Mobile Internet of Things Blog

AppAware powered by 42matters: from research to business practice

2012-01-12T23:13:00.019+01:00

In 2010 Andrea Girardello presented AppAware for the first time at MobileHCI 2010 [1]. The idea of logging mobile installations on one's Android phone and share it with others was well received but kind of hard to sell to the research community. Thus, the next step was to evaluate and prove that by measuring app installations we actually could get more precise quality information about the long-tail of apps than the Android market provides by user reviews [2].

Driven by the idea of research in the large (see also other's experience here [3]), several ideas of predicting successful apps, applying recommendation systems, and learning app usage in the wild emerged but could never pursued as a research project: the continuous user growth (from 30k to 100k) pulled down our server, AppAware had to move to the cloud and emails flooded Andrea's inbox when the service was not available.

Struggling with how-does-all-this-maintenance-related-to-a-PhD and how-do-fund-this-project a decision was made: Andrea Girardello, Andreas Budde, Ivan Delchev and Bo Wang founded 42matters AG.

Focus on publications and research questions was substituted by the driving thrill of user growth and business exploitation. Together with Dani Arielli the old app has been completely re-designed and learning and sharing about apps with friends has become the new focus (download here).

Today, the endless nights of development and hard work have been rewarded by "The best business ideas" award of Venture.

The ceremony was opened by a keynote of Peter Brabek-Lemathe, chairman of Nestle. He gave some advice to the young entrepreneurs: understand societal trends, envision what consumers will want, think global straight-away, innovate and renovate your products every year, stop thinking you can do it yourself, and be competitive within your team or throw a stone.

Good luck to 42matters AG, Android users unite on AppAware and let's conduct research with even more data!

[1] A. Girardello, F. Michahelles, AppAware: Which Mobile Applications Are Hot? In demonstrations at Mobile HCI 2010, September 2010, Lisbon, Portugal. [PDF]

[2] A. Girardello, F., Michahelles:Explicit and Implicit Ratings for Mobile Applications, Best Paper at "3. Workshop Digitale Soziale Netzeʺ an der 40. Jahrestagung der Gesellschaft für Informatik, Leipzig, September, 2010 [PDF]

[3] Niels Henze, Martin Pielot, Benjamin Poppinga, Torben Schinke, Susanne Boll: International Journal of Mobile Human Computer Interaction (IJMHCI), 2011. [PDF]

MoMo #28 Mobile Internet of Things

2011-12-05T19:06:00.016+01:00

The mobile monday switzerland, a community of mobile industry professionals, investigated the applications for Machine to Machine and the Internet of Things.
I in my opening talk I briefly talked about general concept of the Internet of Things of linking things to information.

The message I conveyed was to no longer focus top-down on general concepts of how to grass-root the Internet of Things but rather to explore its applications and let the architectures and concepts follow as an evolutionary process. Understanding the use of objects in daily routine and business processes should provide the starting point for Internet of Things research and developments.

Oliver Thyes from Swisscom gave several examples of Internet of Things services in Switzerland, e.g. Limmex - a watch with integrated wireless alarm upon a button press. He positioned Swisscom as the partner for businesses to manage Internet of Things services themselves as well as the billing of them coupled with security mechanisms. This again showed to me how mobile network operators seek in the Internet of Things to find a way out of the declining revenues of voice communication. However, instead of offering specific end to end services, e.g. track and traces of products or managed wireless sensor networks, these corporations still rely on the provision of very generic platforms providing bandwidth and billing of Internet of Things services.
Alexander Gellner from Ericsson looked on the Internet of Things from the perspective of a mobile network infrastructure provider. He was putting some predictions on display talking about several billions of devices being connected soon and of course finalized his presentation with Ericsson's prediction of 50 billions of devices. Assuming 50 billions running on SIM cards is ten times more than MNO's have today which probably would be an alternative to shrinking voice revenues. However, SIM connection will be only necessary in remote areas where no infrastructure is available.
Charles Upchurch from SilentSoft has reported about the practical challenges of sensing the status of oil tanks and assets in gas stations. He gave nice examples of how to build antennas and package devices to make them robust against water and frozen ice.
Philipp Bolliger from Koubachi, monitoring the health of plants and giving care advices, took the opposite approach. He proposed to get rid of this central sensing units but rather to rely on infrastructure which has become standard indoors almost everywhere: wifi. Instead of instrumenting each sensor with SIM connection just connecting to allows for a much more cost efficient approach.

From this event I learned that the Internet of Things still is a term which is occupied by various stakeholders to market their existing products. The ultimate vision of an Internet of Things instrumenting the world with sensors for multiple purposes and allowing third parties to run new services upon this infrastructure has yet to be realized as an evolutionary process departing from the island solution as promoted today.

I'm also looking forward how this mobile monday event also representing the first Internet of Things Zurich Meetup will evolve and get established as a new platform for entrepreneurs, designers and everyone else interested in doing projects related to Internet of Things.

Erica Dubach's Dissertation about Social Media in Retail

2011-08-17T02:01:00.004+02:00

Erica Dubach has defended her thesis today. She investigated the opportunities of social media in retail, all her data is build upon a project in cooperation with Valora. Erica was so much into her topic that she even spend a day full-time working at a Kiosk in order to understand the processes there!!!

Her thesis makes three contributions. First, she describes a process model of how to successfully apply crowd-sourcing for eliciting novel business ideas. She describes the crowd-sourcing process using Atizo and derives best practices [1]. Second, she reports about the process of successfully building up Valora's ok,- Facebook brand page and distills a process model incorporating a deliberation, preparation, moderating & monitoring and evaluation phase [2]. Third, Erica managed promote facebook comments on in-store screens distributed in 15 kiosks for 5 weeks. By analyzing the effects of the comments on sales she could prove significant increase but still lower compared to traditional advertising. Thus, Erica reasons a combination of traditional advertising and Facebook comments as a new opportunity to think of [3].
Erica has defended her thesis very well, I'm excited whether to see her in a leading social media marketing position in retail soon! Good luck, Dr. Erica!!!

[1] Crowdsourcing for “Kiosk of the Future” – A Retail Store Case Study, Erica Dubach Spiegler, Louise Muhdi, Dominic Stöcklin, Florian Michahelles, Proceedings of the Seventeenth Americas Conference on Information Systems, Detroit, Michigan, August 4th-7th 2011 [PDF].
[2] Effect of Moderator Posts on User Interaction on a Facebook Brand Page, Irena Pletikosa Cvijikj, Erica Dubach Spiegler, Florian Michahelles, 3rd International Conference on Social Computing (SocialCom 2011), Boston, USA, October 2011. [pdf to be published after the event]
[3] Social Networks in Pervasive Advertising and Shopping, E. Dubach Spiegler, F. Michahelles, C. Hildebrand in Müller, Jörg; Alt, Florian; Michelis, Daniel (Eds.), Pervasive Advertising, Springer Human–Computer Interaction, September 2011. ISBN 978-0-85729-351-0

Surveillance to everything

2011-08-09T10:57:00.008+02:00

Alessandro Acquisti from Carnegie Mellon University recently prove the concept of (1) identifying anonymous users of flirt portals and (2) students passing a webcam via their publicly accessible Facebook profiles, and (3) even guess their social security number as an example of retrieving additional data about the from the web [1]2.He reasons from this experiment that social networks become the real ID's of users in the net. While users intentionally choose to be present on the web the consequences of linking published data with each cannot be anticipated. However, opt-in does not work either as we are usually in already or somebody put us in. He does not provide a solution but rather recommends "to reconsider our notions of privacy".
At least Moore's law helps to drive down technology costs and, as such, also democratizessurveillance technology (see also the DIY drones). Thus, we don't have to be afraid of one big brother but can rather benefit from a competition of ideas and implement our own.
Why should the surveillance cameras in the streets only be for the benefit of authorities, police, banks and corporations? As the cameras are there already today and I cannot avoid them anyway, wouldn't it be much more transparent if I could trace back my day in the city as seen by the cameras? There is also the example of Malte Spitz (German MP) who successfully claimed mobile phone logs about his mobile phone trace from his TelCo provider. There is a nice visualization and overlay with publicly available social networks data here. If this data would be just available for the user by default services could be build and data even shared.
As Google+ proposes to organize social relationships in circles, I could also authorize circles of acquaintances (perhaps even limited by time and location) to partly access my trace. Perhaps this helps me and my friends to run into each other more frequently [2].

By instrumenting even things with surveillance, could be visual but also combined with NFC/barcode/foursquare checkin/etc., my bike lock could tell me how many people touched it during the day, the light post could send an SMS to the guy who was kicking it, the umbrella I found in the train could tell its owner that I have it, the chair I sat on in the restaurant could ask how comfortable I found it...
As surveillance is on-going and increasing I'd propose to make it more transparent, accessible for others to build services, and acceptable through little benefits. Let our things turn the world into a better place. Finding the right balance between empowering people to control they data without overloading will be crucial (e.g. see Albrecht's blog about Google's circles).

[1] Alessandro Acquisti, Ralph Gross, Fred Stutzman: Faces of Facebook: Privacy in the Age of Augmented Reality. BlackHat Las Vegas, August 4, 2011
[2] Williamson, J., Robinson, S., Stewart, C., Murray-Smith, R., Jones, M., Brewster, S. (2010). Social Gravity: A Virtual Elastic Tether for Casual, Privacy-Preserving Pedestrian Rendezvous. Accepted, to appear in Proceedings of CHI 2010, Atlanta, April 2010.

Tesco Homeplus Virtual Subway Store in South Korea: go shopping through real world clicks

2011-07-07T14:15:00.006+02:00

Tesco presents a nice example of how to boost traffic on their online shopping platform
through real world interaction: Large-scale photos of real supermarket shelfs are put as posters to metro subway walls where users can order products at the online store by interacting with 2D barcodes attached next to products:

I guess many other services could benefit as well from this one-"real"-click shop solution, such as travel, electronics, music. I really wonder why this is not yet happening.

1st Call For Papers for NFC 2012

2011-07-01T15:27:00.007+02:00

NFC 2012 is the Fourth International Research Workshop with focus on Near Field Communication (NFC). This conference covers the entire technological area, beginning from RF and hardware, smartcards approach, security, applications and services, business processes, up to usability and user experience. NFC 2012 is ideal for addressing the challenges facing multidisciplinary research, development, design, and proof of concepts, pilot projects, deployment and fundamental limits of the NFC technology.

Date: March 13th, 2012 Location: Helsinki, Finland

NFC 2012 is technically co-sponsored by IEEE Finland Section

Selective Topics of Interest

RF & hardware related topics:
High-speed RF interfaces; Modulation techniques; Circuits and antenna design; Power aware design; Modelling and simulation; NFC tests & measurements; Protocol analyses and verification methods; Physical interfaces & architectures; Interoperability between NFC devices, tags and smartcards; RF system-on-chip designs; Wireless charging

Smartcards / SIM cards / Security:
Single wire protocol (SWP); Global platform; Multi-application platforms (SIM centric or not); Secure & multi-secure elements; Secure over the air (OTA) services; Security solutions for readers and terminals; System security solutions

Software platforms for NFC development:
Solutions with NFC add-ons and NFC stickers, software architectures; Smartphones and NFC for location based information services, NFC and augmented reality platforms, NFC m-payment and m-transfer architecture, Interaction systems in ubiquitous information systems; Interoperability between NFC applications and services

New applications & services:
NFC and social media (Facebook, Twitter...); NFC applications for consumers and citizens; Mobile value added services (VAS) using NFC; NFC ecosystems (e.g. tag management); NFC in business processes; Integration of NFC into “Internet Of Things” (IOT); Street and POS marketing with NFC; NFC services in education

Pilot projects, usability and user experience:
NFC and digital cities, airports, homes; Wellness; Homecare; Business usage & leisure activities; User interaction models for NFC applications; Acceptance of NFC devices and services; Field trials and pilots; Secure NFC ecosystem; Virtual ticketing and couponing with NFC, fidelization of NFC cards; User experiences of NFC applications

Important dates

1st Call For Papers: July, 1st, 2011
Submission start date: September, 15th, 2011
Full Paper Submission Deadline: October, 28th, 2011
Author Notification: November 30th, 2011
Proceedings Version: December 16th, 2011
Author Registration: January 13th, 2012
Conference/Workshop: March 13th, 2012

Submission Guidelines and Publication
Authors are invited to submit research and application papers in IEEE Proceedings Manuscripts style (two columns, single-spaced, including figures and references, using 10pt fonts). The papers must not have more than 6 pages. Please use ONLY the following templates (for LaTeX or MS Word).

We appreciate the submission of academic workshop papers representing original, previously unpublished work. Submitted papers will be carefully evaluated based on originality, significance, technical soundness, and clarity of exposition. Duplicate submissions are not allowed. Therefore, submissions of work either submitted to, or already accepted or published in any other conferences/workshops/journals are rejected without reviews.

Registration
The link to our conference management system for registration and paper submission will be available on our website. The corresponding author must provide the following information: paper title, all authors’ names, affiliation and contact information, an abstract with about 200-250 words and about five keywords.
Submission of a paper implies that if the paper will be accepted, at least one of the authors must register for the workshop to present the paper. Otherwise the submitted paper will not be published.
Authors of accepted papers will receive guidelines in preparing and submitting the final manuscript together with the notification of acceptance.

Organization Committee
Josef Langer, Stefan Grünberger, Michael Roland, Christian Saminger, Upper Austria University of Applied Sciences
Tuomo Tuikka, Matti Penttilä, Erkki Siira, VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland
Florian Michahelles, Auto-ID Labs, ETH Zurich
Serge Miranda, University of Nice Sophia-Antipolis
Jari Hannuksela, University of Oulu, IEEE Finland Section

Website: nfc2012.vtt.fi For further questions please contact nfc2012@vtt.fi

IoT in China revisited: centralized views and smart cities are taking off

2011-06-22T17:23:00.031+02:00

Again, I had the chance to attend the IoT Conference organized by Shanghai International Exhibition in China, a continuation of the series started in 2010. The audience included about 400 participants from business all over China. I contrast to last year, about half of the speakers were international.

The session started with welcome notes from various honorable people, such as Wang Lie from CCPIT Shanghai promoting trade, Wang Xi from Shanghai Institute of Microsystems, Shuguang Liu from IOTCC, a newly founded body to coordinate between enterprises and government funding, and An Xiaoping from MIIT (ministry of industry and information technology). All speakers emphasized the business opportunities of IoT as being huge for the future in China.

Chenghai Zhang, a former leader of the post telecommunication ministry, went even more in detail in his very energetic presentation (so energetic that the translator faded out from time to time) and proposed IoT as a way for recovering from the economic crisis, a new technical revolution. He mentioned the capabilities of IoT to broaden the access to economy for new users, to transform the Chinese industry from manufacturing into providing higher value services, and to extend today's value chains by new business concepts.

After that opening, some leaders were called to the stage to trigger short demos featuring NFC, fingerprint, 2D-reader, LBS and RFID technology – exposing those is the core building blocks of an emerging Chinese IoT.

The conference was opened with the first keynote by Ed Schuster from MIT. He started with a quote from Ian Waitz which described that MIT during its 150 years of existence had built infrastructure the first 75 years, and had created industry the second 75 years. Thus, the next 75 years should be devoted for applying this knowledge to build a better planet. Ed gave some examples semantic information processing as part of his work within the data center[1]. I think this perspective of big data [2] should be further investigated as part of Internet of Things research.

This talk was followed by a talk about smart cities by Bin Cao from Datang Telecom, a telecom equipment manufacturer. He again emphasized the view of extending IoT to all industries in China in order to collect, network and communicate even more information within China. As the main challenge of cities in China today he mentioned one-time funding during construction without sufficient budget of maintenance. Furthermore, planning divisions have to improve collaboration, development should be better identified, standards should be enforced, and finally processes should be designed to allow for more sustainability.
As a specific example Bin Cao presented a centralized control system for cities where "efficient modules" collect data and provide services to the citizens. I challenged his assumption of “identifying people’s needs and providing services accordingly” by proposing to follow open data policies for empowering individuals and business to provide services in addition to centralized authoritive units in order to allow for more diverse and competition among services.
In my talk (slides) I proposed to go beyond IoT in supply-chains and seeking for opportunities of accessing tacit knowledge of people and individuals. I gave examples of my2cents and appaware as opportunities of new services based on user-generated content. While user-generated content is probably not at the core of IoT, I see the IoT as an important enabler for developing new services including user input.

