November 20, 2009 at 14:45 pm · Filed under Status
[End keynote, Matt Jones from Swansea, on 10 years of AmI] Ten years ago, Google had just moved onto the web, and noone was yet using it; noone was browsing the Internet on a mobile phone, and browsing the Internet itselg was done not through searching, but through directories.
Computers as theatre 1993, Laurel, B. : “Intelligence without passion is simply rationality”. We should bring passion into the word of computers by turning the user into a performer. What kind of system could we build so that users extrovertly engage with it, publicly? People love their digital technology already.
November 19, 2009 at 12:59 pm · Filed under Ubicomp
[FP] MobiDiC: Context-Adaptive Digital Signage with Coupons, from Münster. Cool comparative pictures of Brooklyn a century ago and now. City signs haven’t changed much in the cityscape, but the technology behind the signs has, from classical printed text to modern light-based techniques. Thus, coupons for town shops are now developed as changing codes on electronic displays throughout the town; prospective users take photos of the displays, and redeem the coupons. Small testbed, few insightful conclusions as to the future of the technique.
[SP] The Ambient Tag Cloud: Mobile Urban Exploration, from ftw.at@Vienna. Tag clouds as context-sensitive location descriptors, for map visualization, gisting (getting a service overview of an area), and information filtering.
[Discussion session: Speculations about the Future of Ambient Intelligence] Key technological requirements for AmI in 2010. Playing devil’s advocate with the following individual ideas for discussion:
- With increasingly successful AmI, a human’s (previously human) caring circle might become fully artificial. Then, what will happen if this artificial technology fails?
- [Humane applications] It’s important to come up with meaningful applications.
- [The doom idea] There’s never going to be Ambient Intelligence. Networks of gadgets will not pervade through all of the world, and, if existing, they will not be maintained on the long term.
For the next few years, a strong platform is the mobile phone, because it has already reached the consumers. RFIDs, for example, have not reached people to the same degree, but remain rather research-based. Even more, mobile phones will prevail because people will only use gadgets which are tangible, and allow full control, instead of disappearing in the background. Similarly, a watch is worn by roughly 2/3 of people on a regular basis. Watches in public places aren’t precise, so we still hang on to our own watches (not to mention, watches are a fashion statement). The single most used application on mobile phones is the time displayed as desktop. In both cases, there’s the ownership factor: one owns the device completely, and may switch it off to opt out, for privacy.
If we had only mobile phone applications, we would call the field mobile computing. To leave phones behind, how much compromising of their privacy would users agree with, in order to use intelligent gadgets? (e.g. earning loyalty points).
What happens when the technology fails? We need to get a certain coolness about technology failures, and simply delay an action if the failure is present. However, in pervasive healthcare it is either technological care or no care. Intelligent technology should not be a drastic change, interface-wise, from the interface humans are used to.
Finally, a briefly lived idea: we should talk about tools, not about an abstract cloud of technology, and certainly not about visions for the visions’ sake; we should focus on concrete problems and tools.
November 19, 2009 at 11:20 am · Filed under Ubicomp
[Keynote: AmI 2.0, on Synergetic AmI, a wooden presentation with good end questioning]
An interesting initial reference to the Poeme Electronique, a multimedia show of image and music in 1958 which brought a disused building to life.
Conceptually, smarter living is technology for people, where the key features are embeddedness, context awareness, personalization, adaptiveness and anticipation. A trustworthy Internet of Things will eventually implement ambient intelligence. Target applications: personal healthcare, balanced lifestyle, creative services in societal setting, sustainable development. Research perspectives: ambient control, social presence, trustful persuasion. AmI brings all these things together into a visionary landscape of research within diverse areas such as ethics, social issue, embedded technology, design.
The dark side of ambient intelligence are the risks: good people with inappropriate technology, or the other way around — legal or ethical issues appear. Interesting: an initial paradigm for AmI pushed more technology into people’s lives, creating technological stress and angst in the process; a current paradigm, ironically, aims at taking away the stress by introducing more technology.
[Landscapes, overview talk: new category of contributions which presents overviews of significant projects and testbeds, organizations and labs on AmI] Norbert Streitz, from Smart Future Initiative, gives a satisfying overview with a focus on the humane city of the future (the undersigned highly appreciated the science fiction images); also, the gentleman makes for a wonderful session chair.
City of the future theme: “Power companies build for your future electric living” (a title from an old newspaper, which nobody would use nowadays). Urban life management is now an overall theme: in 2008, over half the world’s population lived in urban environments. Large scale efforts take place in Asia (Japan, Korea, and Singapore) on city/urban environment. In Korea there’s a plan for 22 ubiquitous cities (u-cities): a city which is technology- and infrastructure-driven. However, the vision now goes away from the technology-driven city to the humane city: real city > ubiquitous city > smart city > humane city.
