Smartphone Use Infographic, via Pew Internet and American Life Project

The Pew Internet & American Life Project website is a treasure trove of statistics about the use of the internet and related technologies.  I especially like the following infographic which outlines how smartphone ownership has reached the "tipping point".  My hunch is that this will lead to some bigger changes in our future!

For more information, see Lee Rainie's article: Smartphone Ownership Update:  September 2012

Ph.D. Student Positions: Intel Collaborative Research Institute on Sustainable Connected Cities

Thanks to Johannes Schöning for sharing information about this opportunity!
This might be of interest to some of my IMT readers:


EngD/PhD Positions within the Intel Collaborative Research Institute on Sustainable Connected Cities (ISCCI) at University College London (UCL) The Department of Computer Science at UCL is inviting applications for up to 6 Research Student Positions (1 EngD of 4 years, and up to 5 PhDs of 3 years), starting September 24th 2012 or January 7th 2013.


With 6.3 billion people expected to dwell in cities by 2050, the aim of the ISCCI is to create and realize a compelling vision of a sustainable future made possible by adaptive technologies that optimize resource efficiency, enable new services and support the quality of life of urban inhabitants. The Institute is located with a rich external ecosystem of companies and researchers both locally and globally investing in this important domain. The ISCCI is led by Prof. Yvonne Rogers at UCL.


We are looking for students willing to pursue a doctoral degree in computer science around the following broad topics:
•       How technology can help recognize, leverage, and support the out-of-sight, hidden or forgotten resources of urban environments, ranging from volunteers to subterranean water systems and other underlying city infrastructures.
•       How communities can encourage sustainable behaviours over time, for example, through meaningful visualizations and feedback about resource usage to individuals and groups.
•       How technology can give us an opportunity to reinvent new ideas of place and identity, considering the diversification & proliferation of new types of communities in cities, with the aim to increase quality of living and lower the barriers for mobility in our future connectedcities.


The applicants should possess a good honours MSc degree (1st Class or 2:1 minimum) in Computer Science, Psychology, Human-Computer-Interaction or related disciplines. Candidates will be expected to work in teams comprising computer scientists, social scientists, and psychologists, so an open attitude towards interdisciplinary research and teamwork is important. Candidates should have interest in at least two of the following research fields (as well as a good command of English) language:
•       Human-Computer-Interaction,
•       Augmented or Mixed Reality,
•       Interactive 3D Computer Graphics,
•       Interaction Design,
•       Perceptual Psychology, and/or
•       Cognitive Sciences.
•       Ethnography•       Data Mining, Machine Learning
•       Crowed Sourced Data
•       Data Visualization, Cartography
•       Geoinformatics
•       Big Data


Fees are fully paid. Salary for the 4-year EngD position is £18,090 tax free p.a., and £15,590 tax free p.a. for the 3-year PhD positions.The closing date for applications is 5pm on 18th July 2012. Interviews will he held on July 26th and 27th. 


The start date is September 24th  2012 (though it can be postponed to January 7th 2013). No part-time option available.Please download the application form http://www.ucl.ac.uk/uclic/phd_studentships/Intel_studentship_application_form/ and email the completed form to Louise Gaynor l.gaynor@ucl.ac.uk as a single PDF document by 5pm on Wed 18th July 2012. Please can you indicate in your application whether you wish to start in Sept 2012 or Jan 2013.

Intel studentship job advert_July 2012.pdf1881K   View   Download

Revisiting Good Blogs: User Interface Engineering (Albrecht Schmidt, University of Stuttgart)

Albrecht Schmidt is a professor at the University of Stuttgart. His main interests include novel user interfaces and innovative applications for ubiquitous computing. His blog, Albrecht Schmidt - User Interface Engineering, serves as his note-pad, full of ideas, deep musings, and great links, including links to good scholarly papers. Below are a few of his posts:

Guests in my multimodal interaction class   
I'd love to take Dr. Schmidt's Multimodal Interaction class!  In this post, Albrecht highlights the presentations of  Nigel Davies, Marc Langheirich, and Rui Jose,  all members of the pd-net project.

Call for Papers:  Symposium on Pervasive Display Networks

Closing Keynote at AMI2011:  Beyond Ubicomp - Computing is Changing the Way we Live
(Pdf version - worth taking a look!)


Percom 2011 in Seatle, keynote


RELATED
PD-NET
"The PD-NET project aims to lay the scientific foundations for a new form of communications medium with the same potential impact on society as radio, television and the Internet. The goal is to explore the scientific challenges and to assess the new technologies required to enable the emergence of large scale networks of pervasive public displays and associated sensors. This display network will be designed and implemented to be open to applications and content from many sources and thus provide the foundation for work on a new global communications medium for information access and interaction." 


Note:  One of my interest is public displays in public spaces.  If you are interested, take a look at my Flicker collection, Ubiquitous Sightings of Urban Screens: Interactive Displays, Kiosks, and Digital Signage.

Revisiting Good Blogs: Space and Culture

Take a look at the Space and Culture  journal/weblog. Below are links to a few posts:

WiFi Measuring Rods, Oslo School of Architecture
Making WiFi Visible - Network City
Robert Shields, 10/6/11
Note: The above post provides a link to Making 'Immaterials: Light painting WiFi', a post written by Einar Sneve Martinussen the YOUrban blog. YOUrban is a research project at the Institute of Design within the Oslo School of Architecture and Design.


Sound, Space and the City
Catherine Scheelar, 10/10/11


Sound, Space, and the City:  Civic Performance in Downtown Los Angeles
"In Sound, Space, and the City, Marina Peterson explores the processes-from urban renewal to the performance of ethnicity and the experiences of audiences--through which civic space is created at music performances in downtown Los Angeles."


Mapping Flickr Photos and Twitter Tweets
Rob Shields, 7/20/11


RELATED/SOMEWHAT RELATED
Cognitive Cities Conference
Adam Greenfield's Presentation


I've cross-posted this to The World is my Interactive Interface blog - a blog I wish I had time to keep up!

Pervasive Retail: Theme of the April-June edition of Pervasive Computing (IEEE)

This is just a teaser.  I'll have time to read it next week when I'm on break!


FYI: This is one of my favorite tech journals. This issue's theme focuses on the use of pervasive technology in retail settings.   Other topics in this issue include wearables, pervasive health, smartphone computing in the classroom, innovative Ubicomp products, and more.


IEEE Pervasive Computing

About the Web of Things - Great Presentations & Links

"The Web of Things is a community of developers, researchers, and designers that explore the future of the physical Web. We explore how to leverage Web standards to interconnect all types of embedded devices (sensors, mobile phones, etc), in order to make them easier to use and to integrate in classic Web applications. We aim to build a future Web of devices that is truly open, flexible, and scalable, and we believe Web standards are the best way to do it."


WEB OF THINGS PRESENTATIONS
Web of Things - Towards Open and Sharable Networks of Embedded Devices

View more presentations from vladounet.

Design of a Web-based Distributed Location-aware Infrastructure for Mobile Devices

View more presentations from vladounet

WoT @ Oracle-Labs

View more presentations from Dominique Guinard.




RELATED

Web of Things Publications

Pdf versions of Web of Things publications

Vlad Trifa's Lift11 Talk:  A Web of Things for Smarter Cities (pdf)

Web of Things Upcoming Event
What: 2nd International Workshop on the Web of Things (WoT 2011)
Where: Pervasive 2011 conference, San Francisco, USA
When: June 12, 2011
For who: Hackers, developers, web, and ubicomp/pervasive researchers.
Web of Things Projects

Personal and Ubiquitous Computing Upcoming Theme Issues- I love the topics!

I'm happy to share some information about the topics of upcoming theme issues planned for Personal and Ubiquitous Computing. The information below was taken from the PUC's Facebook page.  I added links to information about most of the managing editor for each theme.


"PUC is currently working with some of the leading researchers, research groups, conferences and workshops to produce theme issues around specific topics. Here are the issues we currently have in progress:"

• Automative User interfaces:  Albrecht Schmidt
• Multimodal Systems, Services and Interfaces for Ubiquitous Computing Zhiwen Yu
• Ambient Systems, Networks and Technologies:  Elhadi Shakhuki 
• Ubiquitous Computing & Ambient Intelligence: Jose Bravo 
• Extreme Navigation: David McGookin
• Adaptation and Personalization for Ubiquitous Computing: Zhiwen Yu (?)
• Pervasive Advertising: Joerg Mueller  
• A Persuasive Design Approach to Personal Health: Tom Djajadingrat
• Mobile Multimedia Processing: Michael Rohs  
• Cloud computing: Chunming Rong
• Smartphone Applications and Services for Pervasive Computing
• Personal Projection: Enrico Rukzio
• Mental Health and the Impact of Ubiquitous Technologies:  Venet Osmani
• Sensor Networks and Ambient Intelligence: Boon Chong Seet
• User-Driven RFID Applications and Challenges: Katerina Mitrokotsa
• Measuring behavior and interaction – methods and new application domains: E.I. Barakova

"For more details, check back in our Facebook Notes or contact the editor managing the theme issue."   - the editor's email addresses can be found on the PUC Facebook site.



Personal and Ubiquitous Computing


Note:  Ubiquitous Computing was one of my favorite graduate courses and I still can't get enough of it.   In my dreams, I would be happy just playing around with emerging technologies and experimenting with new applications, and nothing else, for a year or two, in and out of the lab.

Connected Youth: Theme of the July-Sept issue of IEEE Pervasive Computing

The guest editors of the July-September 2010 issue of IEEE's Pervasive Computing magazine are John Canny, an engineering professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and Jason Hong, an assistant professor at Carnegie Mellon University's Human-Computer Interaction Institute.  Their article provides an introduction to the publication's timely theme, Connected Youth.  The editors find that the study of the current generation of children and teens provides useful information about the future of computing as in integrates more seamlessly into our daily lives, the way we learn, and our relationships and interaction with others across time, place, and generations.

I'm in the middle of reading this issue of Pervasive Computing.  The articles that have caught my eye so far include "Story Time for the 21st Century", which describes the research an implementation of an interactive book-reading system designed to connect children, family members, and grandparents who live in distant locations. The system involves videoconferencing with paper books and interactive content, and enables grandparents to read with their grandchildren via the Internet.



Additional information about Story Play, a system that is still under development, can be found on the Nokia Research Center website: "Family Story Play: Story Time for the 21st Century".  A follow-up project to Story Play is Story Visit:



I'll post more about the articles from the Connected Youth issue of Pervasive Computing in the future.

Locative & Mobile Media and Martijn de Waal's The Mobile City blog

I subscribe to Martijn de Waal's blog, The Mobile City:  Locative & Mobile Media/Urban Culture/Identity, partly because of my interest in ubiquitous/pervasive computing (specifically how technology can support interaction and collaboration between people across screens of all sizes in public spaces), and partly because I am interested in looking at the ways different disciplines adopt, adapt, and transform emerging interactive technologies.

If you are interested, take a look at my recent post about Martijn de Waal and topics related to locative/mobile media on The World Is My Interface blog.

Mobile Art && Code 2009: November 6, 7, & 8, Carnegie Mellon, Pittsburgh. I want to go!

The following information is from the MOBILE ART CODE Ning social network.

Art & & Code is an event series and online community dedicated to the democratization of computer programming for artists, young people, and the rest of us.

This November 6-8, we continue our successful workshop/lecture series with MOBILE ART & & CODE: Mobile Media and Interactive Arts - a symposium on the aesthetic and tactical potentials of mobile, networked and locative media. The three-day event will feature intimate, practical, arts-oriented programming workshops for popular mobile platforms (such as the iPhone, Android, Nokia Smartphones, Arduino, SMS, and Asterisk PBX systems) along with an all-day series of free lecture presentations that contextualizes the use of these technologies in a variety of contemporary critical, artistic and design practices.

MOBILE ART && CODE is made possible by a generous grant from Microsoft Research, with oversight by the Center for Computational Thinking at CMU. The ART && CODE symposium series is a project of the CMU STUDIO for Creative Inquiry, directed by Golan Levin. If you have questions or concerns about MOBILE ART && CODE, please email Golan Levin at golan@andrew.cmu.edu.

MOBILE ART && CODE is a symposium on the artistic and tactical potential of mobile, networked and locative media: November 6-8, 2009 at CMU!

Conference Schedule
6 Nov (Fri): Three-Hour Workshops, 9am-Noon and 2pm-5pm ($75/ea.)
7 Nov (Sat): Free All-Day Artist Presentations + Evening Performances 
8 Nov (Sun): Three-Hour Workshops, 9am-Noon and 2pm-5pm ($75/ea.)