Later, Paul Havinga presented a nice definition of IoT:

Everything is networked; Smart objects and global connectivity allows for open multi-purpose services.

Thus, IP cannot be solution, not even the low-power versions as 6LoWPAN as being too expensive and too complex for cheap and small devices. Instead, he proposed the integration of various technologies coupled with embedded intelligence as a way for establishing distributed collaboration. The IoT would allow to collect information and to make information available right at where the action is.

Finally, IoT-A hosted a Session and provided an update of its activities.

The second day was opened by Prof. Hao Min who presented several projects of Anti-Counterfeiting. He mentioned tagging of Wulangje liquor which I already reported about here (link) . Alan Thorne from the Cambridge Lab reported about several activities at the Cambridge lab concering discovery services and applications in airline industry.

Prof. Wei Zhao from University of Macau, leader of the 973 IoT project, mentioned the inauguration of IoT colleges. As core topics he proposed computer science, software architectures and sensors. He explained the IoT as being built upon sensing, generating virtual measures, and dealing with the challenge of fusion of data. As a main challenge he put identification of objects.He was elaborating on how identifying. While I agree on this challenge, I also think that progress has been made when thinking of all the different numbering schemes that already exist in industry. As the history of the Auto-ID center has shown, posing a new global numbering fails. Instead, building upon and fusing established schemes is the way to go.

Toru Murase from Sumitomo Electric industries was proposing FTTH as a backbone of running an Internet of Things in the home, mobility network.

Jin Mitsugi was talking about an Internet of Consumer Electronics. For this he introduced a dual interface RFID tag developed by Keio and Fudan Auto-ID Lab allowing to read an RFID tag both from an RFID reader. Thus a newly developed data XML can be read from http, apps, and through a gateteway from home network appliances. They have installed the system in 49 consumer devices so far for monitoring the energy consumption [3]. In combination with IR-sensors counting people, consumer devices could be switched off.

Daeyoung Kim took his inspiration from Hollywood movies, such as minority report and motivated the need of software infrastructure by new verions of facebook/twitter/google for objects. ID-based network with thing’s application level protocol “id- based network for Internet of things”. He mentioned lightweigth Ipv6, 6lowpan and RoL as common alternatives and then introduced SNAIL allowing for mobility management security and routing.

Finally, smart cities was discussed as a hot topic for IoT. Ono Mitsutoshi from Kashima Consulting focused on the development process of smart cities, Yokoi Masaki from Nomura Research envisioned several IoT apps for citizens in smart cities. He proposed that China should understand what smart city means for China of just copy-paste-ing from US. As layers he outlined network layer, platform layer for recognition/identification/authentification, and the application layer for apps.

Michael Zhang from Shanghai Youth Info-tech was talkbing about making life better. He focused on the example of Pudong Xinqu area, the neighborhood of Shanghai where most multi-nationals and expatriates reside. He presented a credit-card combined with access functionality to private spaces. A house-keeper application allows for convenience services implement in a cloud: you can virtually queue in line of hospitals, such that you can wait from home. Also, you can shop from remote, obtain registrations, e.g. dog permit, and banking. Whereas in this app is reasonable in the current context, I was wondering why not also working on changing procedures and introducing planning to get rid of queues.

Finally, I was a bit scared of the "red light app" which warns if pedestrians cross a red light and inform authorities accordingly. When walking through Shanghai I'd rather appreciate a green light app sending an SMS to the car drivers who were pushing really hard to find their way through the crowds pedestrians. Overall, I was a bit skeptical whether reducing human mankind to shopping animals always hunting for bargains and aiming at getting rich while being continuously controlled by government would yield flourishing smart city I'd like to live in.

My take-aways:

IoT is proposed as a way out of China’s disappearing business case: low manufacturing costs are disappearing due to increasing salaries and the currency under pressure adjusting the low peg to US dollar. Ways have to be found to transform industry to go beyond manufacturing and provide more valuable services higher up in the value chain.
Still a very centralized view: During the conference it was mentioned several times that building the IoT would allow to collect and share data within China more efficiently. International collaboration was never really mentioned other than learning and adopting from others in order to follow the national agenda.
More concerns about information security than privacy: Throughout the discussions I experienced that fear about external forces/attacks is more established than protection privacy. The notion of control is more severe than establishing an environment of diversity and creativity. This contradicts quite a bit with the notion of IoT from Council which sees governments getting more and more challenged by an IoT, where individuals and groups gain more power due to open pools of data knowledge (OpenData).
Smart city is the major topic for Iot in China: Smart cities is a major topic in China. As part of the global trend of people moving towards cities, the mega-cities, compact spaces where millions of people live and work, are happening in Asia. Thus, city governments are facing tremendous challenges of providing public infrastructure and services. Information and sensing technologies will become important. Making sense out of this data and connecting all the emerging systems is where IoT comes into play. Finally, construction industries always share close relations to public and governmental funds, thus smart cities fit right into "thinking big".
IoT drives economy in China at least until 2012: I met several Chinese funding agencies promoting IoT for industry. However, as a new president is going to be elected in 2012 it's not yet clear whether he will put the same emphasis on IoT as Hu Jintao does today. Thus, organizing our IoT2012 Conference in Shanghai/Wuxi in November 2012 should be the right moment.

[1] Edmund W. Schuster, Stuart J. Allen, and David L. Brock. 2007. Global RFID: The Value of the Epcglobal Network for Supply Chain Management. Springer-Verlag New York, Inc., Secaucus, NJ, USA.

[2] Big Data: The next frontier for innovation, competition, and productivity, McKinsey Global Institute, May 2011

[3] Katumasa Ihara, Goshi Kojima, Tomonori Kondo, Yuki Sato, Hisakazu Hada, Jin Mitsugi, “Home energy consumption suppression using EPC enabled multi-vendor consumer electronics control”, IEICE Technical Report USN2011-7 (2011-5), pp.29-37

[4] Sungmin Hong, Daeyoung Kim, Minkeun Ha, Sungho Bae, Sangjun Park, Wooyoung Jung, and Jae-eon Kim, "SNAIL: An IP-based Wireless Sensor Network Approach Toward the Internet of Things," IEEE Wireless Communications, 17(6):34-42, Dec. 2010.

Forget about genius - just think about numbers

2011-04-07T17:45:00.003+02:00

Today, I had the pleasure to host Denis Harscoat from Quantter talking about the quantified self [1] in my seminar. Denis illustrated nicely the power of numbers when describing challenges, quality and goals. I could well follow his argument of numbers yielding "serenity, peace, and happiness". You easily can state you want to be "good", "better", "excellent" - however, numbers are still better to describe performance or goals. Thus, the underlying idea of the quantified self is to collect, visualize [3], make sense of data and ultimately, change behavior [4].
Denis gave nice historical examples from Benjamin Franklin, Da Vinci and others showing the power self-inspection and changing behavior. Technological evoluation, he argues, finally allows to overcome the media breaks and collect data more smoothly, one example is the mood scope:

Quantter aims at going even a step further by establishing a platform, a market place of self-reported data: collected either manually by quants (tweets following a syntax, e.g. #swim: 15min) or automatically using one these logger devices (e.g. Fitbit, Zeo, DirectLife). Denis used the metaphore of "connecting the dots". Instead of having single dots of data, Quantter aims at drawing the complete picture of oneself. Denis emphasized the importance and business of values of connectors and interface: while technology may change for services to live on connectors are key. Quantter's default is public, private is the premium service. Establishing a maket for linking between achievers and coaches is the long-term goal. Finally, history is the best predictor for the future. Thus, quantifying routines could for keeping memories, improving in certain disciplines, or just for recording and prediciting success.

I was really fascinated about the brave vision of Quantter deliberately not solving a business or pain, but to rather bet on the emerging trend of self-tracking, social tracking and crowd counting.
In the following discussion Denis referred to the 10.000 hour rule stating if you just work enough you can do it. Whether or not this holds, I don't know, but justifies to keep on trying. Denis also defined the role of entrepreneurs to bridge between today's disbelief and what's going to be happen in the future.
If we only look for need, I'm once more understood, we may loose many innovations: who was waiting for facebook, iphone, google maps ten years ago?

[1] Kevin Kelly's Quantified Self
[2] Wolf, G.: Know Thyself: Tracking Every Facet of Life. Wired Magazine, June 22, 2009.
[3] Gary Wolf on the quantified self (flowingdata.com)
[4] Brennan Moore, Max Van Kleek, David R. Karger, Mc Schraefel: Assisted Self Reflection: Combining Lifetracking, Sensemaking, & Personal Information Management, In CHI 2010 Workshop - Know Thyself: Monitoring and Reflecting on Facets of One's Life, April 2010

Research of the Auto-ID Labs presented at GS1 event

2011-04-01T10:46:00.017+02:00

As part of their research for GS1, members of the Auto-ID Labs research network give regular updates about their applied research in the areas of RFID technology & performance, consumer services and future trends of auto-id technologies.

The most recent update (overview) was provided at GS1's Industry and Standards Event in Brooklyn, March 2011.

Ed Schuster from MIT presented (slides) recent work about using RFID together with polymer material as powerless sensors to measure temperature and strain of bridges. As such, the safety of the material of bridges could be continuously measured and fed directly to the
EPCglobal Architecture Framework.

Jin Mitsugi from the Keio La b reported (slides) about how to improve the lifecycle management of electric appliances in the home. As the EPC has been established in supply-chains but the consumers in the homes are missing the ability to read and write information to these RFID tags, Mitsugi presented a dual interface passive RFID tag: it incorporates the standards UHF Gen 2 interface for standards RFID readers and it additionally features a basedband interface to the tag's memory which can the linked to ZigBee/WLAN or any other appropriate connection being available in the home. Thus, a system can be build to manage the lifecycle of appliances also beyond the point of sales in people's homes.

Myself I had the chance to discuss (slides) the increasing popularity of shopping apps and the importance of barcode scanning in retail. As part of this research I disclosed first results of our analysis concerning barcode data inconsistencies. Triggered by GS1's Data Crunch report [1], we investigated the responses to 220.000 barcode queries triggered by users of two productive mobile apps. We compared the responses of different information providers and could reveal missing information (37% of the queries), wrong information and inconsistent information (spelling, multiple names for single barcodes).
The analysis is still on-going and will be summarized in an upcoming publication and whitepaper.
One approach might also be to position GS1 as the authorative source for barcode information.

Finally, Mark Harrison reported (slides) about recent projects in aerospace, lifecycle management, and event-based pedigreee for healthcare.
For details see also here.

Overall, it has been a very helpful discussion about future research directions of the Auto-ID Labs. It was good to see that the academic perspective of the labs and the business-focussed view of GS1 and members has many topics in common: consumers services, quality of barcode master data and the provision of GS1 master to consumer apps. The labs are looking forward to support GS1 in becoming the trusted source of master data for barcode consumer apps.

Visiting Manhattan, first, I was surprised about the crazy weather and, second, about IMHO a really complicated queuing system at the check-out of Whole Foods: customers are queueing in six lines, each assigned with a color. Then both screen display and audio announcement advice the customers in the pole positions of their lines to approach to a specific checkout identified by a number, run!,...

[1] GS1 UK: V.C., Data crunch report: The impact of bad data on profits and customer service in the UK grocery industry, 2009.

Call for Paper: Workshop on Mobile Interaction in Retail Environments (MIRE) at MobileHCI 2011

2011-03-08T14:57:00.007+01:00

CALL FOR PAPERS (with apologies for cross-posting)

=============================================================

Workshop on Mobile Interaction in Retail Environments (MIRE)

at MobileHCI 2011

http://dfki.de/mire

Sven Gehring, Markus Löchtefeld, Carsten Magerkurth Petteri Nurmi & Florian Michahelles

Stockholm, Sweden

August 30th 2011

=============================================================

People no longer only go shopping when they need something, shopping has become one of the most popular leisure time activities in economically advanced countries. Smartphone apps focusing on shopping are being increasingly adopted. The variety of available mobile shopping applications is huge, but the users’ and retailers’ benefit are yet to be understood.

The workshop on mobile interaction in retail environments (MIRE) brings together researchers and practitioners from academy and industry to explore the following research questions: (1) What are the unique properties and affordances of mobile applications for retail environments? (2) How can consumers be supported in their decision making process? (3) How can mechanisms of eCommerce be combined with brick and mortar stores? (4)How can social media be integrated? (5)Which are the new business concepts and channels suiting both consumers’ and retailers’ needs?

The goals of the workshop include, but are not limited to:

• discuss latest solutions in mobile retailing;

• construct a roadmap for mobile retailing and

• build a community for this emerging and new topic.

We invite both case studies discussing real-world deployments and original research contributions in one of the following topic areas:

• mobile applications for retail contexts,

• infrastructure combining eCommerce with brick and mortar stores

• social media in the retail context,

• business models and social impact.

=== Workshop Format and Submissions ===

MIRE is a full-day workshop with an extended thematic scope and aim at wider audience with multidisciplinary insights being explicitly encouraged. We ask for papers that address one or more of the research questions mentioned above, or that describe findings that relate to these research questions based on systems the authors have built.

Papers should be formatted according to the standard HCI Archive format. (http://www.mobilehci2011.org/sites/default/files/MobileHCI2011archivalformat_final_acmcopyright.doc please remove the copyright notice). Papers should be submitted by email to mire@dfki.de. At least one author of an accepted paper is required to register for the workshop.

will be reviewed by at least three members of an international program committee. All accepted papers will be made available online and will be published at Sun SITE Central Europe (CEUR) Workshop Proceedings .

=== IMPORTANT DATES ===

April 20, 2011: Submission Deadline

May 15, 2011: Author Notification

May 31, 2011: Submission of camera-ready version

August 30, 2011: Workshop in Stockholm, Sweden

=== Website and more Information ===

http://dfki.de/mire

If you have any additional questions please contact us via:

mire@dfki.de

=== Organizers ===

Sven Gehring, German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI), Germany

Markus Löchtefeld, German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI), Germany

Carsten Magerkurth, SAP Research, Switzerland

Petteri Nurmi, Helsinki Institute for Information Technology, Finland

Florian Michahelles, ETH Zürich, Auto-ID Labs, Switzerland

=== Program Committee ===

Antonio Krüger (DFKI)

Antti Salovaara (HIIT)

Carsten Röcker (RWTH Aachen)

Enriko Rukzio (University Duisburg Essen)

Felix von Reischach (SAP Switzerland)

Frank Rehme (METRO)

Jörg Müller (T-Labs)

Michael Beigl (KIT)

Michael Rohs (LMU Munich)

Shin’ichi Konomi (University of Tokyo)

NFC is striking back - NFC Congress 2011 in Hagenberg

2011-02-24T10:34:00.016+01:00

At the recent NFC Congress 2011 in Hagenberg organized by Joseph Langer, I felt that participants and speakers shared the strong belief that NFC is finally coming - "if Apple does it, it can't be wrong.". Eventhough not many visitors realized it, the conference badge had an NFC tag embedded storing the participants' contacts. Touching the badges with the Google Nexus S phone I could easily import the contacts into my phone's address book, it just worked without any further excitement! My first NFC commodity service. However, from a user experience it does feel strange grabbing ones badge and touching it with your phone...

The first speaker, Andreas Jackl from Nokia, was introducing to the development frameworks of Qt and Symbian. Windows Mobile was mentioned of course, but a coherent strategy of how this parallelism to QT/Symbian will co-exist in the future was not visible. Further talks from smaller local solution providers presented existing work-a-rounds for NFC-enabling phones and speculated about Apple's NFC strategy.

