As I am working on my PhD report I decided to include a little drawing that makes the timeline a bit more visual. Three phases will be required to achieve the thesis’ goals: (a) the observation of people communicating using the designed application; (b) the refinement of the retrieval engine that could sustain this kind of communication; (c) the validation of this model through a second experimental phase.

(a) Phase I: The observation of communication. This part of research should last 6 months: an experimental group of users will be gathered for providing experimental data to the framework. The results of this enquiry will be analysed to serve the development of the second phase. The data collected during this phase will be compared with those collected with alternative systems like Urban Tapestries (Q1 on figure).

(b) Phase II: The computational algorithm. The observation of phase I will provide some clues on the nature of this kind of spatial communication like the connection of semantic and geometry of the messages. Together with side experiments on the semantic retrieval engines (Experiment 2 on figure), this will suggest a possible mechanism to sustain this kind of communication that will be implemented in this phase.

(c) Phase III: The verification. Finally, during the last phase the retrieval system implemented during the second phase will be evaluated with two experimental group of users. The phase three might interleave during the 6 months of phase I (Experiment 1 continued on figure).

Jeroen Wijering made What’s Up, a map of the world that gets overlaid with live news feeds. The design is stunning and very attractive.

Tags: information visualization, map algorithms, maps

Share your experience of the city

What is it?

This is an academic research project of the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne.

STAMPS is a little application that allows you to leave notes on a map using your mobile phone. You can see a map of the place where you are, visualised on the screen of your mobile. There, you can write a kind of SMS and attach it to the map so that other friends can see your message appearing on their map. You can write for instance: “this is my favorite pizzeria!”, to offer advice to your buddies. All the messages left in the system say something about the city where you live: what are the sport locations, the place to eat, the meeting spots. After a while, we want to use all these information to help the users to ‘navigate’ the city. You can ask the system, for instance: “where is a pizzeria nearby?”, and the system will search for other people’s messages which refer to the term pizzeria to give you an advice.

What are we looking for?

We are looking for a group of ‘activists’, friends, who like to walk the city and annotate the spots they like the most, the places they hate. If you want to participate in this trial you need to be passionate about your city, informed on the activities running in the surroundings and ready to share this information with your friends. We expect from you to participate intensively for the next few months leaving notes of your activities in the urban area.

What is it for you?

If you will be selected for the first trial all the connection costs that you will have to use the system will be reimbursed. If your telephone is not compatible with our software, we will give you a new one for the period of the trial. The most creative and active participants will be awarded with a monetary prize.

How can I apply for participating?

Please send an email to shoutspace[at]gmail.com with your coordinates, your telephone model and your operator. If you apply with your friends you will have more chances to be selected. Please add the coordinates of your friends to the message.

GooMaps Radar is a kind of Web 2.0 application where ultralight aircrafts can be tracked in real time as overlaying a google map. The system allows to any airplane transmitting specific information as speed, altitude, roll, pitch, azimuth, to be tracked on the map.

Tags: google, Location Based Services, map algorithms, maps

Recently Google bought @Last Software, a 3D CAD company. They did it for this plug-in than allow the user of their software to place the finished building to the exact location of interest to see the final outcomes in the right geographical context.

I think the same kind of technology may reveal to be super useful for thousand of similar situations not just in the architectural domain. See for instance the track on blogjects or in general the internet of things. My point is that everybody likes maps. It is a nice framework to share ideas and communication in general. Looking at a map, communication becomes sharp and direct and grounding takes place spontaneously.

Tags: collaboration tools, google, information visualization, interaction design, map algorithms, maps, universal cognitive distance, urban planning

G. Reitmayr, E. Eade, and T. Drummond. Localisation and interaction for augmented maps. In Proceedings of IEEE ISMAR’05, Vienna, Austria, October 5-8 2005. [pdf]

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The paper presents a projection technique useful to augment maps and therefore the tangible interaction an user might have with the artefact itself. The basic assumption is that cartobraphic maps are complex visualizations that afford natural interaction by direct manipulation. They can be freely arranged, moved or annotated. A map also creates a common reference frame for multiple users in which gestures and verbal communication are interpreted.

The paper details the extremely sofisticated system they used to calibrate the projection from the top to the map raster. Everytime the map was moved, also the projected content was dynamically readapted.

Using extra devices or other technical solutions was possible to handle more complicated intertaction on top of the map: annotations with symbols, curves or areas; calculation of areas of occlusion or layering of different maps.

Tags: collaboration tools, interaction design, interactive furniture, map algorithms, maps, tangible interface

Today I glued a couple of screenshots of the user’s interaction on the STAMPS interface. I thinks this can give a feeling of what is like to use the application and what are the possibilities. The application was developed with Python for Series 60 and uses the code named PyHole, developed by Micah Dowty (thanks!).

Yesterday I discovered this great service that can add a great deal where there are bandwidth problems or discontinuous connection to the internet. In fact so far, I could not use Skype with my family in Italy because they still have a PSTN connection to the internet which does not allow enough band to sustain a voip call. Thing is, for them, that things are not going to change because is not in the current plan of TelecomItalia to connect rural places like the one my parents live in.

So, this service, Jajah does something even better than skype: you pass to the page your landline or mobile number and you select the landline or mobile number you want to call everywhere in the globe. That’s it. After a couple of seconds your phone rings and when answered you can hear the ringing tone of the number you have selected.

The rates are comparable with those of skype.

Tags: collaboration tools, Italy, new technology, voip

LibriVox volunteers record chapters of books in the public domain, and then we release the audio files back onto the net (podcast and catalog). Our objective is to make all books in the public domain available, for free, in audio format on the internet. We are a totally volunteer, open source, free content, public domain project.

Tags: education, open source, pedagogy, politics

Visyoual is a web based data visualisation tool, which helps to browse high complex multidimensional data structures. Thatswhy it supports hidden knowledge detection. Because visyoual consequently uses xml technology, it is plugable to different data sources or systems as a web extension. Visyoual offers a network, tree or landscape view of the your data. A comfortable interactive navigation allows easy browsing through data.

Tags: information retrieval, information visualization, machine learning, search engine