Stephan Karpischek defended his thesis on mobile barcode scanning and quality of product master data

Stephan Karpischek is, after Irena Pletikosa, the second the PhD student this week and my fifth in total successfully defending his thesis. Congratulations, Dr. Stephan Karpischek!
As his co-referee Sanjay Sarma from MIT could not attend in person, Stephan defended his thesis in a sophisticated conference room at ETH where we had high-quality connection to MIT. The quality of video and sound was amazing and prove that some travels can be indeed eliminated by these technologies.
Stephan outlined four contributions of his thesis: the implementation of the open-source mobile barcode scanning app my2cents.mobi [1], the proof of incorrect master data yielding lower usage of mobile apps [2], the introduction of a
method to measure correctness of product names and its application to public master data sources [3]. Additionally, Stephan also did
some remarkable analysis of user behavior of mobile bargaining [4] and developed one of the most renown Swiss apps [5] , Swisspeaks. However, both results did not really fit any more in his thesis "Mobile Barcode Scanning Applications for Consumers" (will be available in a couple of months here).
 In the Q and A section of his defense Stephan prove that roughly 2% of today's master data available in online data pools amazon, google, afili.net etc. are wrong, dillute the brand image and could yield financial losses. This result provides a fact-based justification of the GS1's emerging Trusted Source service [6] which aims at providing brand-owner approved master-data. He also gave a perspective of a future master-data monitoring service that brand-owners could use to measure their appearance and abuse of their barcodes by other parties on the network...
Stephan, it has been a great pleasure to working with you and I really enjoyed the inspiring discussion with you. I wish you good luck in your new job!

[1] S. Karpischek, F. Michahelles, E. Fleisch, my2cents – enabling research on consumer-product interaction. Journal of Personal and Ubiquitous Computing. Springer, 2011, [doi:10.1007/s00779-011-0426-9].
[2] S. Karpischek, F. Michahelles, my2cents - Digitizing consumer opinions and comments about retail products, Internet of Things 2010 Conference (IoT2010), 29 November - 1 December 2010, Tokyo, Japan.
[3] S. Karpischek, F. Michahelles, E. Fleisch, The Not So Unique Global Trade Identification Number - Product master data quality in publicly available sources (Extended Abstract). 14th International Conference on Electronic Commerce (ICEC'12), 7 - 8 August 2012, Singapore.
[4] S. Karpischek, D. Santani, F. Michahelles, Usage Analysis of a Mobile Bargain Finder Application. 13th International Conference on Electronic Commerce and Web Technologies (EC-Web 2012), 3 - 7 September 2012, Vienna, Austria.
[5] S. Karpischek, C. Marforio, M. Godenzi, S. Heuel, F. Michahelles, SwissPeaks - Mobile augmented reality to identify mountains, Let's Go Out: Research in Outdoor Mixed and Augmented Reality.  Workshop at the International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality 2009 (ISMAR 2009), 19 October 2009, Orlando, Florida, USA.
[6] GS1 Trusted Source of Data, Project Report, GS1, July 2012 [pdf]

Technology Transfer in Poland

Poznan was my first visit of Poland. I was invited to talk about the technology transfer practice at ETH Zurich as part of the Opencode Transfer project which deals with the development of a new technology transfer process for Polish universities in greater Poznan region.
 I was presenting on the characteristics of ETH Zurich’s spin-offs such as longer survival rates, job creation, and value generation as the main motivation for fostering entrepreneurship at universities.

Swiss practises on the technology transfer, licensing and encoding methods on Prezi

Throughout the following panel discussion I learned about significant differences between Poland, Switzerland and US. Whereas ETH transfer mainly functions as a service center supporting ETH employees to commercialize scientific results, in Poland university rather see transfer offices as profit centers which should generate surpluses out of licenses, patents and shares of spin-offs. Also other participants underlined that this approach might be hardly successful when looking at the numbers of US universities such as Stanford or Univ. of Illinois, where only 4% of submitted patents finally materialize in transferred licenses.

Overall, I was fascinated by the entrepreneurial spirit and the strong ambition of technology transfer from research to practice in Poznan.   

Research of the Auto-ID Labs presented at GS1 event

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 Lab 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.

NFC is back!?

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]

Augmented reality vs. tagging

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:

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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.

Interact 2009, Uppsala - Overall

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. Schmidt, 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].

Mobile Monday at ETH about camera phone apps

Mobile monday [1] has happened for the first time at ETH. The running topic was camera phones used for richer real world experience.

Juha Laurila from Nokia Research Lausanne started off with Nokia point and find [2] representing a compeling infrastructure for authoring travel guides and navigation services based on recognition of places by the user's camera-phone. Another, even more compelling project for me, was Nokia Image Space [3] which aims at sharing photos taken from Nokia phones together with their spatial relationship. That means besides the photo's location also the angle of the photograph is incorporated through the phones accelerometer and magnetometer. Accordingly, a 3D-representation can be calculated by overlaying various pictures from different angles - there is a nice video here. For me this is another nice example of user-generated content: instead of google-cars crawling around the world and taking pictures, Nokia users could do that for free...

Daniel Wagner was showing a couple of augmented reality "applications" - overlaying the real world seen from a phone's camera with items, animals, markers etc. While the shown examples did not really contain useful applications they gave great perspectives about what could be done in terms of embedding information on items and objects in the real world in a more compelling way than just text. They showed some demos were they really could overlay pictures with 3D images shown on the phone without using markers (e.g. see here).

