Schlagwort: travel

Fight for attention – changing cover display of a magazine

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Attention is precious and there is a clear fight for it. This is very easy to observe on advertising boards and in news shops. Coming back from Berlin I went in Augsburg into the news agent to get a news paper – and not really looking at magazines is still discovered from the corner of my eyes an issue of FHM with a changing cover page. Technically it is very simple: a lenticular lens that presents and image depending on the viewing angle – alternating between 3 pictures – one of which is a full page advert (for details on how it works see lenticular printing in Wikipedia). A similar approach has already been used in various poster advertising campaigns – showing different pictures as people walk by (http://youtube.com/watch?v=0dqigww4gM8, http://youtube.com/watch?v=iShPBmtajH8). One could also create a context-aware advert, showing different images for small and tall people 😉

In outdoor advertising we see the change to active display happening at the moment. I am really curious when the first really active cover pages on magazines will emerge – thinking of ideas in context-awareness the possibilities seem endless. However it is really a question if electronic paper will be cheap enough before we move to completely electronic reading. Another issue (even with this current version of the magazine) is recycling – which becomes much more difficult when mixing further material with paper.

Poor man’s location awareness

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Over the last day I have experienced that very basic location information in the display can already provide a benefit to the user. Being the first time in Sydney I realized that network information of my GSM-phone is very reliable to tell me when to get off the bus – obviously it is not fine grain location information but so far always walking distance. At some locations (such as Bondi beach) visual pattern matching works very well, too 😉 And when to get off the bus seems a concern to many people (just extrapolating from the small sample I had over the last days…).

In my pervasive computing class, which I currently teach, we covered recently different aspects of location based systems – by the way a good starting point on the topic is [1] and [2]. At We discussed issues related to visual pattern matching – and when looking at the skyline of Sydney one becomes very quickly aware of the potential of this approach (especially with all the tagged pictures on flickr) but at the same time the complexity of matching from arbitrary locations becomes apparent.

Location awareness offers many interesting questions and challenging problems – looks like there are ideas for project and thesis topics, e.g. how semantic location information (even of lower quality) can be beneficial to users or finger printing based on radio/TV broadcast information.

[1] J. Hightower and G. Borriello. Location systems for ubiquitous computing. IEEE Computer, 34(8):57–66, Aug. 2001. http://www.intel-research.net/seattle/pubs/062120021154_45.pdf

[2] Jeffrey Hightower and Gaetano Borriello. Location Sensing Techniques. UW-CSE-01-07-01.

Mensch und Computer program committee meeting in Lübeck

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Yesterday night I flew to Hamburg and traveled on to Lübeck – a quite nice town in the north of Germany – for the program committee meeting of Mensch und Computer 2008. This morning I got up a little earlier to walk around the city – as it was my first time visiting. The building I could see when walking into town however was oddly familiar, after some moments I recalled that it is the Holstentor which was pictured on the 50DM note (DM = German Mark – the money used in Germany till 2001 before we exchanged it for the Euro ;-).

In the meeting we discussed a large number of submission made to Mensch und Computer 2008. It seems there are quite an interesting number of papers in the program which make the conference worth while. We will also run the second edition of our workshop on Automotive User Interface and Interactive Applications. The automotive workshop we ran 2007 in Weimar was with about 30 participants very successful.

CHI Conference in Florence

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On Sunday afternoon I flew to Florence and we met up in the evening with former colleagues – CHI always feels like a school reunion 😉 and it is great to get first hand reports on what everyone is working currently. On the plane I met Peter Thomas (editor of Ubquitous Computing Journal) and we talked about the option of a special issue on automotive…

We have rented a house in the Tuscany Mountains together with Antonio’s group and collaborators from BMW research and T-Labs. Even though we have to commute into Florence everyday it is just great that we have our “own” house – and it is much cheaper (but we have to do our dishes).

The conference is massive – 2300 people. There is a lot of interesting work and hence it is not feasible to cover it in a few sentences. Nevertheless there are some random pointers:

In the keynote a reference to an old reading machine by Athanasius Kircher was mentioned.

Mouse Mischief – educational software – 30 mice connected to 1 PC – cool!

Reality based interaction – conceptual paper – arguing that things should behaves as in the real world – interesting concept bringing together many new UI ideas

Inflatable mouse – cool technology from Korea– interesting use cases – we could integrate this in some of our projects (not inflating the mouse but inflating other things)

Multiple Maps – Synthesizing many maps – could be interesting for new navigation functions

Rub the Stane – interactive surfaces – detection of scratching noises only using a microphone

Usability evaluation considered harmful – the every-year discussion on how to make CHI more interesting continues

It seems there is currently some work going on looking at technologies in religious practice. Over lunch we had developed interesting ideas towards remote access to multimedia information (e.g. services of ‘once’ local church) and sharing awareness. This domain is intriguing because churches often form tight communities and content is regularly produced and available. Perhaps we should follow up on this with a project…

Dairy study on mobile information needs – good base literature of what information people need/use when they are mobile

K-Sketch – cool sketching technique.

