Visiting AmI in Salzburg

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definition of AmI as environments that are sensitive and responsive to presence of people appeared to me as a rather outdated vision where users are centrally positioned but the entire system is guessing magically the users desires and serving him accordingly.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...

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

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.

From the _Internet_ of Things to the _Web_ of Things?

Today, the term Internet of Things finally is pretty established. There is not really single historical root to be found, but its birthplace can be asumed somewhere in the early days of the Auto-ID Center [1] in the vicinity of smart things [2][3], inspired by ubiquitous computing [4] and alike. An important reference you always stumble upon is [5] from ITU - not it is the best source in the field, at least it's very popular and well cited due its publisher the ITU.
There has never been a clear definition or discussion how the Internet of Things differs from Pervasive Computing, Ubiquitous Computing, Smart Things, Ambient Intelligence etc. - all areas have many, and undefined, communalities and overlaps. Also, in the end it does not really matter, in a few decades historians may look back and come up with clear definitions in retro-spect.

What the internet is really about, as the first conference has set out in 2008 [6], is the "expansion of the internet into the real world". This "new" internet can be build upon the backbone of internet technology as suggested by [3] or [7] using DNS, TCP etc.. Just recently, one can realize another term getting established - Web of Things (good overview here [8]) - which views the very same phenomenon of expansion from a more high-level perspective of applying web technologies to controlling embedded devices and appliances by URI, HTTP, REST, RSS, etc.
Honestly, I haven't quite understood the difference between Internet of Things and Web of Things, perhaps there isn't really one except the ownership of terms;)
Anyway, let's just move on, build stuff, develop meaningful apps and let's not worry to much about how to name them. And yes, gee, I forgot, there is of course also the Web2.0 which emerges in to the real world as well being called Web3.0 then...


[1] Toward a Global "Internet of Things", http://java.sun.com/developer/technicalArticles/Ecommerce/rfid/
[2] Neil Gershenfeld, Raffi Krikorian, Danny Cohen: Internet 0: Interdevice Internetworking, Scientific American, 2004

[3] Neil A. Gershenfeld: When things start to think, Henry Holt, 2000 (reprint)

[4] Marc Weiser: The Computer for the 21st Century" - Scientific American Special Issue on Communications, Computers, and Networks, September, 1991
[5] ITU Internet Reports 2005: The Internet of Things
[6] Internet of Things 2008. International Conference for Industry and Academia March 26-28, 2008 / Zurich
[7] EPCglobal, The EPCglobal Architecture Framework, Version 1.3, Jan 2009
[8] Dave Raggett: Towards the Web of Things, W3C, September 2007

From devices to services

It has been propagated for long: smart things, disappearing computers, ubiquitous computing, wearable computing, pervasive computing, ambient intelligence, internet of things - various terms viewing from different the very same phenomenon - things are now longer just thingsm but have virtual counterparts that expand their original capabilities.
It has been a nice vision, which is becoming deployed now: apple has come up with iTunes, originally only selling music, but today also selling software, Google has started something similar with Android, and Nokia has started promoting their Ovi. The economist has come up with two nice articles discussing this phenomenon in greater detail.



[1] Gadgets, Thinking inside the box - There is more to portable electronic gadgets than just fancy hardware, Dec 4th 2008, From The Economist print edition

[2]Nokia, Ovi go again - The world’s biggest handset-maker makes a new push into mobile services, Dec 4th 2008, From The Economist print edition

Impressions of the Conference of Ambient Intelligence 2008 in Nuremberg

Next day after the workshop the AmI conference started. It was the first time I visited this conference and indeed it was a great experience:
A great portion of the papers (especially from Philips and others from the Netherlands) talked about designing applications for the elderly - interesting, challenging topic and great for funding. In particularly I enjoyed the presentation of [1] testing an navigation aid for the elderly by means of Wizard of Oz. As people with dementia can't remember things for long the standard instructions of navigation system "in 100m turn left" don't work, since these users won't remember. Thus, short-term and rather indirect instructions based on landmarks "after bench at your left turn right" had been tested proven more successful. I guess, learnings from this paper could be valueable for designers of standards navi apps. But, GPS is definitely not accurate enough for that.
Another nice paper [2] was investigating different means of end user programming for designing interactive shop environments. The authors compared 3D simulation vs. PDA mixed reality vs. programming by demonstrations. Apparently designers preferred the 3D environment, whereas the not so technically affine retailers preferred the PDA.