In the afternoon I had the chance to chair two session of the 3 ^rd International Workshop on Near Field Communication (NFC 2011). Gregor Broll from Docomo-Eurolabs presented touch-based interaction with public displays using grids of NFC tags as an alternative to touch screens. While the accuracy of the system was rather low, the users from the described study seemed to appreciate the interaction [1]. Andreas Prinz from University of Kassel presented an NFC-poster describing a workflow for patients with impaired motor skills to report their health status [2]. Michael Gebhard from NXP Graz presented the design of a contactless smartcard sticker not being disturbed by the metal material of the phone it is sticked to [3]. The work presented both simulations and measurements which should be very rewarding to implement the ferrit-coil concept also for RFID tags in metal environments.
Michael Koch from Hagenberg analyzed the vulnerabilities of signed NDEF. He presented nice examples about how these only partially signed NDEF segments could be rearranged by an attacker while still being recognized as correctly signed [4]. This is really something the NFC Forum should think about considering their specs. Martin Gossar from TU Graz presented phase-shift-keying modulation as way to increase the data rates in NFC communication [5]. Roel Verdult from Radboud University Nijmegen was revealing a security hole in Nokia's method of automatically evoking a bluetooth connection upon touching a tag. Verdult showed how infected smart posters could be used to inject a virus onto one's phone [5].

On the second day Charles Dachs from NXP was providing some arguments why NFC would be in a better position now than six years ago. First the penetration of smart phones (20%, >1 billion) has increased. Second, based on NXP NFC chip sales OEM's are investing now and the number of NFC-enabled handset should increase (I guess he was careful enough not to compare to the hype numbers of 20% of all phones once shared in 2007). Third, the network providers would finally invest in NFC. Fifth, the contactless infrastructure would be increasing. Dachs presented NFC as connecting the virtual world with touch-points in the real world. He showed a number of touch-point examples to be installed in Starbucks. To close with a number, he expected 50 million NFC devices to be shipped this year (which is far below initial predictions from ABI Research of 450 million).
Jure Sustersic from Nokia reported about 150 million of Symbian devices where of "many" would be NFC-enabled, not quite matching "all new Nokia smartphones to come with NFC from 2011" from last year. Tuomo Tuikka from VTT reported about the Smart Urban Spaces Project. The user experience of finding NFC tags in urban spaces and receiving information would be superior to location-based GPS applications. Zhiyun Ren from the T-Labs presented an NFC-based mobile wallet which can feature endless numbers of credit-card schemes on the mobile phone. He showed a demo that worked. Stefan Cecil from Seibersdorf Labs presented the design of a textile tag based on copper-wires weaved into textile fabric. Monto Kumagai from XtremeSignPost presented NFC-based postcards as a means of advertising products by sharing personal experiences.

Overall, the NFC Congress has confirmed my feeling from half a year ago (see here) that NFC is coming back. Nothing has changed about scenarios and business models: coupons, smart posters and payment are still the major ones. The discussion about where to put the secure element might dissolve by just putting several secure elements into a phone, one for the bank, one for the handset manufacturer, and one for the network operator. As new NFC-enabled handset arrive on the market, it will be rather niche players proving their innovativeness to start to deploy 2D-barcode stickers with NFC-tags on the background. URL's will be first, control of apps perhaps later. It's starting now, the only difficult things to predict: how long will we have to wait for mass adoption?

[1] G. Broll, W. Graebsch, M. Scherr, S. Boring, P. Holleis, M. Wagner: Touch to Play - Exploring Touch-Based Mobile Interaction with Public Displays, Proceedings of the 3rd International Workshop on Near Field Communication (NFC'2011), Feb. 2011

[2] Andreas Prinz, Philipp Menschner, Matthias Altmann, Jan Marco Leimeister: inSERT – an NFC-based Self Reporting Questionnaire for Patients with impaired fine motor skills, Proceedings of the 3rd International Workshop on Near Field Communication (NFC'2011), Feb. 2011

[3] Michael Gebhart, Roland Neubauer: Design of 13.56 MHz Smartcard stickers with ferrite for payment and authentication, Proceedings of the 3rd International Workshop on Near Field Communication (NFC'2011), Feb. 2011

[4] Michael Roland, Josef Langer, Josef Scharinger:Security Vulnerabilities of the NDEF Signature Record Type, Proceedings of the 3rd International Workshop on Near Field Communication (NFC'2011), Feb. 2011

[5]Martin Gossar, Michael Stark, Michael Gebhart, Wolfgang Pribyl, Peter Söser: Investigations to Achieve Very High Data Rates for Proximity Coupling Devices at 13.56 MHz and NFC Applications, Proceedings of the 3rd International Workshop on Near Field Communication (NFC'2011), Feb. 2011

[6] Roel Verdult, Francois Kooman: Practical attacks on NFC enabled cell phones, Proceedings of the 3rd International Workshop on Near Field Communication (NFC'2011), Feb. 2011

Internet of Things - Where are the Robots? - Any ideas?

2011-02-15T16:22:00.003+01:00

Talking about the Internet of Things we are discussing a lot about RFID, barcode, mobile phones, sensors...however, this is all about input only. What about output - beyond screens, LED's, projections - about actuation, about letting the Internet of Things not only blend real world and virtual world into each other through information but letting the IoT also take effect in our real world: e.g. using robots.
Irena Pletikosa from our lab is currently collecting ideas and scenarios of robots servicing public spaces, such as libraries and retail centers. If you're interested in the results please participate in her survey and share your ideas at http://robots.im.ethz.ch.

New AppAware Website online

2011-01-26T16:53:00.006+01:00

Andrea Girardello and Andreas Budde have worked hard on releasing also viewable version of AppAware (showing you the current top apps based on users' installation events) on the web, see the result:
Thanks to the great adoption of AppAware by Android users our own server could not cope with the 130.000 events being shared by 55.000 users daily. Thus, we have moved out to the Amazon cloud. It's going to be an interesting experiment whether we can cover these costs by the advertisements displayed on appaware.org. We have already earned $1.39, so please keep on clicking onto the ads;)

Another interesting experience: There is the first appaware clone, see here, having the same features, same look and feel - just it doesn't work so far;)

Internet of Things: first, there have to be plans…

2010-11-25T19:18:00.021+01:00

GIOTC (see for pictures) brought me to Beijing. Compared to Shanghai (I visited earlier this year) Beijing feels much more relaxed, less high-rise, wider spread, less crowed and by far older. The conference took place just next to the remarkable buildings from Olympia 2008.

Zhong Qi, chairman of the Chinese RFID alliance open the conference by emphasizing the importance of the internet of things as a vehicle for growth after financial crisis. As the US have promoted Smart Earth, Europe the IoT development plan [1], South-Korea the u-Korea initiative [2] and Japan the i-Japan program [3], the prime minister of China has identified the Internet of Things as one of the seven key technologies for China. China can build upon the Golden Card project [4], which involves the 940 million ID cards, 2.7 billion banking cards, health insurance cards which adds up to a total of 7 billion RFID-based smart cards in China and suddenly put China 3^rd after US and UK. China strongly believes in developing their own technologies and standards while simultaneously recognizing openness and international cooperation as key parameters to success. According to Qi, the growth rate of RFID in China was at 35% throughout the last years.

Florent Frederix from the European Commission motivated the Internet of Things with the on-going trends of miniaturization, mobility, pervasiveness and sensors. He referred to the work being conducted in the funded iot-research cluster focusing on logistics, supply-chain, retail, green buildings, green cars and ehealth. As a counterpart to China’s 12 year development plan he outlined the EU’s IoT action plan [1] which defines governance, privacy, silence of chips, security, standards, public private partnerships, smart cities, informed consumers and IT waste as major steps to be worked on.

Philip Cousin presented the EU-China expert group as a first attempt to exchange ideas on architectures, naming concepts and protocols in EU and China. Zou Liu from the Minis try of Communication s, Science and Technology and Gao Yanjie from the Ministry of Health reported about achievements and goals in their divisions. It would have been really interesting to learn more specifics about their learnings and their pilots they have performed.

David Boswarthick from ETSI instead mentioning specific business cases or scenarios motivated the emergence of the IoT by the saturation of mobile market (as everybody already has at least one cell phone…), the opportunity of not networked 50-70 billion machines, and the emerging legislation demanding smart systems. He described the development of the Internet of Things as a step-by-step development process which should be also replicated in the corresponding standardization efforts. The requirements of the ETSI platform he outlined as a technology-agnostic multi-purpose service platform providing machine to machine services in an end-to-end fashion while re-using existing standards.

Liu Jianming from the national power provider State Grid impressed me with the astonishing number of 1.6 million employees in his company. Kang Lee from NIST presented the standardization activities in RFID and sensors networks from the US perspective. Wu Donya from CESI promoted OID as China’s open numbering scheme, frankly, looking quite similar to the EPC framework. It's rather questionable how this (old) approach could successfully build upon old legacy [5] being designed for unix machines instead of resource-constrained RFID tags.

Finally, I could talk (slides) about the importance of not limiting the IoT to business corporations but to include the consumer and to provide service for the everyday use. I gave some examples of our work about my2cents.mobi and codecheck.info and Product Empire. In various discussion I later had offline I was confronted with questions about how brand owners would react about bad comments on their products being spammed by fake users of their competitors. I was told several times that our approach might work in Europe but not in the harsh environment of China where competitors might try everything for fighting each other.

It was very refreshing when Michael Dohler from World Sensing challenged the unbelievable numbers of business research agencies creating hypes and heating up markets. He specifically took the example of 7 trillion networked devices (see how this wrong number travels the world, 140k hits on google!) predicted by WWRF for 2017, which would mean about 10.000 nodes per square meter on earth… He mentioned that the technologies for IoT are basically there, the tricky part would be the optimization for data rate, range and power consumption. He proposed to break up with the old thinking of separated communication layers but to design for bi-directional communication instead: "I talk to my sensors, the sensors can also talk to me.". Finally, he disclosed his approach of not only selling components but bundling them with services and then co-leveraging with big players. Big players, he mentioned IBM, are already established in the market and speak the language of the clients, nobody is interested in sensor data…

In the final panel discussion of day one about future perspectives and challenges, both Chinese and European participants either referred to expert groups or to work reports which would provide the answers soon. While in Europe the funding schemes of the European Commission are remarkable (just outreached by the vast amounts of funding the 14 ministries bear in China!), for natural and sustainable growth in our economies we still need to watch out for real problems and pains which are not found in the scenarios use case sections of work reports...

Next day, Girgio Priester from the Smart Cities initiative motivated the need cities to invest into infrastructure, human capital and, additionally, also in new technologies. He reported about the municipal wi-fi mashup in Barcelona which provides municipal workers (police, inspectors, social workers) with communication. He also mentioned networked parking meters, public lighting optimization and informative panels. This would all sum up in savings of 400kEur/year. Venice was another example. There, a multi-purpose smartcard would allow to use transport, bicycles, museum entries for 90.000 residents and 22 million visitors. The vision is to apply dynamic pricing to distribute the tourists more efficiently over the year. It was not quite clear how this RFID pilot on the old continent does really link to Internet of Things.

Prof.Sangchan Park from Kyung Hee University really contrasted these pilot with not just one but 20 "u-city"'s currently being build in Korea aiming at public services, eco-friendly areas, and promoting u-city as a new lifestyle of the future. While all projects are very much technology-driven the extend, pace, and size is really breath-taking (e.g. Songdo).

Alvaro de Oliveira from living labs in Europe summarized on real-life test and experimentation environments in Europe where users and producers co-create innovations. Living Labs have been characterised by the European Commission as Public-Private-People Partnerships (PPPP) for user-driven open innovation, but not going much beyond pilots.

I perceived it a little foolish when the successes of the future cities and living labs in Europe were praised as IoT success stories. Compared to the mega project in Asia (which yet have to prove their success not to become another Masdar!) they are, if at all, first seeds of the beginning of networked RFID (see also another comment here).

Ramjee Prasad, Devasis Bandyopahdyay, Geir Koien and presented about security and privacy. The tradeoffs between security and comfort, the long-term perspective of privacy, and also the dynamics changing notions of privacy. Looking at the younger generation today: what George Orwell was afraid of the big brother could watch, the digital natives voluntarily shout to cyberspace without any purpose...

Usman Haque from Pachube called for a very pragmatic approach of deriving standards: forming them through gradual implementation. He proposed to be as flexible as you can, make as simple as possible to share data, to include context, to support multiple protocols & adapters, to not sumarize data, but to maintain single points, to help individuals manage data, and to
help companies, cities to provide service. He summarized that as extreme data sharing. He sees the role of pachube to "pipes for the internet of things" and to reduce friction to build things for others. He bases his business models on high volume service that pay, while the masses could use this service for free. After his talk, he just disappeared in the crowd of people asking for his business card.
Zhang Jianning from Z-Park was talking about the success of virtual good sellers in China and reminded the audience to thoroughly seek to understand the internet of things and not just running along the hypecycle.
Chen Xianxing from LSD Science and Technology was just going in this direction by pretty directly promoting his company's wireless devices as well suited for the Internet of Things.
Peng Haixing from Huawei reported about the importance of the IoT from the perspective of network solutions provider.

The final panel discussion concluded that IoT would be more succesful in Europe and Asia due to the strong believe in infrastructure there. I would call this rather sellfish, at least there was no representative from the US participating in this panel. Jusgt to mention that it was the Auto-ID Center at MIT coining the term Internet of Things (see here), it were the giants wallmart and DoD deploying RFID, just look at RFIDJournal for the latest stories. But indeed, I don't see the the big funding schemes for IoT either. Perhaps it's more about top-down (Europe and Asia) or bottom up (USA), e.g. IBM's smarter planet is right on track.

Overall, GIOTC has been a very exciting event for again feeling the power and enthusiasm in China for the Internet of Things. Due to China's scale and its long-term perspective of plans combined with the pace and the once-decided-irreversible-will to implement we could expect large scale IoT implementations, not just pilots, very soon. Whether this will be successfull has yet to be found out.Thus, China should be an exciting environment to work in for the upcoming years.

I was also very happy to feel the spirit of the crazy IoT gang, Rob van Kranenburg, Usman Haque and Mischa Dohler. To be continued!

[1] Commission of the European Communities (2009-06-18). "Internet of Things — An action plan for Europe"

[2] u-Korea Masterplan, 2006

[3] i-Japan Strategy 2015, 2010

[4] China RFID Whitepaper

[5] X.660 : Information technology - Open Systems Interconnection - Procedures for the operation of OSI Registration Authorities: General procedures and top arcs of the ASN.1 Object Identifier tree (link)

It's not a bug, it's a feature: measuring rain fall through signal disturbances of mobile phone networks

2010-11-17T18:05:00.002+01:00

Heavy rain floods canals and streets. Gaining more knowledge about rainfall would allow to more effectively manage canalization systems.
The Swiss Eawag analyzes the signal quality between radio towers of mobile network operators for that purpose. Due to the fine-grain deployment of mobile networks they claim to achieve more accurate measurements than the coarsely deployed weather stations can do. Comparing the data of 23 cell towers with 13 rain weather stations over a period of two months they could calibrate their system and derive rainfall from signal disturbance. Find details in German here.

The default setting is: public

2010-11-12T14:18:00.010+01:00

I am a big fan "Professor Tarantogas Sprechstunde", a story from Stanislaw Lem, which describes self-announced inventors and visioners stealing the time of the poor Professor Tarantoga. Then, two "Antecepists" drop by who have developed a revolutionary concept for the fortune of human man kind. This arouses the professors' interest...

My interest got aroused about The Quantified Self. Peter Drucker's credo "If you can't measure it, you can't manage it." gets a twist towards

If you can't measured it, you haven't done it!

Facebook updates and Tweets are only a pretty rough estimation of what we are up to. What if we can quantify that...scary? Maybe, but it's already happening, this is where I have been quantified so:

how much have I published, see Academic Search, ResEval, Scholar Index, QuadSearch, CIDS
how often have I listened to which music, e.g. last.fm
how many applications I have installed on my phone, appaware.org
which products I like, my2cents.mobi
how many people I share biz ties with, linkedin
...and how much I travel knows my miles account, my spendings the credit card etc.