While augmented reality appears to be a fascinating research topic, I'm still wondering what it will look like when in fufutre people will not only have blinking bluetooth ears but also tap through the world using their mobile phone as a white cane for "added-value information"...

Herbert Bay from Kooaba [4], an ETH-based spin-off, presented their approach of having visual search implemented on the iphone: you take a photo, send an MMS to their server, and out of 1 million objects so far you can receive further information.

Roger Fischer from Kaywa [5] presented 2D barcode applications. He explained the differences between Japan, where NTT Docomo has years ago moved forward and forced the other Japanese operators to follow spreading 2D barcode applications, whereas Europe still fights with a plethora of various barcode standards.

Mindaugas Stonys from Convision talked about smart camera applications based on the bee-tag 2d barcode standard. A nice feature of beetag is that you can place a logo inside the code. He proudly mentioned that their reader software runs on 11 platforms.

Finally, there was a 30s pitch about a start-up [5] empowering consumers to distinguish between orginal and faked products by using their mobile phones - an idea we've published about as well [6].

The mobile monday organizers had been so nice to put together a video playlist of compelling videos on youtube.

[1] http://www.mobilemonday.ch/
[2] http://pointandfind.nokia.com
[3] http://research.nokia.com/imagespace
[4] http://www.kooaba.com/
[5] http://www.originize.com/
[6] F. von Reischach, F. Michahelles, E. Fleisch: Anti-Counterfeiting 2.0 - A Consumer-Driven Approach towards Product Authentication , Late Breaking Results at the 9th International Conference on Ubiquitous Computing (UbiComp 2007), Austria, September 2007, [PDF].

Another political discussion about RFID

Finally RFID is in the news again. A referendum [1] is currently being put together on the issue of RFID in the upcoming Swiss Passport. The arguments are the common ones, citation of known internet stories where different passports have been hacked, RFID wouldn't be secure and people could be traced everywhere. Let me just briefly mention that in these contexts hacking a passport mainly means to read an ID - you know I can read the entire passport by just looking at the pages, does that mean paper printing is insecure;)? Not to mention the ubiquitous tracking device in our pockets, the mobile phone, where nobody complains about.
What, however, is striking, and is independent of RFID as such, is the plan of the swiss government to store all personal data including bio-metric data in a central database. That definitely sounds threatning, however, has nothing to do with RFID! Rather the opposite: RFID allows for de-centralized data-storage and leaves much more control to the owner than reference numbers with central storages...
Why is the campaign actually using a barcode print [2] when accusing RFID!? Btw, the barcode identifies blank video-tapes, just try it out and read it with your phone using Barcoo[3].
Maybe also the approach is wrong: How would people react on the chip in the passport if they would get some discount or rebate when travelling to different countries? Privacy is sacred but easily sold for a 1% discount in the nearby supermarket. Albrecht Schmidt envisions in his recent blog [4] people selling information about their daily life, e.g. their sleeping pattern - perhaps that's not so far-fetched if the discount on the matress is alright...

[1] http://www.freiheitskampagne.ch/
[2] http://www.rfid-nein.ch/
[3] http://www.barcoo.de/
[4] http://albrecht-schmidt.blogspot.com/2009/03/next-big-thing-lets-look-into-future.html

Ugly barcodes?

One argument for RFID sometimes is that because it does not require line-of-sight the ID's would not disturb the visual appearance of products. However, I found some examples which follow the opposite approach: make the barcode part of the design:
[1] http://www.barcoderevolution.com
[2] http://www.artlebedev.com

Some articles about the Internet of Things

An article [1] just pointed me to the fact that the vision of the Internet of Things is about ten years old now, after early work has started at Auto-ID Center at MIT. This was my trigger to search for current papers describing and discussing the Internet of Things.
A rather critical articel, [1], proposes to envision the Internet of Things as a hierarchy of objects with different capabilities instead of a network of fully peer connected items, as layed out in the early days of the Auto-ID Center [2]. In order to develop robust business cases, these heterogeneous requirements (tagging of strawberries, cheap items with short life-time, is different from cars with changing configurations) of objects have to be tackled with different technologies, e.g. barcode/RFID/sensor-networks. This is a reasonable argument against building an Internet of Things only RFID, RFID should be part of it, but others, barcode, as well.



Finally, I found a master thesis describing an art project about collecting and sharing stories about objects [3], which the authors calls an internet for things. It's probably not the killer-application but could be a nice consumer gadget for the EPCglobal architecture.

An interesting (but weired;) article is [4], where Rob Kranenburg (btw - the supervisor of [3]) argues for a society that should be in control of the (ubicomp) surveillance technologies it develops. The article is a little bit copious but provides nice arguments for why consumers should be empowered to play a mature role in an Internet of Things.

[1] Bob Williams, What is the Real Business Case for the Internet of Things?, Synthesis Journal, iTSC, 2008
[2] McFarlane, D.C., Sarma, S.E., Chirn, J.L., Wong, C.Y., and Ashton,
K., „The Intelligent Product in Manufacturing Control“, Journal of EAIA, July 2002
[3] Patrick Plaggenborg, Social RFID - internet for things, Master Thesis, Utrecht School of the Arts, August 2006.
[4] Rob van Kranenburg, The Internet of Things. A critique of ambient technology and the all-seeing network of RFID.

User study: bar-code vs. epc-rfid vs. nfc

If you are an application designer concerned about which interaction modality (barcode/epc/nfc) consumers could favor most, have a look at this study we've just conducted lately: