Reading the latest RTDinfo (Magazine for European Research), I learned about the COGAIN project: a consortium of European universities and industry. COGAIN focuses on improving the quality of life for those whose life is impaired by motor-control disorders, such as ALS or CP:

COGAIN assistive technologies will empower the target group to communicate by using the capabilities they have and by offering compensation for capabilities that are deteriorating. The users will be able to use applications that help them to be in control of the environment, or achieve a completely new level of convenience and speed in gaze-based communication. Using the technology developed in the network, text can be created quickly by eye typing, and it can be rendered with the user’s own voice. In addition to this, the network will provide entertainment applications for making the life of the users more enjoyable and more equal. COGAIN believes that assistive technologies serve best by providing applications that are both empowering and fun to use.

One of the output of the project is the application called Dasher. Dasher is a information-efficient communication system driven by continuous pointing gestures. Instead of using a keyboard, the user writes by continuous steering, zooming into a landscape painted with letters. Dasher can be driven by a regular mouse, by touch-screen, or by gaze-direction. Dasher uses a language model to reduce the number of gestures needed. Anything can be written, and well-predicted phrases can be written fastest. The language model can be trained on any documents, it learns as the user writes, and Dasher works in any of the languages of Europe. With practice, users can write at 25 words per minute via a gaze-tracker.

Copyright notice: the present content was taken from the following URL, the copyrights are reserved by the respective author/s.

REFERENCES:

[1] Aula, A., Majaranta, P. and Räihä, K.-J. (2005). Eye-tracking Reveals the Personal Styles for Search Result Evaluation. Human-Computer Interaction – INTERACT 2005, Lecture Notes in Computer Science 3585, Springer-Verlag, September 2005, 1058-1061.

[2] Böhme, M. and Barth, E. (2005). Challenges in Single-Camera Remote Eye-Tracking. In 1st Conference on Communication by Gaze Interaction (COGAIN), Copenhagen, Denmark.

Tags: eInclusion, new technology, eye-tracking

An interesting study conducted by Stephane Birrer, at the University of Lausanne, shows how to infiltrate the scammer’s mailbox with a spyware able to publish the IP address from which the person is operating. The algorithm was also used to reveal the organization behind one of the famous Nigerian Scam.

More here (in French).

I enjoyed Luis von Ahn‘s Google tech talk on human computation. Human computation is not something new, as always, somebody else worked on it. From wikipedia:

In computer science, human-based computation is a technique when a computational process performs its function via outsourcing certain steps to humans. This approach leverages differences in abilities and alternative costs between humans and computer agents to achieve symbiotic human-computer interaction. In traditional computation, a human employs a computer to solve a problem: a human provides a formalized problem description to a computer, and receives a solution to interpret. In human-based computation, the roles are often reversed: the computer asks a person or a large number of people to solve a problem, then collects, interprets, and integrates their solutions.

In the talk, Prof. von Ahn presented a couple of interesting statistics: first humans spend an horrible amount of time playing solitaire, a game as useless as that (btw, I am not part of this statistic): in 2003, about 9 billion human-hours were spent on this game. By contrast, only 7 million human-hours were spent building the Empire State Building. Von Ahn pointed out that if we could create games that besides being entertaining could also have a purpose, then we could be much better off.

Another premise for his work is the fact that there are lots of computational problems that are unsolved, as for instance, the spam and how to prevent illicit use of network resources. Spammers use bots to register thousands fake email addresses from which spreading spam mail. Distinguish a bot from a real human is an example of unsolved computational problem. To circumvent this it is nowadays a standard to use CAPTCHA: we take a string of random letters and we render these in an image in a process which is impossible to reverse … for a machine. On the other hand, humans are very good in pattern recognition, so we use this trick to distinguish a man from a machine.

The point of the talk was: what if we use this human ability to solve other problems that computer are not good in solving and that can be far more useful than preventing spam? For instance one of the unsolved problem is how to index an image. At the moment we use the keywords contained in the filename of the image. This is really dumb but sometimes works. But what if we put images in a game context and we ask players to tell us what is inside the image and we use this description to index the image? That was the point of the ESPGAME that Prof. von Ahn et al implemented. In the game two players randomly matched on the internet are asked to independently look at an image and give some keywords for that image. As soon as they agree on a keyword then that keyword is taken as good and the players are given some points.

I wont go in details here, as the video is explicit enough on the mechanisms of that and other marvelous games. The talk also reports incredible results from the running experiment: 75,000 players have provided 15 millions labels for images. Here I want to argue on another point. As Tim O’Reilly argued on the last column of Make, each game has a purpose, not only in the way suggested by von Ahn. Mr. O’Reilly says:

I liked von Ahn’s phrase, “games with a purpose,” but of course all games have a purpose, not merely those that put us to work helping out our computers. Play is so central to human experience that historian Johan Huizing suggested that our species be called Homo ludens, man the player. … What makers understand is that play is as important as work. It’s not just as we pass the time, it’s how we learn and explore. … We play to learn. What we make when we play is ourself.

I want to extend von Ahn phrase suggesting that each game should have a double purpose: we can help the machine while we learn and we make things. Playing solitaire is a waste but its relaxing and maybe fun. It is definitely not useful other than for the player. The best would be to make games which are fun, useful for the society because while we play we accomplish something, and useful for ourselves, because while we play we learn something.

I wish I could see examples of this last category. Anybody?

REFERENCES:

[1] Luis von Ahn, Shiry Ginosar, Mihir Kedia and Manuel Blum. Improving Image Search with Phetch. To appear in IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP) 2007.

[2] Luis von Ahn. Games With A Purpose. In IEEE Computer Magazine, June 2006. Pages 96-98.

[3] Luis von Ahn, Ruoran Liu and Manuel Blum. Peekaboom: A Game for Locating Objects in Images. In ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, CHI 2006. Pages 55-64.

Tags: education, human computer interaction, learning technology, machine learning, pedagogy, user experience

I remember having this conversation with Mor Naaman on the fact that crossing data from different companies was not possible or easily accessible to the public. Apparently I am now wrong as Yahoo Research Lab released a new service called Yahoo Pipes, which allow the user to merge data from different streams and manipulate the information from useful purposes.

Pipes is an interactive feed aggregator and manipulator. Using Pipes, you can create feeds that are more powerful, useful and relevant.

The service offer an interactive interface where it is possible to play with the data stream (like an RSS feed), manipulate the data (like applying a filter), passing the output to another service (like a web search engine), collect the output from the engine, end so on till the end: the output page. The screenshot below shows a pipe called: “apartments near something” and tries to answering the question: show me apartments for rent near a school or something. Here is how it works:

This Pipe uses craigslist and Yahoo! Local. First, we look at a search on craigslist for apartments. The search results page will show an RSS feed at the bottom which we can use as a starting point. Using the URLBuilder (in Url) we can put together a dynamic feed address that searches by whatever location people enter using the Location Input module. This module automatically translates locations between city/state and zip codes as needed. the same location entered can then be fed into Yahoo! Local using the Yahoo! Local module. We can use another text input to get something we want to find apartments near (e.g., laundromats). After putting the craigslist feed through a Location Extractor module to get the location of each listing, we can compare the two and filter out any listing that isn’t a minimum distance from our search term. Now you can get apartment searches for apartments near things you care about! You can make a copy of this Pipe right here to play with or try running the pipe.

This service shows an example of what the web is going to be really soon: a jungle of data streams that can be intelligently re-aggregated and manipulated for different purposes. Interfaces like that of Yahoo Pipes will help users to recycle the web for their own purposes. Also, there is a rising number of studies on how bots (software agents) can use services made for humans for the same or other purposes and what kind of difference in results we can expect.