Then, there are these tracking devices people use to do sports (nike sports plus, nokia sportstracker, fitbit etc.). These devices also feed to twitter.
Why not capturing all these and putting into one place, a facebook for quantified activities, a pachube for personal tracking. It's there:

A quantt (notice the double t) is a simple way of describing human effort in social network status messages like Twitter and Facebook. It takes the form of:

#verb:value(optional unit) eg. #run:8miles (see quantter.com)

A nice way of how the quantified self can directly feedback for personal improvement is this meditation assistant:

Beer van Geer - Project Dagaz from Quantified Self Amsterdam on Vimeo.

Privacy was yesterday, the default is public? Let's see, it's not the big brother, it's our big ego this time watching us...

Call for Participation: Visit IoT2010 and register now!

2010-11-03T23:21:00.003+01:00

############ IoT2010 | Call for Participation ############

Tokyo - Internet of Things (IoT 2010), a three-day public conference, gathers leading researchers from academia and industry to elaborate on the major themes of the emerging Internet of Things. On November 29, 2010 focused workshops and tutorials feature in a pre-conference program. On the two following days, researchers and industrial practitioners meet and present talks and keynotes in front of an expected audience of 300 visitors.

For more information about the event, refer to the flyer

http://www.iot2010.org/files/flyer.pdf

or the event website at

http://www.iot2010.org/

Registration for IoT 2010 is open!

http://www.iot2010.org/register/

The Conference Programme is now available!

http://www.iot2010.org/conference/

2nd International Internet of Things Conference (IoT 2010), November 29 - December 1, 2010, Tokyo, Japan

IoT for a Green Planet

http://www.iot2010.org/

This 3-day conference in Tokyo is organized by Auto-ID Labs (Keio University, ETH Zurich & University of St. Gallen and Massachusetts Institute of Technology) and supported by the Japanese Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry, European Commission, T-Engine Forum/Ubiquitous ID Center and WIDE Project.

Important Facts

----------------------------------------------------------------

- 28 Full Papers (26.9% acceptance rate)

- 13 Demos

- 6 Invited Workshops

- 5 Open Workshops

- 6 Videos

- Special Workshop on International Trade

- Special Round Table on IoT for a Green Planet

- 5 Exhibit stands (IBM, NTT Laboratories, Unicom, Mitsui, Keio University)

Important Dates

----------------------------------------------------------------

- Workshops, Roundtable: November 29, 2010

- Main Conference Dates: November 30 - December 1, 2010

Keynote Speakers

----------------------------------------------------------------

Norishige Morimoto

- Director, IBM Research - Tokyo

Patrick Wetterwald

- President, IPSO Alliance and Manager, Advanced Technologies, Cisco Systems, Inc.

Chairs

----------------------------------------------------------------

General Chairs

- Jun Murai (Keio University)

Program Chairs:

- Florian Michahelles (ETH Zurich/ St. Gallen)

- Jin Mitsugi (Keio University)

Panel @PhoneSense 2010: Business Aspects of PhoneSensing

2010-11-03T17:27:00.007+01:00

Andrew Campbell has invited me to organize a Panel about Business Aspects of PhoneSensing at the PhoneSense Workshop held in conjunction with Sensys 2010 in Zurich (slides).
I invited Roman Bleichenbacher (codecheck), Samuel Mueller (MiraSense), Michael Wehrmeyer (Mammut Sport group) and Juha Laurila (Nokia Research Center Lausanne) to join the panel which took place in the lovely forest house of ETH Zurich.

First of all, there was a strong consensus among the panelists that contextual relevance of services is an important asset mobile users are highly appreciating. Furthermore, it became pretty obvious that most commercial services today are only presenting information selected based on sensor-input, e.g. location. The actual collection of data from users, as largely discussed as participatory and opportunistic sensing is not taking place yet. Thus, terms of privacy and ownership of data are just not relevant yet.
Additionally, the most used sensors today is still the camera: be it for barcode-reading or augmented reality applications.

The expectations of the panelists from the researchers were: development of open sensor data sharing platforms, more accurate mobile augmented reality frameworks, and a better understanding of how mobile applications are actually being used as part of daily routines and tasks, how users select apps, and to which apps they actually return. It also remained unclear whether the current trend of walling services into apps will prevail, or whether mobile websites are coming back as soon as sensing can be integrated, e.g. HTML5.

Mobile Monday: Trends in Japan

2010-11-03T15:39:00.012+01:00

I could attend the Mobile Monday in Zurich which had the topic Trends in Japan. Koji Fukada, President of YUMENI Inc., gave a tele-presentation live from Japan. He emphasized the importance of social networks on mobile networks, yielding fives times more users than accessing these services from desktop computers. I also liked the twitter-wallr being projected next to the slides where some people from audience did a pretty good job in posting summarizing life tweets of the talks...

Second Daniel Scuka, former editor of Mobikyo claimed in his talk that the mobile business success in Japan is not due to the unique user culture, instead it's the unique competitive culture in the business environment and regulatory regulations. The different carriers were competing not just on services but also using different communication technologies. This has fostered much more innovation than in Europe (see also here for details about this talk). I especially like table the showing "innovations" of the iphone having been released before.
Finally there was the talk of Jan Michael Hess, founder of MobileEconomy. He was reporting about the success of Felica and deriving lessons for Europe. He was a proclaiming Japan being six years ahead. However, what I didn't was the trick he was playing: taking the huge number of wireless payment and assuming that all of those would use this technology on their phones while there wireless cards being used in Japan as well.

Overall, I was pretty impressed from what we can learn from Japan. However, we also have to be careful to consider and understand ecosystem: I'm pretty convinced that the success of mobile internet in Japan largely depends also on the long commuting distances. Japanese often commute an hour and more to work using public transport where making calls is strongly forbidden. So, people have to do something else with their phones...gaming, web surfing, social networking.

Workshop report "What Can the Internet of Things Do for the Citizen?" released

2010-10-05T16:32:00.004+02:00

A few months ago we have organized the CIoT workshop at Pervasive 2010. Together with 25 participants we discussed mobile applications using Twitter and Facebook to facilitate urban interactions, opportunities for user innovation, as well as changing perceptions of privacy.
Throughout the workshop, we asked the participants to think of issues and aspects relating to citizens and IoT write them on sticky notes. The entire group then organized the notes and clustered them into topics. The resulting clusters were crowd-sourcing, system design, business models, and privacy. As a consensus we derived that research should not only on development but also on deployment in order to evaluate the use of systems.
For more details see our workshop report in the current issue of IEEE Pervasive Computing [1].

[1] What Can the Internet of Things Do for the Citizen? Workshop at Pervasive 2010, F. Michahelles, S. Karpischek, A. Schmidt. IEEE Pervasive Computing, vol. 9, no. 4, pp. 102-104, Oct.-Dec. 2010, [PDF, doi:10.1109/MPRV.2010.88].

Ubicomp in the large

2010-09-27T23:11:00.008+02:00

Finally, there was a workshop organized by MobileLifeCentre which I considered really important: how to conduct ubicomp in the large considering all these app stores and mobile devices...

First the participants had 3-5 minutes to briefly report about their work and experience with ubicomp in the large. Examples ranged from social soccer fan apps [1] to architecture planning [2] and public displays [3]. Myself I briefly introduced Appaware but quickly realized that most of the people already knew about it when they showed it to me on their phones.

During the second part of the workshop we had a lively discussion about

how to get users?
how to keep control of the quality of the results?
which research questions suitable to be investigated in the large?

Most importantly, the apps to be distributed have to create some value for the users, be it a game or a productivity app. Hitting the blogosphere is great which is probably best achieved by a well-designed app.

Keeping control of the data quality probably is a tricky one as we do not know who the users actually are: a bunch of people with nicknames. This might overcome by linking facebook profiles to the app, but this requires some added-value functionality of the app justifying this link. Throughout the discussions we found out that with every question we add to an embedded questionaire we limit and design the target group of users: only a subsets likes to answer - pure self-selection. Giving rewards and payment might be an incentive, but this again also incentivizes another special subset of users. There is probably nothing to be done than to try to capture as much information as possible from the users which has to be done in a transparent way with opt-out.

Finally, we struggled about why doing research in the large at all?

Reason were: because it matters more, gets closer to reality, finds unexpected uses, promotes the own lab, creates longer lasting results, gives something back to the public, yields more justified statistics...

In order to distinguish from pure app developments there should be a research question beyond simply finding out whether the crowd would accept a certain app.

I'm looking forward to the special issue following up on this topics soon to appear in IJMHCI.

Thanks to Henriette Cramer, Nicolas Belloni, Mattias Rost, Frank Bentley and Didier Chincholle for this great workshop!

NFC is back!?

2010-08-30T11:32:00.009+02:00

I was just glad to see several reports praising the opportunities of NFC and documenting activities of several players that suddenly recognize NFC: the mobile network operators AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile have started to test NFC according to Bloomberg, the online payments giant PayPal has partnered with Bling to implement payment, Facebook is experimenting with RFID according to AllFaceBook, Apple has hired an NFC expert and acquired several patents to implement NFC into the upcoming iphone 5 as TechCrunch reports, and new entrants as Google, Microsoft and others see NFC's advertising potential by linking a consumers' transaction history to their current location. Last but not least every "Nokia smartphone will have NFC, regardless of fact that the technology lacks a business model or any market demand", according to NFC World.

It would be great to deploy new consumer services current 1D-barcode applications are paving the road for and to revert on NFC which just provides a much better user experience than barcodes do [1]. Finally, we could move away from services where users deliberately have to scan items and arrive at services that push information to users once certain items enter the scanning range.

Back to the future of NFC - it has taken time, would be great to finally make it happen. Yet another step towards the internet of things for everybody...

[1] An Evaluation of Product Identification Techniques for Mobile Phones, F. von Reischach, F. Michahelles, D. Guinard, R. Adelmann, E. Fleisch, A. Schmidt, In Proceedings of the 12th IFIP TC13 Conference in Human-Computer Interaction (Interact'09), Sweden, August 2009, [PDF] [Talk]

Internet of Things and Citizens

2010-08-25T16:20:00.030+02:00

I really get the feeling that moving from RFID, a technology for businesses, over an architecture for the internet of things, at least initally for businesses as well, to DYI consumer and citizen technology starts to touch the ground.
Rob van Kranenburg has released his report about the The 2nd Annual Conference Internet of Things Europe 2010. He outlines

integration of policy recommendations, applications and cloud to store
standards to go hand in hand with applications
more effective application of governance
multi stakeholder consultation process
migrate terms: seamless might shift towards usability: seamless experience, hard-coding might shift toward social values, in the sense of standard making will also mean not only technical but also interaction and value

as necessary step to achieve this vision. I do not agree with

What we need: an (EU) device:

as I do not believe that development and adoption of devices can be mandated. Obviously, I'd appreciate alternatives to all the Androids and iphones, but either it happens or it doesn't - but it can not be governed. Instead, I'm really intrigued by the opportunities of IoT is changing the relationship between the individuals allowing to scale democracy to finer-grain decision making. Which, obviously, requires education and debates about 'sensor wisdom’ very early on in schools.

Most importantly, it's already happening today:

express your opinion on everything, everywhere and in public
rewards shopper behavior, beginning when they walk through the door. Consumers rack up points for scanning products, testing products or even visiting a dressing room.
a mobile wallet—consumers can buy, send and redeem gift cards
users can find deals up to 20 miles away

INTERNET OF THINGS 2010 - Call for Workshop Papers/Call for Videos

2010-08-06T11:41:00.006+02:00

INTERNET OF THINGS 2010 (IoT2010) is calling for workshop contributions and video submissions. See www.iot2010.org.

International Conference for Industry and Academia
Nov 29 - Dec 1, 2010, Tokyo Japan)
Organized by Auto-ID Laboratories at
Keio University, ETH Zurich & University of St. Gallen and MIT

Call for Video Submissions
IoT2010 invites submissions by Sept 10 of draft videos (2-5min long) that showcase the interlinking of physical world and cyberspace as a central theme to inspire other researchers and to educate the general public.

Videos will be shown as part of the main IoT 2010 program on November 30th and December 1st and to a general audience via youtube.

Please visit www.iot2010.org/video for further details on the submission.

Call for Workshop Papers
IoT2010 plays host to a range of interesting workshops (all on Nov 29) in the area of the Internet of Things. We want to draw your attention to the deadlines of the workshops that still invite and accept submissions.

Please see www.iot2010.org/workshop for details and follow the individual links to the workshop homepages for detailed topics, deadlines, and submission information.

Peephole to the future

2010-07-20T03:22:00.006+02:00

I found this video quite inspiring:

Augmented (hyper)Reality: Domestic Robocop from Keiichi Matsuda on Vimeo.

I think it's pretty realistic. Hopefully, the output will be designed less intrusive and more seamlessly. Probably it won't be based on augmented reality only but rather rely on (cheap) displays and incorporate other networked output devices, e.g. picture frame/mobile phone/ipad/tv/radio.

Given the information overload I experience in Japanese stores, I'm surprised how other people just got used to it...

There are more phones than iphones

2010-07-05T09:22:00.005+02:00

If found this blog discussing the hype of iphone developments and deriving a high likelihood for single developers to actually fail. The blog of Kevin C. Tofel is actually based on an earlier blog from Tomi T. Ahonen. As he is a former Nokia guy it is quite understandable that he is not very excited about the iphone but nevertheless the numbers he is presenting, 80million iphones are still just 13% out of all smart phones, or only 4% out of all 2.1 billion phones in total.
These numbers are indeed good to keep in mind: if you want to hit the masses, the iphone is not the right thing - you may hit the media, which just suggerates you had hit the masses...
Nevertheless, as many readers already have posted on this site: How many of the feature phone users have ever thought about downloading an application? How many would know how to do it? How many would be willing to pay? How could that even established without a mechanisms as Appstore/Google Marketplace provide?

Furthermore, dividing the overall revenue by the overall downloaded apps yields increasingly low revenue per average. But following this argument, you can almost deny any effort: divide university degrees by population, divide accepted papers by submitted papers, divide total number of blogs by blogs people read...fortunately, we don't have gaussian distribution in every situation but can improve our chances by special skills in niches accordingly.

Anyway, it's good to recall: despite it's hype and success, there are much more phones out there than iphones...

China: Internet + Internet of Things = Wisdom of the Earth

2010-06-27T17:58:00.024+02:00

The IOT EXPO, the 3rd conference for telecommunication dedicated to Internet of Things, gave me the opportunity to visit Shanghai. I was very amazed about the strong motivation for Internet of Things in China. Several talks mentioned the opportunities for network carries and solution providers for implementing better services and solving society problems. I learned that the entire hype for Internet of Things has actually been jump started by the current premier minister Wen Jiab ao mentioning Internet of Things as one of the key industry areas for China. In accordance to that, the chinese government decided that the city of Wuxi should be premier place for IoT in China: every year the lpolluted ake of the city could not provide drinkable water anymore, until the local government has installed a huge sensor network – the national government was so excited that Wuxi is now the home of internet of things in China. Furthermore, the local party leader had the ambition to attract in the next 5 years 30 talents and entrepreneurs, which coined the 530 plan, This plan supports start-ups in Wuxi, e.g. with free office space.

Backed by this political order various company leaders discussed the opportunities of RFID and sensor networks. In my first talk I took the opportunity to reflect on the history of the Internet of Things strongly emphasized that IoT goes far beyond RFID and has to focus on citizens and consumers and not companies and commercial businesses only. In my second talk I presented a number citizen IoT examples of our current research in Zurich.
Later, I also could visit the Auto-ID Lab of Hao Min at Fudan University. I pretty astonished about his company Quanray. Besides the development of chip design for EPC UHF Gen 2, which is applied to Liquor bottles preventing counterfeit and as well as for ticketing featuring 64kbit of memory. The most stunning development, however, was the integration of NFC into a SIM card: As the SIM is owned by the TelCo’s the get into the position of offering NFC payment services now including over-the-air configuration (OTA) without depending on the hesitating handset manufacturers. In order to get the signal out of the SIM which is usually shielded by the battery, Quanray’s RFID sticker which is powered by the external reader amplifies the SIM’s NFC signal and load-modulates it to the reader. Thus, all smart phones could turn in to NFC phones soon, Even if this just happens which the major TelCo in China, this already targets 500 millions of consumers...
Overall, Shanghai is really a very exciting fast changing place...I went to a restaurant with fishes swimming inside the table.

