I know that is kind of late to blog about this but I just wanted to annotate my impression on this new service from Flickr. I like to see the pictures attached to a map. After all, its the subject of my thesis. I think there is a great deal of inference that we can make just by playing with this simple cartographic representation and with pictures.

One of the things that I really would love to have is a camera with a built-in GPS. I know that there are already a couple of models (cfr. sony) out there but their software lacks of the simplicity that will make it appealing to me.

What I would love to have is an hack on my phone so that it can take a picture with the embedded camera, connect with an external bluetooth GPS to take the location, embed this information in the EXIF format of the picture and finally upload the picture to Flickr without bugging me about all these steps …

Maybe I’ll write my own python app at some point.

(Rome, Italy)

Tags: citizen journalism, collaboration tools, field tools, interaction design, location awareness, Location Based Services, psychogeography, tangible interface, urban exploration, urban planning

Have you ever seen a headline that read: “Atheist militants detonate bomb in city café” -?

Doug Stanhope

Chase, William G., and Herbert A. Simon. 1973. “Perception in chess.” Cognitive Psychology.

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Given a perception task and a memory task from a briefly exposed position, chess players of varying strength extract different amounts of information according to their strength. Superior performance of stronger players depends on their ability “to encode the position into larger perceptual chunks, each consisting of a familiar subconfiguration of pieces.” There is evidence that pieces converging on the opponent’s king (or other) position are chunked in a more abstract attack relation. “Finally, the number of chunks retained in short-term memory after brief exposure to chess positions is about the magnitude we would predict from immediate recall of common words … and copying of visual patterns.”

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

I don’t like to write my papers in Word. I usually prefer TexShop but sometimes we need to collaborate and Word is much better format for that. What I really hate of Word is that there is no easy way to use numbered references.

This is a nice trick on how to create numbered references in Microsoft Word. It does not fix completely the issue though because if you insert a new reference between the olds then you need to click on all the references you created and refresh the number.

(via)

Finally I found an explanation of this piece of text that you can see in every publishing tool every once in a while:

Lorem Ipsum is simply dummy text of the printing and typesetting industry. Lorem Ipsum has been the industry’s standard dummy text ever since the 1500s, when an unknown printer took a galley of type and scrambled it to make a type specimen book. It has survived not only five centuries, but also the leap into electronic typesetting, remaining essentially unchanged. It was popularised in the 1960s with the release of Letraset sheets containing Lorem Ipsum passages, and more recently with desktop publishing software like Aldus PageMaker including versions of Lorem Ipsum.

While lipsum.com does a good job, it’s not really user-friendly and it also contains ads…
I did some exploring and found this other tool. It’s ad-free and quite straightforward, and I wanted to suggest you show it alongside the other one:

https://www.websiteplanet.com/webtools/lorem-ipsum/

This tool allows you to create dummy text quickly and easily (and it doesn’t cost a thing): -)😊

I like this concept of “air boards”, an imaginary frame in front of the person that can be accessed with hand gestures. This space is often used by co-located speaker to symbolize diagrams and objects and the basic relationships between them: e.g., this is on top, this is under, this “talks to” this other thing, etc.

In gesture languages for the deaf, air boards can be used to instantiate a set of temporal pointer which are valid during the talk session: instead of spelling “Dan gibson” every time, after the first time I take this reference to the air board so that the next times I will have just to point at it.

In the literature the air boards have been studied by Olson & Olson:

In videotapes of software design meetings we saw someone describe a complex idea by drawing with his hands in the air (the “air board”; Olson & Olson, 1991). Later someone referred to “that idea” by pointing to the spot in the air where the first person had “drawn” his idea.

Probably worth looking at: Olson & Olson 1991: Olson, G. M., and Olson, J. S. (1991) User centered design of collaboration technology. Journal of Organizational Computing, 1, 61-83.

Image Source

Tags: human computer interaction, interaction design, universal cognitive distance

Axil (AXiom Indexing Library) is a indexing library for Divmod’s Axiom database. It is an implementation of a graph based text classification alghorithm known as CNG (Contextual Network Graphs).

Contextual Network Graphs are a modified version of what was prior refferd to as Spreading Activation Network algorithms: they are a method for implement classification strategies that are been evaluated as qualitative equivalent to LSI (Latent Semantic Indexing) or naive-baesyan classifiers, without many of their limitations (as term-document matrix recalculation as in LSI or continuos-learnig phase as naive-baesyan classifiers).

First there’ns a support for many languages (notably many european and all asian languages) in all of the indexing phases (in particular there is a stemming implementation only for EN and IT languages); this lack of support implies the lack of a chance to implement “term reduction” strategies in early stage of the process, resulting in a loss of effectivness in subsequents phases.

Furthermore document term extraction (splitting/stemming) implementations are written in pure Python and are slow comparing to C/Python based parsers;

[more in Italian]

Yesterday, I attended the Geographical Information Retrieval workshop, which was part of the SIGIR conference. There were lots of interesting papers, some of which are very close to my thesis’ interests.

This workshop will address all aspects of Geographic Information Retrieval – that is the provision and evaluation of methods to identify geographic scope, retrieve and relevance rank documents or other resources from both unstructured and partially structured collections on the basis of queries specifying both theme and geographic scope.

As an overall comment I can say that although we are on the third edition of this event, this particular discipline is still struggling to find its natural audience and support. In most of the cases the results are only partial or superficial even because there are no dataset around that we can play with. (A notable exception is this GeoCLEF2005)

My notes of the talks are in the extended section (or here).

Tags: human computer interaction, information retrieval

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Well, now that I am attending SIGIR I have to admit that sometimes I am a bit pissed by some presentations from big industries like Google, Yahoo, MSN, Ask, etc. (maybe i am just envious)

They present great results because they can access the usage log of a great deal of users. Unfortunately, their dataset is almost always kept private claiming privacy issues. This means that basically we cannot verify most of the claims raised in the papers. However, these works are accepted by the scientific community.

I think that scientific contributions built on top of private dataset should not been accepted in mainstream conferences if their results cannot be replicated by other institution using the same data. I do, however, understand that sometime disclosure of this information can results in troubles for the companies. So I propose two tracks:

1. Let’s create a special track in each mainstream conference for papers that present non-reproducible results.

2. Let’s do some research on how scramble the data in a private dataset to maintain the user privacy maintaining the statistical validity of the dataset.

Tags: information retrieval, politics, scientific method, research, search engine, statistics

SIGIR is a huge conference. I really enjoyed participating in this meeting to listed to these great talks. Particularly, I enjoyed the session on the user experience: it was pertinent to my research, but still the most critiqued and discussed. There is a struggle to accept that the metrics made to measure the system performances do not match with the metrics of the humans using that system.

My notes are in the extended part of this post [or here] of Day 1. Enjoy!

Tags: human computer interaction, information retrieval

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