Tags: clustering, collaboration tools, information metric, map algorithms, new technology, search engine, society

Unfortunately there is no limit to the number of things that you could not anticipate and that go wrong while designing and running an experiment with human subject. I have to admit that this bug i found in my current design could have been anticipated with some more test. However that was not the case, so I found myself trying to re-synchronize the logs of each experiments which are stored on multiple machines, with their relative a-synchronized clock.

One of the limit of using 2 eye trackers is that if you need to confront the data you must have extremely well synchronized clocks, in the order of 50 milliseconds. Windows has a systematic lack of support for this kind of precision so I had to find other solutions, like using an atomic clock synchronizer. But even with that, the golden rule is: trying to keep the least number of machine involved in the data collection.

In my case I have three: two eye-trackers (windows) and a server which handles the messaging system (linux-box). After realizing that the clocks of the three machines have variables delays that change over time, I elaborated a strategy to re-sync the logs. It consists in watching the videos sampled on each eye-tracker at 15 frames per second and look for a specific event that appears almost at the same time in the two machines, like a message being posted on the server. Then I have a common event on the three machines that, besides network and processing delays, happened in the same ‘absolute’ moment. From there is just a question of doing the math.

The silly thing is that is not possible to automate this algorithm with a script, so I had to watch all the movies for extracting the relevant info. It turned out that also doing the math was somehow brain consuming, so I ended up offloading progressively my cognitive charge in favor of a paper based grid.

Here some more about my experiment.

Tags: distributed cognition, research, research methodology

Mobile Processing is an open source programming environment for people who want to design and prototype software for mobile phones. It is based on and shares the same design goals as the open source Processing project. Sketches programmed using Mobile Processing run on Java Powered mobile devices.

The example below shows an example of hack to drive a robot vacuum cleaner with the mobile phone.

Copyright notice: the present content was taken from the following URL, the copyrights are reserved by the respective author/s.

Tags: new technology, open source, programming, series60, Symbian

Last Wednesday I participated to this workshop organized by Nicolas Nova and William Cockayne. The idea was to brainstorm for two hours using critical foresight techniques. But, what is critical foresight? The way Bill presented it, is an effort to brainstorm in a structured manner thinking about the long-term future.

Future is complex and ambiguous. The only way it is possible to say something about the future is by analyzing the past using analytical reasoning and understand when change happened. The point is then to project the same patterns found for a certain story ahead in the future so to find possibilities. Quoting Nicolas:

This is one of the crux element we have to tackle while doing critical foresight: unfolding the history backward from and end point to now, by describing what happened in the forms of changes/events. The lines here can be seen as a metaphor of two different histories that unfold.

William presented a couple of techniques that can be used in these circumstances: the petal graph, is a diagram where you map each critical aspect of change that you can list while thinking to a certain theme. The goals is then to find the commonalities of all these aspect, what goes in the center of the flower.

Another graph that we used was called the S-curve. It’s an s-shaped curve that has at the beginning the date a certain idea was invented and at the end of the curve the date where the corresponding technology finally reached mass market. In between all the different inventions and technologies that contributed to the raise of the curve. The goal is to understand what critical invention / moment constituted the turning point of the curve and made the realization of the idea possible.

The last graph was a cartesian diagram where four different aspect of a certain theme needs to be opposed. Once the axes have been defined the brainstorm aims at finding stories and position these stories in the quadrants according to their match to the 4 defined dimensions. High-density spots are called hot-spots and the contrary are called white-spots. Both are extremely interesting for critical foresight.

One defined these two areas we can then used a diachronic table to answer the question: how did we get here? The table, in fact, should map the most important momentums in the definition of a certain technology with the goal of projecting the line to touch the hot spots or the white spots. The time-scale of the graph is usually 20 years.

Foresight thinking for design encompasses three mayor steps:

(1) Observation: -think about people today; -if they change what is the reason?; -what are the early indicators (triggers)?