Disappearing Computer - my first working day without a laptop

2010-06-15T01:04:00.007+02:00

Talk from Karmen Franinovic about Responsive Technologies

2010-06-03T08:03:00.010+02:00

I could attend a talk Karmen Franinovic from ZHDK as part of a lecture series about responsive technologies. Karmen is an architect and works as an artist and interaction designer exploring the use of technology in architecture, public space and everyday life. She raises awareness of interaction with/in the urban surroundings and its diverse ecologies. She a number of examples where she installed technologies, e.g. loudspeakers the grasp and reply environment sounds, and observed people's behavior.
Being an artist she does not have to tackle questions like "what is it good for?", "what are the learnings from that?", it's more about playing with daily routines and behaviors and challenging those by technology.

Predictions from the past

2010-06-03T08:03:00.008+02:00

These examples show why predicting the future is so difficult. Even the basic idea of e-mail/e-banking/e-commerce has been predicted rather correctly in the following video, it is still presented in the context and style of the time of it's prediction. And that does make it so odd, the analog screen, the men/female role pattern and the mere more on effectiveness leaving out fun and experience completely:

The following video nicely topics to the timeline, it's nice to say how once important topics render out meaningless, "who needs a phone in a PC?", "Is there money in microchips?", "Willinternet be useful?", "From mono to stereo?"...

This is why mainly futures from the past work can work well, e.g. Heinz' Life.

The Case of RFID in Japanese public transport

2010-06-03T06:14:00.018+02:00

Tokyo has rather a complex transportation system. First there are many lines, second they are operated by various private independent players cutting the entire network into smaller pieces. Each line featuring its own pricing schemes makes ticketing and payment as complex as mobile roaming. Apparently, RFID provides a nice abstraction from this underlying complexity. Using PASMO, a standard chip card players all over Japan have agreed on enables a complete track & trace of passengers, measuring entry and exit, and adjust the fare to the travelled distance accordingly - RFID sits like an "application layer" on top of the pricing scheme.
As of April 2009, over 11 million card (wikipedia) have been issued.

Watching the masses of people rushing through the gates shows the convenience and necessity of RFID. Nevertheless, I'm surprised that people still rather stick to their magnetic cards than using the Felica feature of their phones. I probably have to watch out for Mobile Suica eastern Japan...
Comparing this clear advantage with the open access system of public transport in wesgtern Europe makes the case for RFID much more diffcult. Sometimes it can be easier to introduce new technology than changing tradition of a complex payment system...

A roadmap to an Internet of Things @ Home, by Philips

2010-06-03T04:38:00.011+02:00

Searching for related work about Internet of Things for citizens I stumbled upon this nice presentation summarizing the results of a workshop about how far the roadmap to an IoT has really progressed.
It talks about areas of potential applications, analyzes the state of the art of required technology, assesses the maturity, gives nice perspectives by looking back and reviewing applications from the past - obviously a little bit biased to Philips visions, but that's ok;):

Internet of Things on Prezi

...very insightful and inspiring using the prezi capabilities for presentation (though it does require some time to load).

Among Read Write Web's "10 Internet of Things Blogs To Keep An Eye On"

2010-05-11T18:35:00.006+02:00

I'm really glad that my public notepad of my brain dump has been mentioned in the "10 Internet of Things Blogs To Keep An Eye On" of ReadWriteWeb. That's very encouraging, thank you very much! (Thanks, Dominique, for letting me know!)

Visiting the Innovative Retail Laboratory (IRL) of DFKI

2010-05-11T18:16:00.012+02:00

I was glad to visit the IRL of DFKI in Saarbruecken. I gave a talk about how retail could face the challenge of emerging mobile internet in supermarket. Instead of banning phones which is currently happening in single places, a more mid-term strategy should be to find new business models and implementations to actually benefit from these developments [1]. I enjoyed the discussions with Antonio Krueger, his team, and quite many visitors from the local retailer Globus sponsoring the IRL. I liked the argument of “consumers don’t want to play with their mobile in supermarket, as they want to limit their stay there already” challenging our my2cents approach running on mobile phones. Whereas displays represent an interesting alternative especially for additional manufacturer information I would question the perception of “independent third party information” on this store-owned equipment…
The tour of IRL starts with the a shopping list generated at the fridge, continues with an RFID-navigated shopping-cart to an RFID-enabled shelf, displaying infos about products picked from the shelf, NFC check-out and inventory update back at the fridge including warnings about allergic items. Overall, a really nice playground for research.

[1] Kyoung Jun Lee, Young Hwan Seo: Design of a RFID-Based Ubiquitous Comparison Shopping System. KES (1) 2006: 1267-1283

Visiting a university completely surrounded by mountain

2010-05-07T17:55:00.009+02:00

I had the opportunity to visit the free university of Bozen. First of all, it’s just amazing how close mountain to a university building can be…
I gave a talk about Tangible Information search in the Internet of Things and really enjoyed the opportunity to talk to Prof. Ricci. He introduced me to his on-going projects in the area of recommender systems. It was really refreshing to see how the data we are collecting with AppAware could be well exploited by the mechanisms being developed in Bolzano.

Getting an iPad

2010-04-28T14:31:00.012+02:00

Finally, I also went out to get an iPad. The Apple Store on Fifth Avenue had many on display but none to sell. Asking for advice I received the blunt answer to try elsewhere but to no longer bother here, that’s how monopolist’s behave…

Finally I was “lucky” to get one after a third try in Soho. “iPad!? – this line!” – the usual dialog of going through pro’s and con’s of product was skipped, everybody in the line was “lucky” to get one, they even limited “2 per day per person” which was checked by credit card…

Finally, I got to try it out. First disappointment you have to connect to a PC first to set it up, thus I just could use it as a fancy mirror in the beginning. Then, I had to get an US iTunes account which is a little bit tricky without a US credit card. Then, I actually could start it. Besides the wow about the nice screen and sharp image, the question really was what to do know? It’s nice to access the web more comfortably from the couch now, but is this really worth a device? I was immediately reminded about the single vs. multi-purpose device discussion [1]…

…also this video has some nice arguments against iPad: experience shows that devices should be single-urpose. Yes, the pocket exception, the Swiss Pocket knife you carry around, but no multi-purpose in the kitchen, single-purpose usually is more specialized, more targeted, more useful:

DICE 2010: "Design Outside the Box" Presentation Videos - G4tv.com

[1] Dourish, P. 2001. Where the Action Is: The Foundations of Embodied Interaction. Cambridge: MIT Press.

CfP - Context-Aware Intelligent Assistance (CAIA 2010)

2010-04-23T16:53:00.005+02:00

Workshop held at the 33th Annual Conference on Artificial Intelligence (KI-2010)
September 21–24, 2010
Karlsruhe, Germany, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT)

Workshop Web Site: http://www8.cs.fau.de/inf8/events/CAIA2010

Welcome to CAIA 2010
--------------------

Today, the internet gives access to huge amounts of time and location
related information, such as local events, time tables of various
means of transportation, or news. Additionally, social network sites,
such as Facebook or Twitter add even more information from friends and
peers tailored to certain social groups sharing common interests. The
vast adoption of mobile phones and smart phones provides a widely
deployed gateway to this cloud of information while being on the move
anytime anywhere. As the attention of mobile users is always split
among many simultaneous tasks, valuable location-based services have
to be tailored to the users’ current interests and needs.
In order to implement such a solution, several research areas must be
brought together.

Location based services are becoming accessible through mobile devicesvia the mobile network and make use of the geographical position of the mobile device in order to adapt their responses to the current location of the user.
Pervasive and ubiquitous computing aims at developing new models ofhuman-computer interaction that thoroughly integrate information processing into everyday objects and activities that may be located anywhere. “Intelligent” applications provide location, situation and user adaptive information and in this way greatly improve the ability of information systems to successfully assist users.
Mobile recommendation systems add another useful capability: they support a mobile user or a group of mobile users when making decisions ’on the go’, whereby they may leverage shared human experience, the ‘wisdom of the crowds’.

On the very bottom location data and context derived from various
sensors can act as an indicator for the user’s current activities. By
complementing the sensor data with domain knowledge of a specific
assistance scenario (like shopping, or health-care) we can go well
beyond this functionality: In assistance scenarios – in contrast to a
general setting – user activities can be assumed to be related to
certain well defined tasks. By formalizing those tasks and the related
user goals, additional meaning can be attributed to context
information. On this basis the integration of user preferences can be
achieved, keeping the user in the loop of control during concurring
and uncertain system states.

We shall emphasize that the fields and applications mentioned above
share similar problems, currently dealt with separately in the
distinct scientific communities.

Workshop Objectives
-------------------

It is the goal of this workshop to bring together researchers from the
fields of recommender systems, pervasive computing, mobile computing,
urban sensing, social networking, context- aware systems and human
computer interaction in order to foster the development of mobile
services in context. The main matters are:

What is the nature of services provided to users on the move?
How do needs and interests depend on contextual parameters?
What levels of uncertainty have to be handled? / How is uncertainty handled? How can users configure and adapt systems’ recommendations? / How are preferences handled?

Topics of Interest
------------------

Topics include, but are not limited to:

• Formal models of preferences and contexts
- Reasoning about preferences in contexts
- Context modeling
- User preference oriented route planning
• User needs and applications
- location based services
- social networks
- navigation and planning of transportation
• Mobile recommendations
- collaborative filtering
- Interaction of social networks and mobile recommendation
- Mobile feedback and interpretation of user tags
- Semantic aggregation of web 2.0 information and services
- Group recommendations
• Reasoning
- Case based reasoning in mobile recommendation
- Mobile speech technology and NLP
- Dynamic environmental attributes (DEA)
- Multiple goal recommendation
- Event ontologies

Demos and applications are most welcome!

Important Dates
---------------

Deadline for Submission: July 15, 2010
Notification of Authors: August 1, 2010
Final Version of Papers: September 1, 2010
Workshop: TBA. Between September 21 and 24, 2010
Conference: September 21-24, 2010

Submission Details
------------------

Papers should be formatted according to the Springer LNCS
guidelines. The length of each paper should be between 5 and 10
pages. All papers must be written in English and submitted in PDF
format via http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=caia2010

Publication
-----------

The papers will be published on the workshop web site. Further publication options will be determined later.

Workshop Organization
---------------------

Bernd Ludwig, Univ. Erlangen
Stefan Mandl, Univ. Erlangen
Florian Michahelles, ETH Zurich

Programme Committee
-------------------

Florian Alt, Univ. Duisburg-Essen
Oliver Amft, TU Eindhoven
Alexandra Brintrup, Univ. Oxford
David Elsweiler, Univ. Erlangen
Günther Görz, Univ. Erlangen
Tatsuya Inaba, Univ. Keio
Paul Holleis, NTT Docomo Europe Labs
Thomas Kirste, Univ. Rostock
Rob van Kranenburg, Founder of Council
Matthias Kranz, TU München
Kristof van Laerhoven, TU Darmstadt
Marc Langheinrich, USI
Alexander De Luca, LMU München
Carsten Magerkurth, SAP Research
Marcus Meyerhöfer, IT2Media
Alexander Meschtscherjakov, Univ. Salzburg
Jörg Müller - T-Lab
Hans Jürgen Ohlbach, LMU München
Felix von Reischach, SAP Research, ETH Zurich
Francesco Ricci, Univ. Bozen-Bolzano
Christoph Schlieder, Univ. Bamberg
Ute Schmid, Univ. Bamberg
Edmund W. Schuster, MIT

my2cents released: comment and twitter about products

2010-04-23T16:19:00.006+02:00

Finally, Stephan Karpischek has released my2cents for Android. my2cents connects consumers and their opinions about products: they use their mobile phones to read EAN/UPC barcodes and enter a short comment to be shared among social networks, e.g. Twitter. Watching the livestreams of comments should be very interesting as diffusion and adaption start to happen. Please install from Android Market:
See also our poster [1] at Pervasive 2010.

[1] My 2 cents - sharing comments about retail products on Twitter, Stephan Karpischek, Anton Rau, Florian Michahelles, Pervasive 2010, Helsinki, May 2010.

What the Internet of Things is not....

2010-04-16T08:59:00.007+02:00

Tomas Sanchez Lopez from the Auto-ID Lab Cambridge writes about what the internet of things is not. From my point of view he has five good arguments...

IoT should no longer free-ride on Weiser's ubicomp term - whereas there are similarities Weiser much more focuses on the user aspect and seamless integration instead of networked things
IoT also goes beyond network protocols as it aims at integrating heterogeneous technologies.
Whereas these technologies provide the basis for IoT they still do not ressemble the IoT, as to get the IoT working a range of services, e.g. discovery services, are necessary.
The same argument applies for embedded devices, they augment things by sensing - but again it's the context of things these nodes are being used to make sense out them
Applications are not the IoT, well, philosphically this should be right, but generally applications are always a nice way to communicate visions - they are actually necessary drive business and development.

I would still like to add social networks making sense of user's preferences and relationship to each other, a very important component to also expand the IoT beyond business corporations to everyday users. Concerning enablers, there is no way around mobile technologies, especially mobile phones, our daily companions. Yes, mobile phones are NOT the IoT but a major gateway to services and urban sensing.
What I actually would like to emphasize most are the business aspects. The entire hype about RFID and urban sensing using mobile phones was mainly driven by business opportunities. Companies saw a new era of gaining insights into their business processes and to optimize their supply-chains accordingly. Right, RFID adoption has not happened the way is has been predicted 10 years ago, but it still is probably the most widely deployed IoT technology. In the long run to get IoT out of the labs and out of the hands of technical visionaries, business needs and applications have to be identified in order to drive the development.
What could that be?

see things you haven't seen before - visualize product flows, energy, carbon footprint, any kind of information bound to things and locations, e.g. using AR
find things you might have forgotten - track & trace history, time series of sensor data
share things you might have been too lazy before - crowdsourcing and mashups of user-generated data, comments/opinions to things, movement patterns
finally, have even more precise information about what's going in order to act accordingly

Of course, if there wouldn't be challenges, it wouldn't be a research topic - hopefully, we can stimulate theses discussions at IoT2010 in Japan later this year...

Looking for references about Twitter and Co?

2010-04-14T09:49:00.006+02:00

Finally, I got directed to a nice list of references about Twitter and Microblogging, very useful for future papers:

Bibliography of Research on Twitter & Microblogging
Microblogging References
Bellotti, V., Begole, B., Chi, E. H., Ducheneaut, N., Fang, J., Isaacs, E., King, T., Newman, M. W., Partridge, K., Price, B., Rasmussen, P., Roberts, M., Schiano, D. J., and Walendowski, A. 2008. Activity-based serendipitous recommendations with the Magitti mobile leisure guide. In Proceeding of the Twenty-Sixth Annual SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (Florence, Italy, April 05 - 10, 2008). CHI '08
Chen, J.; Nairn, R.; Nelson, L.; Chi, E. H. Short and tweet: experiments on recommending content from information streams. Accepted for CHI 2010. http://zerozero88.com/

Someone did a youtube video on AppAware - Thank you very much!

2010-04-09T12:38:00.007+02:00

Youtube has really become great channel to also visualize and illustrate research results in a very self-describing way. However, the really new experience for me was to see someone else doing a video on our Appaware application (btw, thanks to our 20.000 users we are have collected more than 1 million events!). It's really very well done, to the point and correct - Thank you very much, Adroinica!:

Probably the next step now is to find someone writing the papers for us;)

The killer app for robots: folding towles

2010-04-08T17:33:00.004+02:00

We had been wondering for a quite a while what robots could actually be good for in the household. Throughout the last years the succesfull examples have been the vaccum ceaner Roomba and a number of lawn mowers. Now there is another application, folding towels - look impressive!