Workshop Schedule for MOBILE ART  CODE:

WORKSHOPS	Instructors	Friday 11/6 AM (9am-12)	Friday 11/6 PM (2-5pm)	Sunday 11/8 AM (9am-12)	Sunday 11/8 PM (2-5pm)
Introduction to Arduino	Gaye	$75 + 75m	$75 + 75m
Design Tech. for Mobiles	Bleecker	$75	$75
FlashLite on Mobiles	Kam et al.	$75		$75
iPhone + openFrmwks.	Akten & Gage	$75		$75
Interactive SMS	Evans	$75			$75
Python + Nokia	Scheible		$75	$75
Interactive Telephony	Van Every		$75	$75
Android + Arduino	Anderson & Marlinspike		$75 + $120m		$75 + $120m
Scrapyard Challenge!	Brucker-Cohen & Moriwaki			$75 + $50m. Note: 6 hours.
Master's Seminar	Behrendt, Paulos et al.			$75	$75
iPhone + Pure Data	Steiner			$75	$75
How to Make Ringtones	Foley				$25

Some of the workshops do not require any programming experience, and only two (iPhone + OpenFrameworks and Android + Arduino) recommend that participants have some programming experience.

The Touch Research Project, re/Touch, and Near Field Communication Touch Interaction

The Touch Project is based in the Interaction Design department of the Oslow School of Architecture and Design in Norway. "Touch is a research project that investigates Near Field Communication (NFC), a technology that enables connections between mobile phones and physical things. We are developing applications and services that enable people to interact with everyday objects and situations through their mobile devices. Touch consists of an inter-disciplinary team involved in social and cultural enquiry, interaction/industrial design, rapid prototyping, software, testing and exhibitions." -

Nearness Explores Interaction Without Touching

Nearness from timo on Vimeo.

iPhone RFID: Object-based media

iPhone RFID: object-based media from timo on Vimeo.

reTouch Web Site

reTouch Info Sheet (pdf)

reTouch is part of the Touch project, and it " brings together hundreds of cross-cultural examples of social norms and values involving touch—all categorised according to actions related to touching. Using quotes from ethnographic accounts written between the late 1800s and the present, re/touch encourages designers and researchers to explore how touch is used by people to relate to one another and the worlds in which we live. Browse re/touch to create design briefs, refine interaction scenarios, devise game play, or otherwise think, make and do things touchrelated." -reTouch web info, Anne Galloway.


One of the members of the research team is Anne Galloway, a social researcher and the author of the  purselipsquarejaw blog, which she recently resurrected after taking a year off from blogging.

Anne also contributes to the space and culture journal.  I've followed Anne's writing for a while.  Over the course of her Ph.D. studies, she has thought deeply about the intersections of technology, space, and culture,  including cross-cultural meanings of touch.

RELATED
Inspiring Touch Related Interaction Design

Designing With RFID

View more documents from Chen pinmiao.

Original Design Thinking Approach for Researching RFID
-Nikolas Nova, Pasta and Vinegar


Note:  Nikolas Nova's Pasta and Vinegar blog is worth taking a look at if you are interested in design, UX, emerging technologies, pervasive/ubiquitous computing.


About Nikolas and his blog:
"User Experience researcher at LIFTlab. My work is about studying how people use various technologies and turn them into insights, ideas, prototypes or recommendations to inform design and foresight.This blog is a selection of the material that I collect, especially in fields such as mobility, urban environments, digital entertainment and new interfaces. I am also part of the near future laboratory."

Sample of Pasta and Vinegar Posts:
(Touch) Interaction Vocabulary
A Graphic Language for Touch-based Interactions

Foursquare: Interactive Local + Social Media Coming to a City Near You.

Foursquare is a locative-mobile system/game/social media game/activity that is starting to grow in popularity in a number of urban settings, such as NYC. It hasn't arrived in Charlotte, so I can only share what I've gleaned about it from the Foursquare website and a few reviews:

"We're all about helping you find new ways to explore the city. We'll help you meet up with your friends and let you earn points and unlock badges for discovering new places, doing new things and meeting new people."

"It's foursquare! Think: 50% friend-finder, 30% social cityguide, 20% nightlife game. We wanted to build something that not only helps you keep up with your friends, but exposes you to new things in and challenges you to explore cities in different ways. There's a lot of experimenting here, so bear with us as we try to figure it all out (and thanks!)"

"We have an iPhone app, a mobile-web site (Blackberry! Treo!) and an SMS shortcode (50500) that you can text check-ins to. For more info, look here." (For more information, visit the Foursquare NYC website.)

RELATED:

Foursquare: Check In, Tweet....Money on Beer (Jennifer Van Grove, Mashable, 8/7/2009)

"Foursquare is poised to be a prime player in the location-based social networking space."