Crowdsourcing user studies – reminded me of my visit at http://humangrid.eu

Lean and Zoom – simple idea – you come close it gets bigger – nicely done

Application Workshop of KDUbiq in Porto

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After having frost and snow yesterday morning in Germany being in Porto (Portugal) is quite a treat. The KDubiq application workshop is in parallel to the summer school and yesterday evening it was interesting to meet up with some people teaching there.

The more I learn about data mining and machine learning the more I see even greater potential in many ubicomp application domains. In my talk “Ubicomp Applications and Beyond – Research Challenges and Visions” I looked back at selected applications and systems that we have developed over the last 10 year (have a look at the slides – I, too was surprised what variety of projects we did in the last years ;-). So far we have often used basic machine learning methods to implement – in many cases creating a version 2 of these systems where machine learning research is brought together with ubicomp research and new technology platforms could make a real difference.

Alessandro Donati from ESA gave a talk “Technology for challenging future space missions” which introduced several challenges. He explained their approach to technology introduction into mission control. The basic idea is that the technology providers create together with the users a new application or tool. He strongly argued for a user centred design and development process. It is interesting to see that the concept of user centred development processes are becoming more widespread and go beyond classical user interfaces into complex system development.

Reset/reboot is ubiquitous – or my worst train ride so far

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What have learned to do when our computer or phone does not work anymore? Easy just reboot it. A colleague recently told me his rental car broke down (basically did not work anymore) but after resetting it, it worked fine again. When he told me I found this pretty strange – ok the radio or opening the car boot – but essential functions related to driving?

Today I was travelling on an ICE high-speed train to Amsterdam for the CHI-Notes committee meeting and shortly after we left Germany the train lost speed and became slower and just rolled out. Then can an interesting announcement: “Sorry it seems we do not get power anymore – but we think it is not a big problem. We reset the train and then we are on our way again”. The reboot did not work 🙁 so they told us we needed to another engine. Perhaps there was more to reboot (e.g. the train power grid nation wide?)…

Extrapolating in the future I can imagine a lot of things we will need to reboot, e.g. your shoes, your furniture, your house, your augmented sense, and your implants – or should we take more care in developing things?

At some point they decided we can not wait on the train and we had to get off the train outside the station (using small ladder) while it was pouring with rain. The left us than waiting for 2 hours (in the rain) – basically till we found ourselves another means of transport (overall delay about 5 hours). This made me realize that a Nokia N95 with GPS is probably really good while travelling – if I would have had it with me I could have called a taxi to where I was 😉

More about train rides… Some more traditional technologies however work very well – this week I was already once stuck on a train were a passenger pulled the emergency train and went of the train – somewhere in the middle of nowhere…

Interesting MSc Dissertations at Trinity in Dublin

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I have been at Trinity College in Dublin today as external member of the MSc exam board. While reading MSc dissertations I learned at lot of interesting things. Here are two pointers to technologies which I like to share (they may be useful in further projects):

SUMO – Simulation of Urban Mobility: An open source traffic simulation package
http://sumo.sourceforge.net/

Small computing platform: http://gumstix.com/

In Search of Excellence

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At the Fraunhofer retreat in Westerburg we had very interesting discussions on research and research strategies in computer science. The span of excellent research in computer science is enormous ranging from theoretical work (e.g. math style proofs), to engineering type work (e.g. systems), to experimental and empirical work (e.g. studies). This makes it really challenging to find a common notion of “excellent research”. This reminds me of an interesting book which I started to read (recommended to me at the retreat): In Search of Excellence: Lessons from Americas Best Run Companies by Robert H Waterman et al. – so far it is really interesting to read. However everything in management seems really straightforward on paper – but in my experience in the real world it always comes down to people.

Guest course at the University of Linz, MSc Pervasive Computing

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I am teaching a guest course at the University of Linz in the Pervasive Computing master program. The topic is Unconventional User Interaction – User Interfaces in a Pervasive Computing World (http://www.ubicomp.net/uui). Today we started with an introduction to motivate how pervasive computing changes human computer interaction. I am already looking forward to the projects!

At dinner I learned why you can never have enough forks in a good restaurant. In case you loose your pen for the mobile phone a fork will do… The topic of the lecture is everywhere!