And it's not an April joke

Innovative user interface: Skinput

2010-03-29T13:53:00.005+02:00

People often complain about have-seen-before presentation on conference. In contrast to that, I think Skinput [1] should be really exciting...

[1]Harrison, C., Tan, D. Morris, D. 2010. Skinput: Appropriating the Body as an Input Surface. To appear in Proceedings of the 28th Annual SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (Atlanta, Georgia, April 10 - 15, 2010). CHI '10. ACM, New York, NY.

CfP - 5th Annual ACM Conference on Interactive Tabletops and Surfaces 2010

2010-03-29T13:32:00.009+02:00

The Interactive Tabletops and Surfaces 2010 Conference (ITS) is a premiere venue for presenting research in the design and use of new and emerging tabletop and interactive surface technologies. As a new community, we embrace the growth of the discipline in a wide variety of areas, including innovations in ITS hardware, software, design, and projects expanding our understanding of design considerations of ITS technologies and of their applications.

5th Annual ACM Conference on Interactive Tabletops and Surfaces 2010

ITS 2010

November 7-10, 2010

Saarbrücken, Germany

http://www.its2010.org

Visiting Andreas Butz's group in Munich

2010-03-19T15:52:00.017+01:00

Finally, I got the chance to go Munich again. On the way I took the opportunity to visit the group of Andreas Butz at LMU. Sebastian showed me his impressive Demo of interacting with large screen by touching on the see-through image from the iphone - augmented reality interaction with display, what a nice idea [1].
Yaxi presented me a visualization of music tastes of different users. I specifically liked this work as it might be well combined with Appaware, too. I also got the chance to learn about Curve [3], a vertical-horizontal interface for workspaces. Currently, it is still difficult to motivate the advantage to a screen, but I'm pretty sure they come up with compelling apps soon, as the combination of diplaying, interacting and sensing in these two dimensions is really fascinating.
Finally, I learned from Alexander about ColoPin [4], a really smart idea that combines colors and numbers in way that you can't spy on the PIN by looking over someone's shoulder.
Overall, I enjoyed the visit very much.

[1] Sebastian Boring, Dominikus Baur, Andreas Butz, Sean Gustafson, Patrick Baudisch
Touch Projector: Mobile Interaction-Through-Video
To Appear: In Proceedings of the 28th ACM International Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems - CHI 2010, Atlanta, Georgia, USA, Apr. 2010
[2] Yaxi Chen, Sebastian Boring, Andreas Butz
How Last.fm Illustrates the Musical World: User Behavior and Relevant User-Generated Content To appear in Proceedings of the international workshop on Visual Interfaces to the Social and Semantic Web, VISSW 2010, Hong Kong, China, February 17. Proceedings. (bib)
[3] Raphael Wimmer, Florian Schulz, Fabian Hennecke, Sebastian Boring, Heinrich Hussmann
Curve: Blending Horizontal and Vertical Interactive Surfaces
Adjunct Proceedings of the 4th IEEE Workshop on Tabletops and Interactive Surfaces (IEEE Tabletop 2009), Banff, Canada, Nov. 2009 (bib)
[4] Alexander De Luca, Katja Hertzschuch, Heinrich Hussmann
ColorPIN - Securing PIN Entry through Indirect Input
To appear in proceedings of CHI 2010. Atlanta, GA, USA, April 10 - 15, 2010. (bib)

At the GS1 Marketplace

2010-03-09T16:06:00.006+01:00

Just two weeks ago Stephan Karpischek and I did another trip to Brussels in order to present My2Cents at the GS1 Global Forum. Among all the supply-chain applications GS1 has initially started it was really refreshing to see the several mobile applications coming up that enable also small retailers to retrieve information about the issuing authority of barcodes, e.g. using Mobile GEPIR. With My2Cents we even went a step further showing how actually consumers themselves can add comments about products and can retrieve the impressions and opinions of others. Obviously, the herb bouilons (only available in Switzerland) we've chosen as sample product for commenting have raised so much interest that some of them have disappeared after our demonstration...

AppAware - outrageous adoption...

2010-03-02T16:07:00.017+01:00

Just two weeks ago in my last blog entry I reported about Andrea's first release of AppAware. We already got a thousand users after the first day, it was just incredible.
The week after it got even better when different blogs started talking about AppAware. Currently we have about 5000 active users creating more than 10.000 events (i.e. install/remove/update) per day!!! That means if you have the app running on your phone almost every second you receive update.

This massive adoption actually motivated Andrea to take the next step: to allow to filter for local events only. Accordingly, you can find out which applications are being used and installed around you. So if you arrive in a new city you can find out which apps are being used there...try your self it's really exciting!

AppAware - find out which Android Apps are hot

2010-02-15T17:19:00.008+01:00

Our group has again released a new mobile phone application. AppAware allows to share online your Android application installs, updates, and removals. Out of these events, AppAware calculates a popularity measure. As such, users can learn from each other which apps are hot and which are not. Additionally, the install/update/removal events can also be shared via twitter.

If you want to try it out install AppAware from the Android Market (search for 'AppAware') or scan this barcode. You can also browse the recorded apps from your desktop computer: http://appaware.org

Please provide us with your feedback.

Mobile Services in Retail: Opportunity or Threat?

2010-02-02T13:41:00.013+01:00

As we have been developing several services in the past (e.g. my2cents, APriori) putting more information about products at the consumers' fingertips, I also stumbled over some critics. Tim O'Reilly has put out "buy where you shop" in a recent blog entry. As consumers could abuse and ruin the small shops providing the nice physical experience of the product but don't get a share if you decide to still buy the product online. However, other approaches [1] propose to combine both worlds and to provide benefit both instead of cannibalizing each other: physical stores become showrooms for online stores and receive a share of the online purchase as a reward.
To that point GS1's MobileCommerce group has yet released another whitepaper [2] outline the various opportunities for retailers to attract customers using mobile technologies.
Focussing on hybrid shopping, i.e. the combination of both online and physical stores [3], is probably more promissing, as consumers probably will never realize the long-term implications (i.e. small shops have to close due to competion from e-tailers).

[1] Lee, K.J., Seo, Y.H.: Design of a RFID-Based Ubiquitous Comparison Shopping System. In: Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Knowledge-Based Intelligent Information and Engineering Systems (KES’06) (2006)
[2] Mobile in Retail - Getting your retail environment ready for mobile, A GS1 MobileCom White Paper
[3]Cassar, K.: The Online and In-Store Crossover Conundrum. In Nielsen Consumer Insight Magazine, 2008

Swiss Peaks titled as "one of the best iphone apps for skiing"

2010-01-21T14:31:00.004+01:00

Some time ago I mentioned the release of our first iphone app SwissPeaks/WorldPeaks which provides you with the names of the mountain your iphone camera is currently capturing. Just yesterday the swiss newspaper TagesAnzeiger picked it up and called it "one of the best iphone apps for skiing" (read the entire article here).

Try TwiPhone

2010-01-11T09:30:00.009+01:00

A Ph.D. student of us, Andrea Girardello, has developed TwiPhone which logs calls, text messages and their position by constantly monitoring the mobile phone device (just have a look at Twitter for current logs). This allows users to share their personal communications on the Twitter online social network.

If you are interested, please feel free to download/install TwiPhone through the Google MarketPlace and try it for some days. In any case, your comments are very welcome, also if you decide not to tweet anything or just send your a feedback on this project.
We am looking forward to your comments. Thanks a lot for giving it a try.

About the right to be off-line

2010-01-10T21:57:00.006+01:00

The anytime anywhere notion of ubiquitious computing provides us with continuous access to services (almost) all around the globe anytime.

Simultaneously, however, continuous attention to virtual services in addition to our real-world impressions is also getting demanded by our remote partners, using email, instant messaging or social networks. I wonder how we keep up coping with this emerging information overload.

Perhaps, a right for being off-line has to be established, as being absent from somewhere only has a physical meaning, as one will be always only a click away. Great to have some lonely valleys left in Switzerland without radio coverage (yet)....

My "pervasive" experience at the PC meeting

2009-12-13T20:30:00.023+01:00

It was the first time for me to visit the Pervasive PC meeting. It was great to participate in the discussions, see the procedures of decision, and experience the emerging group dynamics. I also admired Antonio Krueger about steeping back, consequently keeping his own opinion out of discussion, but moderating the flow of arguments effectively instead.

I was really fascinated about the entire procedure: based on the expertise of the PC members and additionally reviewers they have invited, arguments in favor and against papers had been collected. The grades provided by the reviewers provided the line of sequence in which the papers had been discussed: high-ranked papers did not create long discussions and where clearly in, the same on the bottom clearly out. However, each member could intervene, so in fact it was more about valid arguments since the numeric grades which can be kind of arbitrary.
Most of the time obviously was dedicated to these "borderline" papers. For those papers it is really that they inspire at least one PC member that defends this paper with passion throughout the discussion. This is most likely to happen if the PC member is in this very specific field and believes its importance, so picking the conference with potential champions is an important strategy when submitting papers.

My lessons are:

Papers have to reach the right reviewers. Reviewers that are in the very same field and can enthusiastic about the topic. Reviewers are reached by addressing the topic of the paper well in the title and abstract.
Papers have to be written in a way that the story and conclusions can be conveyed to the primary and secondary reviewer in a way such that they can present the papers in the PC meeting in 1-2 minutes. As such abstract and conclusions are the most important part of a paper.
Additionally, research has to be solidly conducted such that obvious objections ("to little users in the study", "advancement from related work is unclear", "statistics cannot be comprehended") do not apply.
Eventhough blind submission is required the majority of the PC members considers comprehensiveness of the paper is more important - "anynomity is a means to an end". As such authors should certainly remove obvious references to their institutions but shouldn't spend to much time on anonymizing pictures and other data relevant to the story of their paper as in the end it does not matter.
Authors should not submit notes (short contributions) as reviewers do not really understand the concept of notes. Also US people don't consider this as valuable contributions as they do not count for their metrics.

I really enjoyed to experience the passion and dedication all PC members brought to the table (from my perception laptops were only used to dig up reviews and papers, no emails or other unrelated stuff) in order to really identify the best papers that move the field and the conference forward. Eventhough this might be sometimes hard to believe when receiving reject reviews about a paper oneself was really convinced during submission.

Before the meeting we had a research "speed-dating". Various people presented their work. What I found interesting was this Sesame-kid book that could sense which page. As young children don't like to answer to the phone this book could be used with two maemo devices (yes, it was presented by Nokia;) to faciliate another way of telecommunication for children: having this book at each location grandparents and children could jointely read the book, see each other in the screen, and if the communication gets stuck the toy character on the left hand-site (I found it really disturbing) brings up some laugh and smile to trigger the communication. Future probably won't happen that way, but this remote communcation is definitely an interesting problem.

Family Story Play: Reading with Young Children (and Elmo) Over a Distance from hayes Raffle on Vimeo.

Digital kills real

2009-12-04T10:15:00.007+01:00

Today I received a quite remarkable auto-reply:

Dear email sender,
I receive on a normal day around 100 emails which takes about 4 hours to read and answer. After a trip or vacation some 1000+ emails are waiting for me. I thus decided not to read all email any longer. I apologize for any inconvenience it will cause.
If you need to contact me, please do not use the phone as this is also given me similar problems and I had to switch it off.

You can always call the secretaries to leave your tel number or email address (+xxx xxxxx xxxxx) between 6:30 and 7:30am in the morning it is awfully quite and I would like to chat with you then. Later I will be too busy.

Alternatively you may want to write me a conventional letter. I would be delighted to receive one once in a while and probably even read it.

best regards
XXX

Poor guy, wasn't IT meant to make life more efficient and more effective? Now it's starting to absorb us. This is not really what I mean when aiming at "integrating the real world with the virtual world". But it's probably get worse. How can we cope with all that emails, tweets, blogs, facebook status updates? Technology can help to interweave places, things, people and information but there always only one timeline pressing ahead quickly.
However, I'm not convinced that this radical opt-out as described above should prevail - connections and relationships might break rather soon.

We probably should find ways to collapse and delete notifications that have become obsolete which is usually the most tedious part to find out after a longer absence...

Doktorandenseminar ETH Zurich/Univ. St. Gallen

2009-12-03T22:40:00.017+01:00

I just spent two full days at our group's (Elgar Fleisch) Doktorandenseminar. Each Ph.D. student had to present his current state of research. After three talks per session we did feedback walk-arounds such that each participant had the chance to comment - quite thrilling. I presented (slides) my understanding of research and tried to provide some lessons about publishing.
The event was very inspiring - despite spending time in the same office space we're still not of aware of all the projects going on...

Definitely a highlight were the lessons learned from Mikko Lehtonen (he just defended recently), he recommended to seek for a practical problem (motivation), start with an overview paper, circulate between own concepts and related work, design EU project reports as papers, define your stake in projects, write down your conclusions, copy from overview paper, copy from your papers - and the thesis is done! He obviously enjoyed Jakob Badram's Fish model presented at Ubicomp 2007's doctoral consortium.

There is no better way of getting a condensed view about what's going on in the brains of our twenty-something Ph.D.s and getting their views about my research in return!

Ph.D. defense of Mikko Lehtonen

2009-11-27T10:35:00.009+01:00

Yesterday Mikko Lehtonen successfully defended his Ph.D. thesis about applying low-cost RFID against anti-counterfeiting. He derived from related research of security systems that a security budget should rather be invested in the continuity of checks than achieving a close to 100% detection rate - a way of good-enough security. Additionally, he presented three technical measures, namely TID [1]. synchronized secretes [2], and probability-based trace reasoning [3], that provided also milestones on a roadmap describing a migration path for introducing technical measures against anti-counterfeiting.
The consecutive discussion with Elgar Fleisch and Friedemann Mattern focussed much on the validity of the assumption of detection may supercede protection and was questioned by the example of credit-cards coming with security chips lately.

Despite his nervousness Mikko was brave enough to embedded a "surprise" slide explaining the two prevention strategies of protection and deterence - some may call it embarrassing, others just finnish humor...

[1] Lehtonen, M., Ruhanen, A., Michahelles, F., Fleisch, E.: Serialized TID Numbers – A Headache or a Blessing for RFID Crackers? In 2009 IEEE International Conference on RFID, Orlando, Florida, April 27-28, 2009, pp. 233 - 240.
[2] Lehtonen, M., Ostojic, D., Ilic, A., Michahelles, F., : Securing RFID Systems by Detecting Tag Cloning. In proceedings of H. Tokuda et al. (Eds.): 7th International Conference, Pervasive 2009, Nara, Japan, May 11-14, 2009. LNCS 5538, pp. 291–308.
[3] Lehtonen, M., Michahelles, F., Fleisch, E.: How to Detect Cloned Tags in a Reliable Way from Incomplete RFID Traces. In 2009 IEEE International Conference on RFID, Orlando, Florida, April 27-28, 2009, pp. 257 - 264.

Visiting the Tutorial @MuM2009

2009-11-22T23:09:00.012+01:00

Today, I had the great chance of visiting the tutorial "Introduction to Programming Applications for Mobile Devices" at MuM 2009. Jamie Costello and Andrew Rice gave a great introduction to programming on the different mobile phone platforms and taught us in 3h how to build an Android app that takes a picture, reads GPS location, and uploads the annoted photo. The tutorial was very well prepared: the code was step-wise extended by Andrew and displayed on the projector, additionally, a step-by-step list allowed to keep track, and, if completely lost, from a website the entire code could be downloaded in the course. Inbetween Andrew walked by and really managed to solve all 'unexpected' problems - so in the end the app worked at all the 20 participants laptops. Just incredible! However, being on myself from now with Android will be yet another adventure, I'm sure!