Claims for future developments:
- the more the computer becomes invisible, the more (ironically) it determines our lives
- it’s all there in the environment: no need to carry devices, the city is the interface
- people-friendly environments need no classical computers
- we move from information design to experience design; smart spaces make people smarter
- privacy might become a commodity and a privilege
The development has an interdisciplinary approach. The Greek Agora was an open place of assembly in ancient city-states, a market place of ideas and discussion — the concept serves as a guide for current humane development. A list of web pointers: smart-future.net, roomware.de, disappearing-computer.net, ambient-agoras.org, etc.
[Landscape talks: LS2 on Transdisciplinary Approach for Constructing Ambient Intelligence Environments from NTT Com. Sci. Laboratories, Japan] The ecology of AmI: there are lots of entities (nicknamed mushrooms: funny blob agents with loads of personality) which answer to you, are mischievous, and hidden. Scenarios:
- AmI-Thesaurus (organizing, presenting knowledge)
- AmI-Chronicle (automatic creation of histories), e.g. memorize the grandfather’s favourite classical tune
- AmI-Companion (good conversation partner and listener), e.g. mushrooms run quiz sessions
- AmI-Classroom (sharing knowledge, enhance learning by drawing in emotions)
AmI in A.D. 2059 gets people connected; AmI inside a family creates a relationship among grandfather, grandchild and mushrooms. A family’s memory is recorded over 100 years; mushrooms then make connections between current context (the grandchild playing a classical tune) and family history (the tune is the grandfather’s favourite, a fact reminded by the mushroom, and leading to the family getting back in touch).
November 8, 2009 at 17:01 pm · Filed under Belles lettres
A subjective, and subjectively endearing fast trek through the history and geography of a scientifically vague concept: that of Thule, a traditional target of northern exploration not for the scientists and explorers there are, but for the likes of masterminds of class and race.
A Greek explorer (whom, later on, readers either distrusted or built empires upon) opened Pandora’s box by writing of an Arctic land six days’ sailing from the northern tip of Scotland; a land of iced seas and midnight sun, never before reached by a traveller. A concept which fueled imagination, it has since been geographically linked mostly to islands in the European North Sea and Atlantic through scenarios of various probability. Distorted as wished, it served as a fictional cradle of an Aryan race to the Thule Society, an early form of the German Nazi Party. Just as fictional, but born out of a disarming need to cleanse a land littered by Nazi and Soviet occupation, Thule is not a land, but a historical event: Estonia’s fiery meteorite crash, which must have looked to the ancient witnesses like the fall to death of a sun god. To the NATO 20th-century Thule Air Base in Greenland, Thule was the pride taken in having settled military foothold in the most extreme, yet most strategic of locations. Above all, probabilities lead to Arctic, ice-covered lands of barren geography, harsh mountain peaks and extreme strangeness.
There is no single answer as to the identity of Thule, and one is hardly expected from a land whose first account is a single traveller’s vague log, made less precise by centuries of copying and translation. “For me,”, the author tells in the end,
Thule was thousands of years of discovery of the north. It expressed the ambivalence of the human relationship to perfection: a desirable but impossible state, a state glimpsed and occasionally seized, for a fleeting moment. [..] Thule was ambiguous, available for use or corruption. Thule represented all the explorers and writers imagining and travelling and trying to understand.
Svalbard lay under a pale sun, the ice fragments drifted across the fjord. I understood that it was inevitable that as the lands of the north became part of human history, they would lose the plainness of perfection, the sheen of purity.
September 27, 2009 at 19:37 pm · Filed under Inner blues
… No bottle to improvise a dumbbell out of.
September 26, 2009 at 23:43 pm · Filed under Inner blues, Computer science
… remain in question form. The moment I choose an answer and take the blue pill, the red pill bites back with faultless argumentation.
Take person A. Computer scientist of many years and degrees. Cannot tell the difference between GPS and DNS. Makes for a wonderful student for some minutes there, but most certainly ends up avoiding me for the rest of this term for having made him aware of the depth of his (theoretician’s) hole.
Person B, same job description. Me. Who, having worn a smug face for those minutes (she was being useful, you know), is now in thought: is she right in judging her science-worth based on the depth of her hole, and ditto for the worth of the As out there? Surely, a theoretician is already misfortunate enough in not being able to communicate his work in practical, lay terms the way person B can, but is A’s work output less traceable than B’s in the future computers?
September 16, 2009 at 21:34 pm · Filed under Photo of the day, Inner blues
December 18, 2008 at 18:04 pm · Filed under Things British
On the bottom of my last Innocent juice bottle:
“Stop looking at my bottom!!”
May 16, 2008 at 0:06 am · Filed under Computer science
… is when at each turn of writing on the paper, the author moves h[is/er] name from the top of the author list to the bottom of said list. Cvs commit, update, and repeat with next author.
February 13, 2008 at 23:35 pm · Filed under Photo of the day
Over here, they count books in miles. No, they don’t like kilometers.
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