Paper-based cartographic maps provide highly detailed information visualization with unrivaled fidelity and information density. Moreover, the physical properties of paper afford simple interactions for browsing a map or focusing on individual details, managing concurrent access for multiple users and general malleability. However, printed maps are static displays and while computer-based map displays can support dynamic information, they lack the nice properties of real maps identified above. We address these shortcomings by presenting a system to augment printed maps with digital graphical information and user interface components. These augmentations complement the properties of the printed information in that they are dynamic, permit layer selection and provide complex computer mediated interactions with geographically embedded information and user interface controls. Two methods are presented which exploit the benefits of using tangible artifacts for such interactions.

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Tags: information visualization, map algorithms, maps, ubiquitous computing

C. O’Reilly, D. Bustard, and P. Morrow. The war room command console, shared visualizations for inclusive team coordination. In Proceedings of 2005 ACM Symposium on Software Visualization (Softviz 2005), pages 57–65, Saint Louis, Missouri, USA, May, 14-15 2005. Association for Computing Machinery. [pdf]

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This paper presents a study on making the structure of software visible during system development. This is proven to have beneficial effects on building a shared understanding of the context for each piece of work; identify the progress with implementation; and highlight the any conflict between the individual delvelopment activities.

One of the central aspect of improving collaborative work is maintaining the level of conflict up to a certain level. In the author situation they identified this aspect with the code problem handling. Instead of a simple problem notification, it seemed desirable to allow delevopers to have access to each oither’s activities.

The authors identifies several obstacles to communication when trying to coordinate activities between members of a software development team: (a) conveying effort, the scale and complexity of the work involved; (b) determining current progress, to better coordinate activities; (c) identify conflict, to avoid wasted efforts; (d) highlight areas of concern, keep track of the artifacts that are of importance; and (e) translating between viewpoints, reconciliating different perspectives.

The rest of the paper details the experiments the users did with their test interface, which showed a positive effect on some of the points above. The trial also highlighted some important facts: 1) the definition of code complexity is not an easy one; 2) the mapping from the visualization to the code provided good effects on the users.

Tags: collaboration tools, information visualization, software visualization

W. G. Griswold, P. Shanahan, S. W. Brown, and R. T. Boyer. Activecampus: Experiments in community-oriented ubiquitous computing. IEEE Computer, 37(10), 2003. [pdf]

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This paper presents the ActiveCampus projects, an experiment of community-oriented ubiquitous computing. Basically, the authors offered to the users an application fot PDAs that allowed them to exchange virtual graffiti over the campus map. The paper details the ecological approach used, the relevant facts which emerged during the trial and the results of the study.

They chose to create a viral community, because as they state, for the project sustainability they had to increase the application value, which increase with the number of users.

One of the most interesting findings is the analysis of the message sender and receiver locations. The analysis showed that for 473 out of 539 pairs the distance when messaging was less than the average distance. In short relative location as a context seems to matter in community-oriented computing.

Tags: collaboration tools, graffiti, location awareness, Location Based Services, tagging, ubiquitous computing

Reading BeppeGrillo.it I realized of this plan to scrap prohibition on seeds that threaten Third World farmers with hunger:

Ministers are trying to scrap an international agreement banning the world’s most controversial genetic modification of crops, grimly nicknamed “terminator technology”, a move which threatens to increase hunger in the Third World.

Their plans, unveiled in a new official document buried in a government website, will cause outrage among environmentalists and hunger campaigners. Michael Meacher, who took a lead as environment minister in negotiating the ban six years ago, has written Margaret Beckett, the Secretary of State for the Environment, to object.

Please let’s send  thousands of hate-mail to the British government.

More on The Independent article (payant).

Tags: ecology, environment, politics

OpenGuides is a network of free, community-maintained “wiki” city guides to which anyone can contribute. Here you can find lots of information about places to eat, drink or shop, ways of getting about the city, [major attractions]?, the Arts, hints for those unfamiliar with a certain city.

Tags: collaboration tools, urban exploration

An elegant vertical-axis wind turbine, quietrevolution has been designed and developed by XCO2, an established low-carbon energy consultancy and engineering practice. Virtually silent and vibration free, quietrevolution is ideally suited to both urban sites and exposed locations.

The simple and robust design (patent pending) has just one moving part, maximising reliability and minimising maintenance requirements.

Tags: ecology, environment, new technology

T. Sohn, K. A. Li, G. Lee, I. Smith, J. Scott, and W. G. Griswold. Place-its: A study of location-based reminders on mobile phones. In UbiComp’05: Seventh International Conference on Ubiquitous Computing, pages 232–250, Tokyo, Japan, September 2005. [pdf]

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This paper presents the Place-Its system, a context-aware reminder platform that is used by the user to define reminders that are triggered by specific locations. This application is said to improve the usefulness of automated reminders.

The aim of this study was to find how location-based reminders are used when available through a person’s day. The study builds on previous work on ActiveCampus, ComMotion \cite{Marmasse:2000fs}, and CybreMinder, highlighting the fact that these previous studies used additional hardware, such as GPS receivers, that people do not carry around or because they are restricted to predefined areas.