(2) Analyzing and describing: -ideas are fine; -questions are important; -assumptions are critical; -stories will tie it all together.

(3) Prototyping: -models are endpoints; -the models generate questions around the areas of interest; -the underlying assumptions and questions are more important.

The results of the workshop are less interesting than the methodology that we used to produce them.

Here is also a list of readings and movies that can inform more and inspire for critical foresight.

LIFT is a non-standard conference about the challenges and opportunities of technology in our society. It ran on the 7th, 8th, and 9th of February 2007 in Geneva, Switzerland. LIFT has a simple goal: connect people who are passionate about new applications of technology and propel their conversations into the broader world to improve life and work. This is my conference report, where I try to distill some implications which I find relevant. [Here my running notes if you want to get dirt: day1, day2]

Nurturing a critical mind: we should encourage people to critically verify the information that they use in their life. Florence Devouard, of the wikimedia foundation, remembered us that one of the advantage of their ‘wiki-approach’ is that there are people all around the world which participate and that have access to local information that might be not available elsewhere. The key point is about empowering individuals.

Designing for open-endedness: we should design services where we let users free of inventing new opportunities. Sampo Karjalainen, one of the key persons behind habbo hotels, explained us his vision behind the success of habbo. The open ended game is the great innovation of habbo. They discovered the rise of use of the site using this kind of play but they did not anticipated. People like to play. How can we design for this kind of play? 1- You need something to play with, 2- The interface should be invisible / minimal, 3- The environment should be playful to set the stage for these activities, 4- Common games have a single goal. It is better to have multiple goals, 5- the social setting is important.

The individual is the center of the world: the most successful applications are these that do a good job in helping the users to express their passions, their interests. etc. Habbo is a great example of these sorts of things. Stowe Boyd explained us that Me should be in the center of each social application. The next level is the group of peers that are related to me and might interest/be interested by my interaction. Finally there should possibly be a market around me+my peers.

Shifting our business models to respect humanity: current business models stress corporate responsibility towards stockholders. ENRON is a perfect example of correct application of this principle that does not respect humanity. Paola Ghillani reminded us that exists alternatives. She mentioned the Norwegian central bank that decided not to invest in anu business that did not comply with self-imposed ethical guidelines.

Outdoctrination, or designing for self-organising learning: children can self-instruct in a connceted environment irrespective of their background, intelligence, race, etc. BUT they have to be in groups. Sugata Mitra reported on The hole in the wall: an experiment in Delhi. A PC embedded in the wall.  The experiment showed that technology is engaging and can overcome illiteracy. Children in groups can self-instruct themselves. Language was not a barrier.

Going virtual in proportion to being actual: the anonimity of the internet interaction must lead to a human encounter. Sister Judith Zoebelein reminded us that our task, as designers, is to make manifest the global community to the local community. All these simulated persons that we can be using Internet can bring confusion to who I really am. I will blog more deeply about this in the next days.

Bridging 1st life and 2nd life: 1st life is in the atoms’ world. Every digital bit owes its existence to the material world. 1st life maintains our 2nd life. This material basis undergrids the second life. That is a debt in materials, in human resources, of expended energy. Why it matters? It matters because there are critical externalities. 1st life doesn’t reboot when the system crashes. In 1st life you cannot install more servers. In our 2nd life worlds we have many avatars. In 1st life we have only one body. We only have only one world to inhabit. Julian Bleecker pushes us to create legible, playful reminders of the materiality of 1st life.

Making the locus of control visible: Everyware is an emergent paradigm from computation. Wiser’s notion of a computing “invisible, but in the woodwork everywhere around us.” Adam Greenfield rings the alarm bell of disappearing computer. Everywere obscure the locus of control. Everywere can be engaged even in the absence of an active, conscious decision to do so. We can be inadvertent: I didn’t mean to engage this system. I meant to do something else; unknowing: I did not know. I wasn’t aware of this existence; and worst we can be unwilling: I don’t want to be exposed to this system, but I have been compelled to accept such an exposure.

