Swisscom Auto-id is a spin-off of Swisscom telecommunication that aims at hitting the radio frequency tags business market. The main applications developed will target companies logistics:

Swisscom Auto-ID Services can help speed up your company’s supply management thanks to Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology. RFID, which allows high-speed automatic data recording using radio waves, is able to identify all manner of objects without direct contact, and can be used in applications such as logistics, inventory management and industrial automation.

One of the crucial point I am facing is that of being able to monitor the SMS activity of the participant of the field trial of STAMPS. This will provide useful information to compare the spatialized messaging with canonical strategies of communication. There are a couple of technical limitations which prevent a direct monitoring on the outgoing box so I have been thinking on possible workarounds.

1st solution: monitor the inbox for incoming messages from one of the group participant. This will require to know the numbers of all the participants which is possible. One of the limitation is that it will also parse other messages with possible infringement of the privacy.

2nd solution: ask the user to use a second phone knowing that this second device, the SMS exchanges will be monitored. A bit more fair but not practical to hang around with two phones in the pocket.

3rd solution: implement an internal private and direct one-to-one communication with other participants. This will be mostly transparent to the user but it will face the risk of not being used because people are accustomed to current SMS mechanisms.

Interesting meeting this afternoon with Martin Rajman on information retrieval techniques in relation to the STAMPS project. One of the first reference I picked up was that of the link mining, which is the data mining activity of constructing links between documents.

Then Dr. Rajman, gave me two references to the weighting scheme which are currently used to make rankings on a certain data structures: Prosit (also known as DFR) and Okapi (a variant of TF*IDF).

He mentioned briefly a technique they are working on at LIA to combine a selection technique with a Random Walk data structure which should be based on probabilistic formulas.

Basically, the building of the structural part on the graph is the result of how people would have walked our graph through many interactions.

An interesting comment Dr. Rajman made is that the different layers / properties we are trying to combine (social, semantic, geometric) are mostly precious if kept separated. These are maybe interesting to use at different time during the user interaction: for instance the user may start looking for a specific area on the map and then s/he might want to zoom on a more specific subset of the result, maybe this time focussing more on the social layer and using this to trim the results. We should enquiry how to use pertinence propagation across the different layers.

Another interesting thought from Dr. Rajman is that words are interesting to look at because they do not follow gaussian distributions in phenomena.

E. F. Churchill, J. Trevor, S. Bly, L. Nelson, and D. Cubranic. Anchored conversations: chatting in the context of a document. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems, pages 454 – 461, The Hague, The Netherlands, 2000. Association for Computing Machinery. [pdf]

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This paper describes an application-independent tool called Anchored Conversations that brings together text-based conversations and documents. The design of Anchored Conversations is based on our observations of the use of documents and text chats in collaborative settings. We observed that chat spaces support work conversations, but they do not allow the close integration of conversations with work documents that can be seen when people are working together face-to-face. Anchored Conversations directly addresses this problem by allowing text chats to be anchored into documents. Anchored Conversations also facilitates document sharing; accepting an invitation to an anchored conversation results in the document being automatically uploaded. In addition, Anchored Conversations provides support for review, catch-up and asynchronous communications through a database. In this paper we describe motivating fieldwork, the design of Anchored Conversations, a scenario of use, and some preliminary results from a user study.

Pierre told me about this work today. I was a bit surprised that he slipped over this important reference till this moment. I think this paper is extremely important for my research as focusing on making links to between specific points of the document where the discussion concentrates. In this sense the document can be seen as a map on top of which the chat has been anchored. Can we find an asynchronous alternative to this?

Tags: collaboration tools, context, graphical user interface, interaction design, map algorithms

Fortunately there are Italians like Antonio Scarponi around. They represent the genius and the creativity of some of us against the barbarian disgrace that Italy is living in this period.

His latest project is called ‘Italia in fumo’ (Italy burned and transformed in smoke). The goal of the project is to raise the awareness around the italian constitution, a document that is largely unknown by most of the italians 🙁 .