Visiting AmI in Salzburg

2009-11-19T11:52:00.016+01:00

After a rather short night ride on the train I arrived in Salzburg to visit Ami-09.
The session started with keynote prepared by Emile Aarts but hold by Frits Gotefris. He looked back into the history of ambient intelligence and reported about the electronic poem, a combination of architecture music and light dating back to the 40ies. The mentioned requirements of AmI, such as miniaturization, provision of connectivity, displays, textile
. The definition of AmI as environments that are sensitive and responsive to presence of people appeared to me as a rather outdated vision where users are centrally positioned but the entire system is guessing magically the users desires and serving him accordingly. The examples given such as virtual presence and the virtual tapestry, for me, did not add much to credibility of that vision. Interestingly, the year 2015 was mentioned as a milestone where not just environments but also things could be networked, forming an internet of things. I was almost jumping out of my seat – why wait, we will have the 2^nd Internet of Things Conference next year in Tokyo…

Besides the common challenges of coming up with new user interfaces and real world trials, two ‘dark scenarios’ have been mentioned to take care about: people building well engineered technology with bad intentions and people building bad technology with good intentions. The keynote outlined the goal of designing ambient intelligence in eco-affluent manner that allows people to flourish. The examples given where, firstly, light in your hand, a planar flashlight the allows reading books anywhere and anytime at zero cost – well, at least at zero energy costs due to solar power (after 10 years ambient intelligent research the result is electric light!?). Secondly, ambient care was mentioned, where an MRI gets turned into a into multi-dimensional theater that can be designed by children patients and their relatives in order to remove the fear of treatment. Sense-making applications would be key to let ambient intelligence evolve. This indeed would be a healthy turn for the community, trying to get away from designing for luxurious experience only but looking more into ‘real’ problems. The final messag was to put the human into center, nobody in the audience would have ever questioned that...

Slipping an iphone into a children`s book: PhoneBook

2009-11-09T19:36:00.003+01:00

I find this a convincing example of bridging between real world and virtual world:

by MOBILE ART LAB

IoT2010 - Announcement of 2nd International Conference on Internet of Things, 2010 in Japan

2009-10-29T22:12:00.016+01:00

Finally, here is the announcement of IoT 2010 (find the CfP here):

Tokyo — Internet of Things (IoT 2010), a three-day public conference, gathers leading researchers from academia and industry to elaborate on the major themes of the emerging Internet of Things. On November 29, 2010 focused workshops and tutorials feature in a pre-conference program. On the two following days, researchers and industrial practitioners meet and present talks and keynotes in front of an expected audience of 300 visitors.

The 1^st International Conference on Internet of Things 2008 in Zurich discussed the fundamental challenges of interconnected objects forming an Internet of Things (IoT); from consumables to assets, from food to high-value items. The Internet of Things Conference 2010 (www.iot2010.org) will explore the technical requirements and business challenges to address today’s societal challenges with IoT technology: health monitoring systems to support the aging society, distributed awareness to help predict natural disasters and react more appropriately, track & trace to help reduce traffic congestion, product lifetime information to improve recyclability, transparency of transportation to reduce carbon footprint, and more insights into various kinds of processes to improve optimization. This conference will continue the success of the International Internet of Things Conference 2008 in Zurich and will put a dedicated focus on the IoT infrastructure and applications, facilitating environmental responsibility, an "IoT for a Green Planet".

Today, connectivity and increased bandwidth of the Internet have borne a huge number of services such as email, e-commerce, e-banking, VoiP – many of those have become a commodity. However, the World-Wide Web today still only represents a fraction of information about our real-world. To foster the automatic integration of a larger fraction of the 100 trillions of physical items crafted by 6.5 billion people per year into today’s Internet, the infrastructure of the IoT will have to be heterogeneous: besides the 2 billion computers and 4 billion mobile phones additional objects will connect, some of which will have their own Internet Protocol addresses, others may even run web-services (sometimes to referred to as ‘Web of Things’), use sensors to perceive their environment (e.g. food logging its temperature along the supply-chain) and use actuators to interact with it (e.g. chemical explosives warning staff from close collocation).

“In the recent years, we have gained a rough understanding of what the Internet of Things really is and how likely unfolds in nature", says Elgar Fleisch, professor at ETH Zurich and the University of St. Gallen, co-chair of the Auto-ID Labs, and co-chair of IoT 2008 and IoT2010. "However, we still lack some of the essential global standards and infrastructures that would drive adoption on a broader scale". The goal of IoT 2010 is to gather the stakeholders in order to continue work on technical requirements and business needs to build the Internet of Things.

Thanks to the recent advances of miniaturization and the plunge of costs in RFID devices, sensor networks, NFC and wireless communications, the technologies and applications around the concept of the IoT became increasingly relevant for industry and end users. Detection of the status of physical things through sensors, collection and processing of item-level data allow us to respond to real-world changes instantly. This fully interactive and responsive network yields immense potential for consumers and businesses.

"The existing Internet is just an infrastructure for the Internet of Things”, says Jun Murai, professor at Keio University, chairman of the board of directors of the Auto-ID Labs, and conference chair of IoT 2010.“The Internet of Things is the key to solving many real-world problems. That is why we decided the conference theme to be IoT for a Green Planet at this time.”.

Clearly with the close interlinking of physical objects and cyberspace also privacy and security have to be answered properly. “There will be areas where user acceptance is essential: The possibility to locate and trace objects is certainly much welcome if you have lost your keys, but it will not be accepted if the government uses it to snoop on its citizens”, says Friedemann Mattern, professor at ETH Zurich and co-chair of IoT 2008.

Keynote speakers, researchers and industry experts will discuss the immense potential for consumers and industry, how items can be integrated with the internet to sense, check, and act to fulfill known and latent consumer and business needs. Practitioners will report on latest real-world implementations, applications, and experiences.

In addition to the main conference on November 30 and December 1, a pre-conference program on November 29 will feature several workshops focusing on dedicated topics such as standards, prototyping, social and organizational aspects, and specific applications of the IoT for interconnected and interoperable vehicles. Furthermore, there will be tutorials putting across fundamentals on today’s core technologies of the IoTsuch as sensor networks, RFID and corresponding software frameworks.

For more information on the Internet of Things Conference 2010 visit www.iot2010.org or contact iot2010@ethz.ch.

Towards a Do-it-yourself-Internet of Things

2009-10-23T16:50:00.004+02:00

I'm quite happy about my recent purchase of Sonos, an always on network stereo, that streams music from any source (NAS, internet radio, etc.) to my home without requiring a computer. For me it's the first embedding of streams into my physical home.
Simultaneously, I'm quite proud about the doll's kitchen I build for my daugther from standard components you can get in a hardware store.

I also have a couple of ideas concerning improvements of the Sonos interace, coupling of my Sonos with location information and alike. I'm wondering how long it still takes until laymen can build and extend Internet services embedded in physical environments using standard components and tools - similarly, as I could for building the doll's kitchen. Probably still along way to go - that's why we're submitting a project proposal about that to the EU today...

Who am I?

2009-10-23T16:01:00.006+02:00

In the old days of the web I used altavista and all that other crawlers and was excited to find out what the web knows about me. Today, there are more sophisticated solutions, such as people search engines (123people, pipl). Just recently, I tried Pe rsonas:
It does not matter so much about whether this is right or wrong, it matters that others can find this information. I probably should stop publishing papers about Anti-Counterfeiting in order to lower my hits in the categories of legal/illegal...

Korea Visit: Auto-ID Labs meeting and conferences

2009-10-12T14:43:00.013+02:00

I was invited to give two talks one on the status of European research in RFID and sensor networks and another one on our current research in St. Gallen and ETH Zurich. When I was talking about our new iphone app Peaks (which I was proud to test successfully in Korea!) I received an interesting comment“…there is no iphone in Korea.”.

In conjunction with the conference there was also a fascinating exhibition about RFID. I must admit I ‘ve never visited interesting RFID exhibition so far mostly showing reader gates and tags, but this one was really exciting. Obviously, “green” is an important topic also in Korea which was reflected by at least four high-tech bicycle renting systems providing access to public bikes through RFID cards in combination with sophisticated locks. Slightly over-engineered but exciting indeed. I noticed green-ouse monitoring, sensor-augmented Taek-Wondo gear and the usual stuff, such as smart shelfe and military apps. Finally, the electronic colorful price tags gave a good impression about the opportunities of display information in our supermarkets of tomorrow.

As part of the conference we got access to the running Incheon Expo displaying technology and future vision of living of tomorrow, again with a dedicated focus on “green technology”. Due to the fear of the H1N1 virus we first had to pass a disinfection gate before entering the site – pretty strange experience. Among others, I enjoyed the art pieces showing how to sweep the ground off virtually leaves (once all trees have died but to maintain the tradition;) and the auto-transformation of textual news into graphical icons. In the exhibition I noticed the quite different notion of responsibility: instead of the rather individual share as we practice in Europe meaning everybody tries to contribute his share by his individual behavior, I understood that in Korea this is rather centralized and delegated to institutions, government and companies taking care of you.

Finally, I got the chance to travel South to the another event, the Koala 2009 RFID USN conference where I gave another talk on my favorite topic of building an Internet of Things for everyone. I took the chance of a train ride in order to enjoy the country-side from a window seat. Korea consists of countless hills – in order to gain culture land land is often reclaimed at the sea side.

After several conservations I was amazed about the huge funds of Korea provided for research and education, the huge percentage of academics of the population ( was told over 80% would study – though I haven’t verified), and tremendous attitude of almost living at the work place. I guess we’ll hear more from Korean rather soon…

We've released our first Layar: Peaks

2009-09-25T16:45:00.004+02:00

We've finally released our first layar (see here) "Peaks" - a layer giving names to the mountain you are looking at using the Layar application on Android. Enjoy the nature with knowing more about it!

Finally, a programmable camera

2009-09-25T14:14:00.009+02:00

Researchers at Standford are currently building an open-source camera, Camera 2.0, where the firmware can be completely designed by the user. Instead of being stuck with features and effects coming from manufacturers end-user development can create much richer services. Examples given are image recognition and hints about the appearance of a setting in popular online galleries indicating the importance of shot before the shutter is released.

I also could imagine to add meta-information or to even implement a photoguide taking to photographers to the most scenic spots in a city and teaching them how to really do nice shots. Would be great to have access to that platform soon.
Finally, I really like the lovely shot of Zurich they use in the video above;).

Ambient features beat GPS indoors

2009-09-25T13:39:00.003+02:00

Surroundsense [1] implements the simple idea of integrating various ambient features of an indoor location, such as sound, light, and acceleration pattern of the user. The authors present architecture which they test successfully to distinguish between 51 different business locations. In order to deploy that one should check whether assumption that the ambience of places remains stationary really holds. It also remains unclear to me how to actually train such a system...

[1] SurroundSense: Mobile Phone Localization Via Ambience Fingerprinting
Martin Azizyan, Ionut Constandache, Romit Roy Choudhury
ACM MobiCom, September 2009.

Nice talks at MobileHCI09

2009-09-18T11:58:00.016+02:00

Again I had the chance to visit MobilHCI09, despite the rather odd organization of the program in rather fragmented dual-tracks I enjoyed some nice talks. Overall, my impression was that especially the time slots of full papers were rather long which the presenters pretty often filled with sometimes tyring overviews of related work or other explanations of commonplaces.

In his talk about Glance Phone [1] Richard Harper embeded quite provocative message asking why mobilehci research would focus so much on human-device instead of the more interesting communication human-human supported by technology. He underlined that the very same message if conveyed through either shouting, whispering, bellowing or murmuring - normal mechanics of communicatons - get a completely different meaning and cannot be established today. The basic idea of glance phone is to allow to glance through someone's phone's front camera. This should enable the caller to have a better guess on the recipient's current situation whether it's approriate to call him or not. The implementation is running a webservice on the phone only allowing people in adress book can glance. The outcome of the study was quite unexpected. Instead of initial of purpose for the caller to detect appropriate moments to call their recipients, users rather used glance phone in unstressed, arty, funy and amusing moments to show off their status as done on facebook. Quite a nice lesson how a study can go wrong but still makes it as a paper.

Friendlee [2] showed how the rich activity with the intimate network (friends, family, relatives) could be derived from mobile phone interaction and represented by a weighted graph. This allows to re-arrange the phone book and to also search other friends via hops of close friends. I was wondering whether the interaction with others via phones is really a good indicator for intimacy if I think of re-curring conversation when trouble-shooting with public authorities or corporations. Would be nice if those would push out my friends and relatives down to the bottom of my phone book...

Johannes Schoening presented PhotoMap [3], a nice approach of how to capture you-are-here maps and turn them into gps-navigationable-maps on mobile phones. He proposed 2 point referencing and overlaying over google maps. A user study showed that slightly uncorrectly referenced were god enough. This was a really nice idea he also received the best-paper award for. What stroke me was when he mentioned that Apple denied their iphone app for their Appstore as they would replicate functionality of the iphone - does that mean their will be no further location and mappings apps!?

uWave[4] presented an evaluation of authentication through gestures. The authors found out that with visual disclosure of a gesture to others to mimic a gesture is rather simple. In order to increase security the authors proposed to additionally pressa button while a performing gesture in order to define start and end in a hidden way. Well...why not just pressing buttons - here comparision gesture vs. several buttons would be nice. Novelty is cool, but usability should be also key in order to show the superior properties of novelty to the established...
Finally, Stephan von Watzdorf, a Ph.D. of ours gave his first presentation at a conference. He discussed the ability of phones to be used as risk alert [5] devices. The results were that people see value that phones are suited due its always on and always with-us character. The results were based on the analysis of a survey.

[1] Richard Harper and Stuart Taylor, Glancephone – an exploration of human expression, In Proceedings of the 11th international Conference on Human-Computer interaction with Mobile Devices and Services (Bonn, Germany, September 15 - 18, 2009). MobileHCI '09. [pdf]
[2] Ankolekar, A., Szabo, G., Luon, Y., Huberman, B. A., Wilkinson, D., and Wu, F. 2009. Friendlee: a mobile application for your social life. In Proceedings of the 11th international Conference on Human-Computer interaction with Mobile Devices and Services (Bonn, Germany, September 15 - 18, 2009). MobileHCI '09. [pdf]
[3] Johannes Schöning; Keith Cheverst; Markus Löchtefeld; Antonio Krüger; Michael Rohs; Faisal Taher: Photomap: Using Spontaneously taken Images of Public Maps for Pedestrian Navigation Tasks on Mobile Devices, In: Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction with Mobile Devices and Service. In Proceedings of the 11th international Conference on Human-Computer interaction with Mobile Devices and Services (Bonn, Germany, September 15 - 18, 2009). MobileHCI '09.[pdf]
[4] Liu, Jiayang; Zhong, lin; Wickramasuriya, Jehan; Vasudevan, Venu: User Evaluation of Lightweight User Authentication with a Single Tri-Axis Accelerometer. In Proceedings of the 11th international Conference on Human-Computer interaction with Mobile Devices and Services (Bonn, Germany, September 15 - 18, 2009). MobileHCI '09. [pdf]
[5] Watzdorf von, Stephan; Michahelles, Florian: Evaluating Mobile Phones as Risk Information Providers. In Proceedings of the 11th international Conference on Human-Computer interaction with Mobile Devices and Services (Bonn, Germany, September 15 - 18, 2009). MobileHCI '09. [pdf]

Jun Rekimoto's Keynote at MobileHCI09

2009-09-18T10:05:00.012+02:00

Jun Rekimoto was giving examples of mixing reality with virtual world. As a quite illustrative example he showed how a fighting characters of card game could revive by virtually augmenting fighting capabilities - though this was nothing really new, Albrecht notes even more critically. Then he introduced sensonomy as concept to combine intentional and unintenional tagging of users, known from web (pagerank, social tagging), for the real world in order to increase the quality of location tracking using wifi. He showed from a simulation how location accuracy could be increased by user participation. He did not really talk about the motivation of users to do that which should be the pivotal requisite for that system.

The other topics of lifelogging, capturing environmental data from crowds were not new either, but in the end his example of pet lifelogging put some nice perspective. I'm quite convinced that people might enjoyunconventional pics taken by their cat, information about which other cats she meets derived from face recognition of others und to compute facebook-like relationships if combined with need-solving applications such as pet-tracking.

Augmented reality vs. tagging

2009-09-18T10:05:00.010+02:00

Just recently I stumbled over some exciting videos showing how augmented reality on mobile phones can be used to overlay the real-world with additional information when seeing it through the mobile:
new

end

This looks fascinating on the one hand as it finally runs on mobile phones today, but the idea itself is also kind of old on the other hand:
old:

end

I can imagine that applying AR may make sense in specific situations but how do indicate to you users that there is virtual information "behind" the current real-world view? How frustrating would it be running through a city watching it entirely through your mobile phone without finding any augmented information?
In that sense I still find the approach of tagging places with barcodes or NFC more convincing, e.g. as ServTag or several NFC projects show.

Whitepaper: Mobile Advertising - 2020 Vision

2009-09-08T16:54:00.008+02:00

Ogilvy and Acision have published a White Paper called "Mobile Advertising – 2020 Vision" exploring how mobile advertising will look in 2020 (download here). They lean back about the quality of predictions in general but envision some nice scenarios: a car advertisement (see to the right) can trigger different meanings for different users ranging from buying, renting, or tuning a car. Later they mention serendipity through ads of trusted advertisers, interaction between devices (e.g. buy a shirt an actor on TV is wearing through your mobile).
However, as an essential prerequisite the true adoption of mobile phone is required, not just doing geeking things but using it for continuously for boring routines in daily life. I still wonder how get there looking at the recent 'flat-rate' Swisscom has overed a few weeks ago: 169 CHF/month (!!!) for unlimited data and voice NOT including roaming...

Announcement: CfP - What can the Internet of Things do for the Citizen?

2009-09-04T17:39:00.007+02:00

The workshop "What can the Internet of Things do for the Citizen?" (CIOT), Workshop @ Pervasive 2010, Helsinki, May 17, 2010, is accepting submissions.
I have the great pleasure to announce that our Pervasive workshop proposal "What can the Internet of Things do for the Citizen?" (CIOT) has been accepted at The Eighth International Conference on Pervasive Computing (Pervasive 2010).

We (Stephan Karpischek (ETH Zurich), Albrecht Schmidt (Univ. of Duisburg-Essen), and myself) are soliciting submissions describing applications, tackling infrastructure issues, introducing meaningful forms of interaction as well as articles discussing business scenarios that show the commercialization of Internet-of-Things applications for citizens. What if we had technology that gathered data from things of our daily lives, tracked and counted everything in order to solve citizens’ needs (e.g. reduce waste, prevent loss, and improve search)?

The reception of the call in the community was quite overwhelming such that we managed to organize a quite remarkable PC for this workshop.

Please find the detailed call here: www.autoidlabs.org/events/ciot2010

You may also express your interest on facebook.

We are looking forward to your submissions!

Interact 2009, Uppsala - Overall

2009-09-04T16:30:00.009+02:00

As said in my first post, I found six sessions in parallel quite overwhelming. Thus, I - as all other visitors - only could attend a little fraction of the talks.

I enjoyed the contribution of Florian Alt who proposed a proxy-based implementation [1] to alter the content of website with or without the owners consent. This could increase usability of badly designed sites or, probably more important, to implement dynamic applications on static content, e.g. integrating infos from your social network with content of a website you're just looking at.

Next I fascinated by the simpled idea Paul Holleis [2] presented to attach a sequence of NFC tags behind a laptop screen in order to fascilitate touch-based interaction similar to a touch screen but at much lower cost. Obviously, one technically problem to be solved is to find screens that still allow the radio waves to permeate the screen.

Finally, I was glad to see the talk of Felix von Reischach [3], our Ph.D. student, presenting our work about the different ways of interacting with mobile devices and products: barcode vs. epc vs. nfc.

[1] F. Alt, A. Sch midt, R. Atterer, P. Holleis
Bringing Web 2.0 to the Old Web: A Platform for Parasitic Applications. Interact 2009. Uppsala, Sweden. 24-28 August 2009.
[2] Khoovirajsingh Seewoonauth, Enrico Rukzio, Robert Hardy and Paul Holleis. NFC-based Mobile Interactions with Direct-View Displays. Interact 2009. Uppsala, Sweden. 24-28 August 2009.
[3] F. von Reischach, F. Michahelles, D. Guinard, R. Adelmann, E. Fleisch, A. Schmidt: An Evaluation of Product Identification Techniques for Mobile Phones, Full Paper at the 12th IFIP TC13 Conference in Human-Computer Interaction (Interact2009), Sweden, August 2009, [PDF] [Talk].

Interact 2009, Uppsala - KeyNote 3: Liam Bannon, "Towards human-centred design"

2009-09-04T15:46:00.011+02:00

Finally, after a great show on the evening before, the organizers of Interact 2009 had been smart enough to organize a third keynote to motivate people to visit the third day of the conference.
Liam Bannon talked about "Towards human-centred design".He started with the quite known fact of how ubiquitous computing has changed the interaction with technologies and, as such, human desktop no longer persists as the most dominant form of interaction. More interesting was his comment about how also industry has changed, he gave the example of a senior executive who has changed his instructions from "evaluate" (something the company has developed) over "develop" and "explore" to "come up with something interesting". Liam outlined herewith a clear shift from industry-driven to user-driven research.
Liam jumped a little bit cross topics in his talk, he also had a vast number of slides with "too much text" on them, as he admitted quite frequently throughout the talk. Anyway, took strong opposition against replacing humans by technology, as human skills are still relevant in technical systems, such that humans always should be the real actors. Well, who in the audience would have ever questioned that...
When Liam started to talk about ambient intelligence he attacked the vision of the all knowing systems prentending to operate on behalf of the user. He rather proposed to design system that extend human capabilities as also critiqued in Rob van Kranenburg's new online book The Internet of Things.
Then Liam did another jump to the topic of collecting data vs. forgetting information. Using Microsoft's MyLifeBits project he questioned the underlying assumption that collecting data is a good thing per-se. He emphasized that also forgetting is an important part of human life which also should be supported through technology, e.g. digital shelters.
The Liam jumped back to the previous topic of ambient intelligence and gave some good counter-examples of the stupid user always being supported by technology: user-generated content and open-source software just show the opposite, how the skilled users spread their ideas and collaborate through technology.

Human agency and technnologies have to come together. He referred to the Mc Namara-fallacy:

The first step is to measure whatever can be easily measured. This is OK as far as it goes.
The second step is to disregard that which can't be easily measured or to give it an arbitrary quantitative value. This is artificial and misleading.
The third step is to presume that what can't be measured easily really isn't important. This is blindness.
The fourth step is to say that what can't be easily measured really doesn't exist. This is suicide.

I find this a quite remarkable counter-position towards high-resolution management.

Interact 2009, Uppsala - KeyNote 2: Nicklas Lundblad, "Lies, damn lies and privacy"

2009-09-04T14:38:00.011+02:00

The second day of Interact2009 started with a keynote from Nicklas Lundblad, former European policy manager at Google and now deputy CEO of the Stockholm Chamber of Commerce.
Nicklas started he talk with the insight that security today is an established field in companies, where as privacy is not: usually there no designated role for privacy in companies. The most established answer towards privacy is privacy-enhanced technology (PET) which is mostly cumbersome, implemented as an add-on, and not really perceived useful: the more privacy, the less usability.
As an example, the Icognito mode of web browsers allows to browse the web without leaving traces of what you've visited: mostly used at public computers, but the significant majority is porn.

Accordingly, privacy always incorporates, whether true or not, that the user wants to hide something. Nicklas played a quite exaggerating movie about the 'google' opt-out village:

Google Opt Out Feature Lets Users Protect Privacy By Moving To Remote Village

Then Nicklas gave some background of some quite exciting interpretations of privacy:

1. sphere of gaze
if you always keep in mind that you are under the watchful gaze of god you will be fine.
Nicklas gave an example of Benton's prison: a disciplinary prison - where the prisoner is put in the center of sphere and can be watched from all sides around - which refers to a concept of god being watched, more details can be found here.

2. privacy as a mask:
Nicklas called this the Swedish interpretation of privacy, a personal integrity concept, which allow you to keep your mask in front of others. You can experience these masks when you compare pictures of your friends on linked-in and with their's on facebook.

3. Privacy as a game
Privacy is about learning and playing with it. You learn to handle it and to care about it.

In former times there was no privacy at all: we all lived in villages, privacy only came with urbanization. In the village you are naturally risk-avert, because of if you fail you're entire reputation is lost. In urbanization, you can move somewere else, you become more risk-alert which triggers economic growth.
A growing counter-culture of lie emerges.

Most well explored sector of online lying is online-dating, 20% self-reported to ly on line sites, 90% even think that others lie.

Now, after a long introduction finally the main topic of the talk appeared:
How can you build privacy based on lie.

It followed some philosphical discurs about lying and it turned out it's a social evolution.
Nicklas proposed to support people to ly by technology: e.g. don't reject people on Facebook but rather introduce a mechanism to allows you to express your intend to confirm without disclosing your information - that would be ly on faceook.
Another approach was to apply steganography, turn emails into spam, and by that hiding your information in spam which again could be a mechanism for privacy based on ly (is the spam actually is not spam!).

Obviously, this approach has some problems. First of all ethical, as ly could destroy the internet, as social trust disolves and structure disappears. However, Nicklas added, lying is not a monolithic concept: there are also"white lies" as "you're looking beautiful today" and Nicklas asked "is there even a right to be able to lie?".

The talk concluded with some challenges: how to build prototypes to support ly, how people lie with technology (spam filter), is lying changing society? (ly less in email, than mobile). His talk is even available:

The lessons of this talk are not to be implemented right, but it least this talk triggered some thoughts and discussions. I find it nicely illustrates how still human are in control and design technology towards their needs, even along their defiencies...

Interact 2009, Uppsala - KeyNote 1: Krista Höök "Mobile life - body and interaction"

2009-09-04T13:33:00.010+02:00

Last week I could attend Interact2009. I was really thrilled by the huge variety in the program, six tracks in parallel - quite hard to not miss the most interesting talks;)
Anyway, at least the keynotes were in the plenary and not to miss:

First Krista Höök talked about the lasting challenge of coming up with new interfaces for new environments. She set out her talk with the confession that HCI research in the past would have lost it's relevance. As it has left the ground of reality needs.

The challenge - according to her - was to design interfaces in the wild for strange environments, e.g. video dj applications that allows to stream videos from various mobile phones' cameras of the audience to the big display [1]. At that point I was not sure whether Krista was pointing a way out of the crisis or rather wanted to illustrate the status of the HCI crisis.
She emphasized the difficulties of designing something new which might be even hard to describe in words, e.g. body expression. She proposed explanatory design, a playful way of associating technology with habits. She was talking about reptile owners that treat their animals as a living exhibition and she taking that as a motivation for designing a living wallpaper that gave birth to a flower fertilized by images the users had been uploading. Krista strongly voted for the ludic society, as social would be all life is about. Later in the discussion she even clearly outlined that supporting playful entertainment would be more important than solving a murder.
I really enjoyed when she was talking about the malleable experience and introduced Mobile2.0 [2], an environment that allows everybody to become a designer of pervasive games. She used the notion of "digital handicraft for all".
Finally, she mentioned the importance of the eco-systems of drivers, namely mobile network operators vs. google vs. application design. She proposed to start with the consumers' needs when designing applications. Interestingly, she didn't want to call the users 'users' but rather 'actors', as those themselves should apps in short cycles, as they know their problems best.
That was a nice message to follow, however, I didn't really see in the examples she gave herself following that advice.

[1] Engström, A., Esbjörnsson, M. and Juhlin, O. (2008). Mobile Collaborative Live Video Mixing. In Proceedings of MobileHCI 2008. ACM Press, pp. 157-166.
[2] Holmquist, L. E. 2007. Mobile 2.0. interactions 14, 2 (Mar. 2007), 46-47.

At the right time at the right place: two of our Ph.D. students on google streetview

2009-08-19T21:25:00.006+02:00

Today, there was suddenly a big hurray in our office: Stephan and Mikko were very happy that the car with the strange cameras on top they've seen in winter this year actually captured them on their way back from the cafeteria:

If you know them you can easily recognize them...

The street of our office further up, Google forgot to hide a number plate:

Visiting the Smart Factory in Kaiserslautern

2009-08-18T11:24:00.018+02:00

I had the chance to visit the Sm artFactory^KL in Kaiserslautern. It was nice to see some ideas how the smart technology from the consumers' sector slowly finds its way into production scenarios: a chemical machinery allows to autonomously fabricate soap, based on SAP orders defining colors and numbers of soap units to be produced. Various parts can be remotely monitored, or configured, e.g. via bluetooth and mobile phone. Prof. Zühlke illustrated the various steps being taken from simplifying the control of machines by the control room through mobile communication in order to remove the strong coupling between worker and machine. However, the challenge in the production scenarios clearly is the lifetime of machines spanning up to thirty years - compared to the 2 year life-time of a mobile phone.
The driving vision here is the digital fab where all units can be controlled via web-servers (SEMPROM). The journey towards that vision goes via remote control (factory of bits), remote programming (factory of functions) and the real/virtual integration (factory of things - where parts of the factory could be simulated in 3D).
Afterwards we had some discussion on how these developments would effect the job market and, thus, also cause changes im training and education. There is a German project elaborating this topic.

Lost & Found - a case for the internet of things for the consumers

2009-08-06T12:56:00.007+02:00

I just received a call from my wife when she left a suitcase in the tramway. She was busy with our two kids and only remembered the suitcase when the doors had been closed and the tram departed. Since I have the schedule of all public transport on my mobile, it was no problem for me to hunt for the tram taking some short-cuts with my bicycle. However, since I was too late to catch it I just decided to wait a few stations further down until the tram would turn and come back - that I could reason precisely from the schedule. What I did was a 'virtual track&trace' which works excellent in Switzerland since the planned schedules really match the as-is-situation most of the time.
However, the uncertainty we still had was what would happen, if the driver would detect the unattended luggage, take it out and send it to the lost&found office - we would loose a day in retrieval, as it would go there into storage room according to a defined process as my wife found out when asking at that office. Also they do not allow to communicate with the driver as this would disturb his process of driving (just imagine the communication load for all items being lost in Zurich everyday!).
Thus, wouldn't it be great, if you could initiate an ad-hoc real-time track and trace yourself of your belongings [1]? Or, if you could have a better way of communicating with other people that find your lost items and have the good mind of helping you [2]?
I'm convinced that this could be really a valuable case for the internet of things for consumers (and all that desperate people would be also happy to pay a reasonable fee for that service, e.g. keymail).
In our case: we had been lucky, the suitcase just came back with tram I reasoned from the schedule and everything was fine.

[1] C. Frank, P. Bollinger, C. Roduner, and W. Kellerer: “Objects Calling Home: Locating Objects Using Mobile Phones”, in: Proceedings of Pervasive ’07, Toronto, Canada, 2007.
[2] Guinard, D., Baecker, O., & Michahelles, F. (2008). Supporting a Mobile Lost and Found Community. In Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction with Mobile Devices and Services (pp. 407-410). New York.

Visit from Aaron Beach

2009-08-04T11:48:00.006+02:00

Just last week we had been lucky to listen to a talk given by Aaron Beach from Boulder university. He got in touch with me since we discussed one of his papers [1] in my seminar this spring term. In his talk he discussed the potential of mobile social networks. In particular I enjoyed his touch-me-shirt, which allows to establish facebook links once hugging a real person in real life. This is a nice example of how to bridge this two worlds. However, the problem he reported on is, that the current facebook API does not allow anymore to establish friendship links through events happening outside facebook. So the power of facebook can be sometimes frightning and can even hinder new developments.
In the interesting discussion he mentioned a nice observation: pupils in school in Boulder set their ring tones to higher frequencies (>17.000Hz) most grown-up adults, teachers, cannot hear anymore in order to continue the use of mobiles in class even if it is prohibited...

[1] Beach, A.; Gartrell, M.; Akkala, S.; Elston, J.; Kelley, J.; Nishimoto, K.; Ray, B.; Razgulin, S.; Sundaresan, K.; Surendar, B.; Terada, M.; Han, R., "WhozThat? evolving an ecosystem for context-aware mobile social networks" Network, IEEE , vol.22, no.4, pp.50-55, July-Aug.