Avoiding Internet global warming: User-Generated content is a key topic nowadays. Jaewoong Lee stress out that we have to worry about global warming on the internet because the long tails is in fact just garbage. User Generated Content which is poorly constructed and that creates pollution in the search indexes without any utility. Maybe we need intelligent layers to aggregate content depending on the user needs. Maybe we need a community gardener, some people responsible to take care of the virtual side of the community.

Embracing the real world messiness: there is a vision in ubiquitous computing that everything needs to be seamless, that has to disappear, that needs to become calm. We see many examples of bad interaction design. The wold is messy. We rely on infrastructure but infrastructure can break down. Another aspect is heterogeneity: it very difficult to come out with standards. Fabien Girardin highlights how we are building a tower of babel of technologies that are often in competition. The point is to use a seamful design: revealing the “seams” (limits, boundaries, uncertainty). Know when to reveal or hide the imperfaction of the system.

Avoiding burning out while preserving ‘the flow’:  there are lots of examples of technological addition. what we see is that more and more there is an invasion of the private life in the work time. What we are seeing is that the social network is part of the daily activity. Maybe we should talk about social network dependance more that technological dependance. Stefana Broadbent is against the idea of umplugging. This conference is about social intelligence, which is the consequence of “the flow”.

The User/Citizen Centered Society: User Generated Content is now accepted in mainstreem media. The word of mouth is a great power. Everybody in this room has the ability to reach mainstream. Derek Powazek, founder of JPG magazine, shows how is possible to build a community generated magazine. JPG is the first truly community generated magazine. There is a huge community of writers that contribute to the articles and there is a huge community of voters which contributes to rate the content.

Thinking big, staying real: there are things that we need to reintroduce in our thinking: politics, power, borders, conflict. Fluid circulation of ideas is not going to stop this. Daniel Kaplan wraps up saying that we did not foresee the extintion of large corporations. Let’s remember ourselves that most of our information is now handled by huge corporations that have their own agenda.

Tags: new technology, liftconference

While doing my blogroll I was attracted by this news on Africans farmers using SMSs to make business. Tradenet, is a website developed in Ghana with an 11 million-dollar USAID support. It is intended to enhance trans-border trade between farmers and traders in Africa. The services are completely free for users, except the normal sms messaging charges by the mobile phone service providers of each country.

The site is  a platform for sellers in agricultural business to display their profiles and information on their commodities, prices and locations on the Internet, with the view to attracting potential buyers through the net. It also offers individuals and traders associations the opportunity to establish their own website within the tradenet platform at no cost to constantly display their commodities and prices.

“Potential buyers looking for a specific commodity only need to compose SMS message on their mobile phones stating the code of the commodity in question and the country from which they want the results and send it to tradenet number ‘1344’ for Areeba users or 024649999 from any other network and get instant results.”

Why SMS? This is a nice example of a service implementation that uses existing communication channels and infrastructure. The use of mobiles is pervasive and how explained by Jan Chipchase last week, the recent growth on the mobile market is coming from underdeveloped countries.

(via & via)

Copyright notice: the present content was taken from the following URL, the copyrights are reserved by the respective author/s.

Tags: collaboration tools, field tools, human communication, new technology, p2p

Gilles Barbier pointed me to his geo-localized application using Google Maps: Tellmewhere (dis moi ou). This site is basically a geo-wiki where everybody can describe collaboratively what they know on earth! They are currently focused on France, but they plan to  expand quickly after opening. This service is a sort of hyper-local site: they are going to add some social tools to help people of the same neighborhood to realize they share the same places.

I really likes the interaction. The reviews of the locations are quite detailed, it is possible to add pictures, and it allows social ratings on the posts. Really nice!

Tags: Location Based Services, urban, urban exploration