In his keynote, Joe Paradiso was presenting some ongoing projects of his group at MIT media lab dealing with gateways and interfaces between real-world and virtual world (2nd life - I thought it's already dead) [3]: either power plugs, or spinner gateways allow to interact between these two worlds in both ways.

Despite the technical fascination what one can do and build, I really missed the answer to the question my Ph.D. advisor Bernt Schiele was always asking for: "What's the message, what is it good for?" Apparantely, their research methodology looks as follows: build a new sensor device, do a video and let the people think what they would do with it...

Finally, I really enjoyed the work presented by Alireza Sahami Shirazi [4] about using multiple vibration motors for providing more complex haptic feedback to mobile users. Though the work presented was rather rudimentary, the idea of having six motors embedded in a box offers great opportunities for out I imagine, such as circular rotation patterns for navigation apps. Certainly it's about eyes free instead of eye-phone...

[1] F. N. Hagethorn, B. J. A. Kröse, P. de Greef and M. E. Helmer, Creating Design Guidelines for a Navigational Aid for Mild Demented Pedestrians, Ambient Intelligence European Conference, AmI 2008, Nuremberg, Germany, November 19-22, 2008.

[2] Mark van Doorn, Arjen de Vries and Emile Aarts End-User Software Engineering of Smart Retail Environments: The Intelligent Shop WindowAmbient Intelligence European Conference, AmI 2008, Nuremberg, Germany, November 19-22, 2008.

[3] Lifton, J., Feldmeier, M., Ono, Y., Lewis, C., and Paradiso, J. A. 2007. A platform for ubiquitous sensor deployment in occupational and domestic environments. In Proceedings of the 6th international Conference on information Processing in Sensor Networks

[4] Alireza Sahami, Paul Holleis , Albrecht Schmidt and Jonna Häkkilä^, Rich Tactile Output on Mobile Devices, Ambient Intelligence European Conference, AmI 2008, Nuremberg, Germany, November 19-22, 2008. Proceedings

The first robot in my home

Many keynotes and talks concerning ubicomp/pervasive computing and 'internet of things' conclude with "Sensors are only the beginning...actuators will be next...".
Indeed, we are getting there. Robots are slowly entering homes mainly lawn mowers and vacuum cleaners [1]. In [2] the developers of Roomba clearly explain why single purpose robots, e.g. vacuum cleaning, convince consumers instead of everything-else-slaves nobody can yet believe in.
Meanwhile, we bough a robot for our lab. I immediately took it home and tried it out:


My experiences completely match with [3]: Roomba does not really clean well, but it does it automatically, so who cares? It works without intervention and it's just fascinating. The device is rather dumb, which is nicely described as 'random walk': it just goes straight, turns around obstacles and wanders criss cross around the room which the instructions call 'robot intelligence to efficiently clean the whole floor'.
Anyway, Roomba is a rather cheap and robust platform. Even if its dumb, attaching a mobile phone will offer new opportunities for developing applications [4]. Stay tuned...


[1] World Robotics 2008
[2] Jones, J.L., "Robots at the tipping point: the road to iRobot Roomba," Robotics & Automation Magazine, IEEE , vol.13, no.1, pp. 76-78, March 2006.
[3] Forlizzi, J. and DiSalvo, C. 2006. Service robots in the domestic environment: a study of the roomba vacuum in the home. In Proceedings of the 1st ACM SIGCHI/SIGART Conference on Human-Robot interaction (Salt Lake City, Utah, USA, March 02 - 03, 2006). HRI '06. ACM, New York, NY, 258-265.
[4] Tribelhorn, B.; Dodds, Z., "Evaluating the Roomba: A low-cost, ubiquitous platform for robotics research and education," Robotics and Automation, 2007 IEEE International Conference on , vol., no., pp.1393-1399, 10-14 April 2007