Antonio proposes to use some common form of public display to spread the knowledge of the constitution articles. With the same graphic language of the european directive concerning the cigaret consumption, the project web site proposes a series of widgets that is possible to download and use to spread the constitution around. On the picture below, for instance, there is the model for building a cigaret box cover. I find it really neat and smart! Thanks Antonio!

Tags: education, information visualization, Italy, learning technology, pedagogy, politics

I finally join the wave started on the smart mob world and catch promptly by Nicolas and Fabien on the great advantages of having a web server running on a mobile phone. Why is this step so important for an ecology of the internet of things:

Providing access to a mobile phone from the Internet is not straightforward, as operators typically employ firewalls that prevent access from the Internet to phones inside that firewall. By implementing a custom gateway we could circumvent that limitation and we are now able to provide a webserver on a mobile phone with a global URL than can be accessed from any browser. In a sense, the mobile phone has now finally become a full member of the Internet.

It is clear that with this ‘little’ step a mobile phone becomes an ubiquitous ‘transductor’ from the bits world  to the atom world, a connection that was missing so far. We can already imagine lots of different geek application (aka ‘find my shoes’). Now, let’s start thinking for real on what to do with this technology which will not make my grandmother say “and then what?”.

Besides, any example out there yet on how to make an ‘hello world’?

Tags: new technology, internet of things, reverse engineering, smart mobs

Trying to reshape the experimental setup of my thesis, I brainstormed this afternoon with my respected colleagues Mirweis (aka ‘Sinalco’) and Gaelle (aka ‘Molinette’). The aim was to find an experimental setting that could support the hypotheses of the thesis in a closer look that the current experiment I am doing with Lorenzo.

So the starting hypotheses are that space provide a context for the receiver and a new structure to communication. Therefore we might expect shorter messages and a smaller number of iterations when dealing with a task. Other specific linguistic indicators might include: it might be easier to reach grounding, or there might be fewer repair acts.

The initial idea I had was to implement two different interfaces of the kind developed for the VIR experiment. A map and a search box. Using the search box, the users can browse a dataset of geolocalised messages. The users have to solve collaboratively a certain task and they have at their disposal a chat utility that allows them to coordinate. This utility is different in the two interfaces. In one case the users can anchor their conversation to specific places on the map. In the other case it resemble a traditional chat, standing on a side of the map.

As I was not sure of the task I thought that a bit of brainstorming could be optimal to reach a possible solution. Both Gaelle and Mirweis were very imaginative to sketch scenarios and to highlight concerns. Two mayor concerns emerged: on the case of the georeferenced chat it will be difficult to represent the temporal aspect of the discourse, which is embedded in the vertical sorting of the traditional chat; additionally, the dimensions of the chat tool should be maximally comparable in both situations.

Three elements were found fundamental to a good and balanced task: (1) the presence of countable aspects in the requirements of the task: i.e., temporal or numerical as a certain amount of money necessary to solve the task. This should be mixed with spatial elements necessary to accomplish the task: as locating a certain number of similar items, find the shortest path according to the criteria, or locate the best spot to position an activity using different criteria; (2) the difficulty of the task should be balanced so not to have scores too high or too low, so there should be different solutions to the task; (3) the task should not impose any preferential control to the users so ‘to force’ them to discuss possible solutions and act together to reach the goal.

We worked on three different scenarios, which I have to refine to reach a more specific task:

1. Find the closest books on a certain topics among the libraries of EPFL. This might integrate the need for different queries and discussions on where points needs to fall to compose the shortest path;

2. Organise a touristic tour in the center of Geneva for a group of visitors given a certain amount of money and time.

3. Discuss where to position the offices of a startup in Lausanne, given the activities of the company, the transport resources around, the condition of the soil and other factors. 

Yesterday I had one of the most controversial meeting with my PhD advisor. The thing is that we have slight different ideas of what constitute the core of the thesis and how to answer the research questions. So it happens, time to time, that we have to step back and rethink together the whole process. So we did.

One of his points is that the current VIR experiment cannot be used in full to sustain some of the central claims of my thesis work. It is a bit of a side experiment. Now, my point was that most of the analysis methodologies that we are taking in place for the VIR will be reused in the rest of the thesis.

