This week the final presentations of the lab course were due. It was really interesting to see what motivated students can achieve in just 4 weeks! The projects explored the idea of contextual ECG and students implemented the data acquisition, transmission over the network, and visualisation. The user studies showed that there is quite some potential in the idea (even though there is also still some way to go before the system is perfect ;-) We plan to publish a paper on the results of the course.
Friday 30 March 2007
User tests and final presentations of the lab course
This week the final presentations of the lab course were due. It was really interesting to see what motivated students can achieve in just 4 weeks! The projects explored the idea of contextual ECG and students implemented the data acquisition, transmission over the network, and visualisation. The user studies showed that there is quite some potential in the idea (even though there is also still some way to go before the system is perfect ;-) We plan to publish a paper on the results of the course.
Thursday 29 March 2007
Having a digital presence after life?
Thursday 22 March 2007
Panel on Sensor Networks – Applications are the Key
Debora Estrin made an interesting statement. The “early challenges” (the thousands or millions of randomly scattered sensor notes) do not have much applicability outside the battlefield. The new challenges are heterogeneity (specific sensors with specific capabilities) and interactivity (basically sense-making is a process where humans are involved). She made the point that the logical consequence is that dealing with data is the essential issue and statistics have an increasing role. Furthermore these new research directions make a stromg call for application driven research. With these very insightful comments she criticised a lot of the current work in sensor networks. Especially the observation that there is no such thing as a "general sensor" - it points out that concrete applications are required to make meaningful contributions, even to basic research in sensor networks research.
Best Demo Award at Percom 2007
Gregor got for our Perci prototype (Supporting Mobile Service Usage through Physical Mobile Interaction) the best demo award. So it paid off that he spend a night configuring the data services on the phones for the
Wednesday 21 March 2007
Talks and Demos at PerCom 2007 in White Plains, NY
This year we (my previous group from LMU Munich) have a significant presence at PerCom. Form the 20 full papers the Embedded Interaction Research Group (www.hcilab.org) has 3, and additionally 1 of the 7 concise papers is from us. With a total of 207 submissions and an acceptance rate of around 10% this is quite an achievement for the team – and a good high point for the project before moving it to University of Bonn.
What can you do with a Wii controller? Use tape and connect a toothbrush and program a nice UI (fish tank) in Flash. Quite an interesting demo from Waseda University in Japan - at least the person who did the demo had really clean teeth in the evening.
Monday 19 March 2007
PerTec Workshop in NY, Ripping off the Antenna
There was an interesting contribution by Paul Moskowitz from IBM, the clipped tag. It is a tag where you can physically rip off some part the antenna to reduce the read range from several meters to centimetres (see the pictures). It is really interesting that people can do a very clear and visible action to change the characteristics of a tag. The only questions that remains for me – will people trust that this really rips of the antenna? Probably yes…
The topics we discussed included security, privacy, location and RFID, end user issues, and connection of sensors to RFID, we hope to write it up in an overview article.
Sunday 18 March 2007
Wearable Computing – Is it here?
After Falke presented some years ago a sensor/ECG-t-shirt there was another one at CeBIT this year. It is not on the marked yet and it did not yet look fully convincing (you need to button in the electrodes). In our lab class on programming mobile systems we could use such a t-shirt. Currently we use stick on electrodes from http://www.alivetec.com/ which work really good but for the scenarios in mind having a t-shirt would be nicer.
In my recent entry on St. Petersburg I wondered about a communication glove. There was one on display – it includes only the essential (basically a speaker and a microphone) – but it enforced my opinion that creating a communication glove would be an interesting project. There were also hats with included speaker and microphones.
I was told that garments that keep warm – with active heating – are a hot topic ;-) Not fully convinced, but if projected consequently into the future it could change the way we dress completely. Want to show off you body at -20°C? Just power up the heating in your underwear a bit more and walk outdoors in your favourite summer dress without a coat. Not sure if this is the way we should push, I rather take my warm coat and save some energy. Apropos saving energy – there were interesting laptop bags with solar panels on the outside for harvesting energy.
Saturday 17 March 2007
Fraunhofer at CeBIT
Friday 16 March 2007
CeBIT: Context-Awareness for Novel Transport and Logistics Services
The big question is now on algorithms and software for context recognition and data mining in the collected sensor data, the integration with processes and company software systems, and the exploitation for optimising transport and logistics processes.
Wednesday 14 March 2007
Business in a Nutshell, Thoughts on Patents
Thomas Doppelberger and Andreas Aepfelbacher from Fraunhofer Venture Group (http://www.venturecommunity.de/) came to our lab course to teach us how to get from a technical idea to a successful business. They talked us through the essentials of a business plan, discussed common mistakes and gave us an insight how companies are evaluated and furthermore encouraged our “entrepreneurial thinking”.
After such a day and the interesting discussions with them and the students one wonders why we are not trying more often to look into the option of starting a company. Obviously not every start-up is the next youtube or second life – but without trying ideas out, there is not way in telling if the work or not.
Over lunch we talked very briefly about issues on patents and licensing. Even though the value of patents for companies is fairly comprehensible many questions remain open in publicly funded research institutions, – especially with regard to computer science. Thinking a little more about the figures they presented in the morning I wonder how the balance (over all publicly funded research in universities and non-profit institutions) between investments in securing rights (basically making patents and holding them) and income (e.g. licensing) is. Are there any figures available? Within the whole Fraunhofer Gesellschaft it is impressive to see the contribution of one development such as MP3 to such an equation.
Monday 12 March 2007
Visitor from Finland
Jonna Häkkilä, a principle scientist from Nokia Research Center in Helsinki/Oulu, is visiting us for two days. As you can see on the pictures she enjoyed arguing with our students. She also gave a talk on her recent work. We talked a lot about the format of the course and the results are really interesting. I think getting 10 students for 4 weeks into one room (every day from 9-5) makes a lot of sense - it is amazing how quick students learn is such a setting.
Jonna was a co-author of a paper on tactile output at TEI'07 ("Tap Input as an Embedded Interaction Method for Mobile Devices"). We discussed some opportunities for a follow-up project here in Bonn. Perhaps we co-supervise a master student on the topic.
Paul Holleis from my group (he is still in Munich) is visiting, too. While walking along river Rhine we got into an interesting discussion on wearable computing. Cloth cover often the whole body - would they not be great for input?
Wednesday 7 March 2007
Broadcasting your Heart Beat
This morning the first 3 students completed the exercise part of our lab class. For the first team the basics are done and we start with the exciting part ;-)
We have different sensors that can be connected via Bluetooth to the phone (e.g. heart rate, pulse oximeter, GPS) and the task for the project is to invent a new application that makes use of sensors and creates a new user experience.
In the brainstorming session some were tearing out their hair - but it was rewarding. Some of the ideas that came out are really novel - and perhaps a bit to crazy to implement them. One example of such an idea is to create a web radio station that broadcasts the live heart beat of celebrities as an audio stream (not sure if this is the right way to fame). Other ideas centered on support for sport, exercise and mobile health.
Alexander De Luca (a former colleague from LMU Munich) was spending the last few days with us here. He helped greatly to write some code to get the Alivetec-ECG data parsed.
Thursday 1 March 2007
Zweitgeist - Meeting People While Browsing
Since then I think that is a really exiting idea. But looking at his current work it is easy to imagine that this could really take of. It is extremely easy and looks like fun. You have your avatar (which you can customize) that can meet and interact with other avatars that are at the same web page as you are. It is not a lot what you can do - but that is the beauty!