were ok, but in Oregon is “considered” fair to leave 18% of tip for the service.

On Sunday we visited the Japanese garden, in the Washington park. After I could had a look at the Powell city of books: one of the biggest bookshops in the US.

Geographic search is becoming an hot topic in the blogosphere and in research. One of the typical scenario:

If you stand on a street corner in Tokyo today, you can point a specialized cellphone at a hotel, a restaurant or a historical monument, and with the press of a button the phone will display information from the Internet describing the object you are looking at.

One of the companies behind this product is GeoVector.com. We will see …

Tags: geographical serach, Location Based Services, new technology, search engine, ubiquitous computing

Gutenkarte is a geographic text browser, intended to help readers explore the spatial component of classic works of literature. Gutenkarte downloads public domain texts from Project Gutenberg, and then feeds them to MetaCarta’s GeoParser API, which extracts and returns all the geographic locations it can find. Gutenkarte stores these locations in a database, along with citations into the text itself, and offers an interface where the book can be browsed by chapter, by place, or all at once on an interactive map. Ultimately, Gutenkarte will offer the ability to annotate and correct the places in the database, so that the community will be able construct and share rich geographic views of Project Gutenberg’s enormous body of literary classics.

Below, the mapping of “A Tale of Two Cities” of Charles Dickens. It is possible to spot some little problems in the parsing algorithm used. See the “us” flag in Croatia …

Tags: data mining, map algorithms, maps, text data mining

This is something I was thinking about for quite some time. This portal allows the user to browse and search the content of several news feeds that are displayed attached to a world map. At a glance it is possible to have an understanding of how certain topics are discussed in the globe. Nice.

Tags: information visualization, map algorithms, maps, geographical serach, search engine