The three components of a Place-It note are the trigger, the text and the place. The trigger defines whether the message should be signaled upon arrival or departure of the associated place. The text is the message associated with the reminder and the place is the location defined by the user where the reminder should activate. Location sensing is achieved with PlaceLab \cite{Smith:2005tr}.

The authors conducted a user study with 10 subjects during a period of two weeks. They interviewed the subjects before and after the experiments, collecting interesting facts. One interesting finding was the unexpected presence of ‘motivators’ reminders, a kind of message used to motiva the person to perform a cerain task.

Due to the way location-based reminders were used and the relative inaccuracy of location-sensing in Place-Its, the author could not claim location to be essential context to prompt reminders. The location-sensing ready availability in Place-Its admits opportunistic use by those who can map relevant (but unsensed) context to anticipated, coarse, location cues. Participants who worked by a set time schedule achieved similar results by mapping their relevant context to time cues and modifying their behavior.

Results showed that location was widely used ad a cue for other contextual information. It appeared that the convenience and ubiquity of location-sensing provided outweights some of the current weakness of the system.

Tags: interaction design, Location Based Services, tagging, ubiquitous computing

M. M. Sebrechts, J. Vasilakis, M. Miller, J. V. Cugini, and S. J. Laskowski. Visualization of search results: A comparative evaluation of text, 2d, and 3d interfaces. In Proceedings of SIGIR’99, pages 3–10, Berkeley, CA, USA, 1999. [pdf]

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This paper present an experimental evaluation of a visual information retrieval interface called NIRVE. The authors confronted a group of users with a three dimensional, two dimensional and text based engine. The results showed a weak effect in favor of the performance of the visualization over the text-based system.

Although there have been many prototypes of visualization in support of information retrieval, there has been little systematic evaluation that distinguishes the benefits of the visualization per se from that of various accompanying features. The current study focuses on such an evaluation of NIRVE, a tool that supports visualization of search results. Insofar as possible, functionally equivalent 3D, 2D, and text versions of NIRVE were implemented. Nine novices and six professional users completed a series of information-seeking tasks on a set of retrieved documents. There were high interface costs for the 3D visualization, although those costs decreased substantially with experience. Performance was best when the tool’s properties matched task demands; only under the right combination of task, user, and interface did 3D visualization result in performance comparable to functionally matched 2D and textual tools.

Tags: information retrieval, information visualization

P. Au, M. Carey, S. Sewraz, Y. Guo, and S. M. Rüger. New paradigms in information visualization. In Proceeding of SIGIR’2000, pages 307–309, Athens, Greece, 2000. ACM Press. [pdf]

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The starting assumption of the paper is that of information overload the users have to fight when dealing with results from a search engine. In the authors’ opinion the strategy should be to shift the user’s mental load  from these slower thought-intensive processes such as reading to faster perceptual processes such as pattern recognition in a visual display.

Instead of the classical ranking, the author suggest clustering the hit documents and make use of the obtained groups with interactive displays. The propose three new paradigms for information visualization: (1) the Sammon Cluster View; (2) the Tree-map focus + context approach; (3) the Radviz interactive visualization.

The first (1) method is a conversion of the high-dimensional cluster centroid vector to two dimensions which preserves the distance among the clusters. This is then mapped on the interface, providing a landscape for navigation. The distance between the circles in the interface is then the metaphor of the similarity of their respective clusters.

The Tree-map (2) clustering is a 2-d space filling approach that was borrowed from D. Shneidermann. It consist in a technique that devide the space of a quares in nested sub-squares which have dimensions and position which reflect the original clustering and similarity among the documents.

In the Radviz visualization, related words are initially arranged on a circle and connected with an invisible spring to each document the appear to be in. The documents are thus placed in a equilibium of positions between their related words and the center of the circle.

Using the first viz, the author showed a setting with an holistic view giving primarily information about a first-order cluster structure and inter-cluster relations. Using the second visualization, it was possible to show the second-order cluster structure. With the third approach they showed a solution where the user could participate in the clustering process, setting the priorities of the relevant words upon the visualization.

Tags: clustering, information retrieval, information visualization, pattern recognition

As I am approaching the finalization of the first prototype of STAMPS, I had a look on which phones it could eventually run. So far I managed to try the 6680, my personal phone, the 6600, and the Panasonic X700 of the lab. I also tried on the 3560 of the lab but i have got a Memory Error. So, I have the suspicion that it wont work on the S60 1st Edition (Symbian OS v6.1). I am sorry Fab.

# S60 3rd Edition (Symbian OS v9.1)

Nokia E60, E61, E70

Nokia 3250

Nokia N71, N80, N91, N92

# S60 2nd Edition FP3 (Symbian OS v8.1)

Nokia N70, N90

# S60 2nd Edition FP2 (Symbian OS v8.0a)

Nokia 6630, 6680, 6681, 6682

Lenovo P930

# S60 2nd Edition FP1 (Symbian OS v7.0s enhanced)

Nokia 3230, 6260, 6620, 6670, 7610

Panasonic X700, X800

Samsung SDH-D720

# S60 2nd Edition (Symbian OS v7.0s)

Nokia 6600