For instance we found ourselves in the need of defining whether the navigation of the information space by the users can be considered as “spatial”. In other words: does the user adopt a spatial strategy to explore the points rather than just clicking randomly? We decided to answer affirmatively to this question only if the distance between the clicks that the user does on the map is a function of the pertinence of the articles selected.

Over the last couple of days we discussed a lot on how to measure the fact that the user explores the cluster where s/he finds relevant articles. For instance: does the user try to explore the closest documents to the one selected during the experiment?

To define what is “close” during the exploration we tested different definitions with different results. At first, for instance, we decided to use the average distance of the interaction sequence. This follows the hypothesis that the user will shorten the jumps among the documents whenever s/he finds a relevant article. However this simple calculation may be biased by the fact that some relevant documents are isolated in the lower part of the map.

Another possibility was that of using the notion of density of closest points. Or, using the Minimum Spanning Tree of the documents. This, however resulted in a very restrictive consideration for “close jumps”. Then we thought about using other graph strategies to say which documents are close. One of this was the usage of the b-skeletons. Another was the usage of the k-nearest agglomerative clustering to define documents nearby. We thought to analyze this matrices with the Exploratory Sequential Data Analysis technique.

Finally Pierre came out with the idea of using a granular definition of proximity instead of the binary selection I was trying to implement. This follows the idea that two documents can be separated by a great geographical distance but a small number of other documents, which make the jump comparable to a smaller geographical distance with other documents nearby.

Tags: beta-skeletons, clustering, data mining, information metric, information retrieval, map algorithms, maps, spatial clustering, text data mining

I completed the script that performs the sequences extraction from the patterns of usage in the visual information retrieval experiment. The first matrix is the cumulative representation of the LSI method across the different tasks. The second matrix is, on the contrary, CNG. To understand the meaning of the cells the following key is needed: the columns are the events at time T+1, while the rows at time T. The first element is the case A, then B then C and D. These states are so summarised:

A: The user read a document and then select a document in the relative neighborhood of the first document;

B: The user read a document and then moves away from the cluster of the first document;

C: The user selects and stays in the cluster;

D: The user selects and moves away from the cluster.

[19, 132, 0 , 0]

[83, 588, 10, 90]

[4 , 49 , 0 , 0]

[14, 104, 0 , 2]

[5 , 88 , 0 , 1]

[48, 537, 17, 98]

[2 , 49 , 0 , 0]

[6 , 109, 1 , 2]

Next step is to verify whether these frequencies are different from the expected. On a first sight it will seem that the most frequent move is the ‘read + long jump’. Now we need to check whether this difference is significative.

P.S. To verify the move within the cluster we used the sequence determined by the Minimal Spanning Tree, which is extremely selective in defining the “in-cluster” movements.

T. Judd and G. E. Kennedy. More sense from audit trials: eploratory sequential data analysis. In R. Atkinsons, C. McBeath, D. Jonas-Dwyer, and R. Phillips, editors, Beyond the comfort zone: Proceedings of the 21st ASCILITE Conference, pages 476–484, Perth, Australia, December, 5-8 2004. [pdf]

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This paper introduces the use of exploratory sequential data analysis (ESDA) to detect, quantify and correlate patterns within audit trail data. We describe four sequence analysis techniques and use them to analyse data from 34 students’ attempts at an interactive drag and drop task. Using a model sequence of events based on the task’s underlying educational design as reference, we employed these techniques to: (i) calculate an ‘average’ sequence of events based on individual user sequences, (ii) characterise individual sequences in terms of their similarity to the design model, (iii) identify common partial sequences within individual sequences, and (iv).

characterise transitions between two disparate actions within the task. We then used the results of these analyses to explore why most students failed to complete all components of the task.

We suggest that it was not because the task was too long or that it lacked challenge but that students intentionally and selectively ignored certain non-key steps in the task. It is our contention that ESDA techniques, in conjunction with judiciously collected audit trail data, represent a powerful and compelling tool for educational designers and researchers.

Tags: data mining, information metric, information retrieval, user experience