Forsquare: Why it May Be the Next Twitter (Jennifer Van Grove, Mashable, 7/25/2009)
"The Game: To those of you not playing, it may sound like a joke, but don’t knock it till you try it. You earn points for every check-in — unless of course you check-in at the same locale all the time. You’re rewarded with more points for being adventuresome (exploring different parts of the city), for hitting up multiple spots in one night, and eventually for the tips other people try and the to-dos you complete."

Screen-shot from Jennifer Van Grove's Foursquare App:



Building an Army of Hyper-Local, Mobile-Connected Advocates: Or, Why Marketers Should Pay Attention to Foursquare (Allison Mooney, Ad Age Digital, 8/5/09)

"Co-founder Dennis Crowley puts it this way: "I think Foursquare found some kind of sweet spot between the intersection of social utility (Hey, I know where my friends are), sharing/oversharing (I log everywhere I go/everything I do) and gaming/rewards (every check-in gives you a little piece of candy)."

Foursquare is designed with these game dynamics in mind, and it's the absurd appeal of its reward that makes the service so "sticky.""

Naveen Selvadurai (Foursquare Co-Founder)

Cities: Amsterdam, Atlanta,Austin, Boston, Chicago, Dallas/Ft. Worth, Denver, Detroit, Houston, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Miami, Minneapolis/St. Paul, NYC, Philadelphia, Phoenix, Portland, San Diego, San Franscisco, Seattle, Washington D.C.

(Also posted on the Technology Supported Human-World Interaction blog.)

Interactive Displays in Public Spaces

Daniel Michelis recently completed his Ph.D. dissertation on a topic that is dear to my heart. Information about his research can be found on his Interactive Displays in Public Spaces blog.

(Note: This was cross posted on the Technology-Supported Human World Interaction blog.)

Here are links to a few of his posts:

Interactive Displays: Perception, Awareness, and Interaction

Evaluating Interaction with Display Applications in Public Space

I especially like the diagrams Daniel uses to depict zones of interaction:

Figure 3: Four-phase Model
(Source: Daniel Michelis (2009), according to: Vogel and Balakrishnan, 2004)

(Author: Daniel Michelis, Institute for Media and Communications Management, University of St. Gallen)

Figure 1: Perception and Usage of Interactive Displays
(Source: Daniel Michelis (2009), according to: Brignull & Rogers, 2003)

Everyware Healthcare Links

I've decided to focus some of my posts about emerging technologies related to health care on my Technology Supported Human-World Interaction Blog. Here are a few links:

Everyware Health Care: Real Life Examples

Everyware Health Care: A Personal Focus

Everyware Health Care: Microsoft Health's Common User Interface website, usable health care applications, pervasive health games....

Emerging Technologies: SHiFT 08 Conference - Sensor Networks and Data for the Open Internet of Things

This is a cross post from the Technology-Supported Human-World Interaction blog:

I first learned about the "Internet of Things" nearly two years ago when I was taking a Ubicomp class. Since that time, things have sped quickly along in the research arena, but I don't think most folks are aware of how this technological transformation will impact our daily lives.

The videoclip below is from David Orban's presentation at SHiFT 08, "Why We Need to Listen to our Things":



Orban discusses how we currently spend much of our time taking care of our mobile devices, but as the magnitude of devices increasing, it is difficult to manage things as we have in the past. There is just too much data...There is a need for obtaining information from sensor networks. "We must derive deep knowledge of the environment from these sensors." In the video clip, Orban goes on to discuss the various challenges in this field:

• Signal to Noise problem.
• Signal to Signal problem.
• Management of the sheer volume of data that is generated, or will be generated - how data is filtered and analysed.
• Dependability - managing spime systems and sensor networks of tens of billions of elements.
• Aggregation of data to derive second order knowledge.
• New phenomena will surprise us in the future, we will learn more about our environment, and listen to our planet more clearly.

Video by Wide Tag Inc.
October 2008



Related:

SHifT 08 was held in Lisbon, Portugal on October 15-17. The focus of this year's conference was Transient Technologies, "in the sense that technology is breaking up with it's digital boundaries and it's becoming a vital part of a lot of the things we do and interact with in our daily lives."

The themes of SHiFT 08 included user experience, mobile computing, sustainability, the social web, web design, open technologies, digital media, artificial intelligence, spimes, and knowledge & innovation.