Guests in my multimodal interaction class

Today I had brought 3 more professors with me to teach the class on multimodal interaction (I learned from Hans). As we have the pd-net project meeting Nigel Davies, Marc Langheirich, and Rui Jose were in Stuttgart and ‘volunteered’ to give a talk.

Nigel talked about the work in Lancaster on the use of mobile computing technology to support sustainable travel. He explained the experiments they conducted for collecting and sharing travel related information. In the 6th Sense Transport project they look beyond looking at understanding the current context into predictions and eventually ‘time travel’ ;-)



Marc presented a one hour version of his tutorial on privacy introducing the terminology and explaining the many facets this topic has. We discussed the ‘NTHNTF’ argument (Nothing To Hide Nothing To Fear) and Marc used an example of AOLstalker.com to show the weaknesses of this argument. Marc suggested some reading if you want to dive into the topic, see [1,2,3,4].

Rui focused in his lecture on pervasive public displays. He gave an overview of typical architectures for digital signage systems and the resulting limitation. The pd-net approach aims at creating an open platform that allows many different applications and use cased. He showed once concept of using virtual pin-badges to trigger content and to express interest in a certain topic.

There is more information on the pd-net project on http://pd-net.org

[1] David Brin. The Transparent Society. Perseus Publishing, 1999.
[2] Simson Garfinkel: Database Nation – The Death of Privacy in the 21st Century. O’Reilly, 2001.
[3] Lawrence Lessig: Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace. Basic Books, 2006. http://codev2.cc/
[4] Waldo, Lin, Millett (eds.): Engaging Privacy and Information Technologygy in a Digital Age. National Academies Press, 2007.

pdnet meeting at the University of Minho in Portugal

Over the last day we got together in Portugal to discuss the progress in the EU-FET-OPEN project pdnet. We are now 9 month into the project and it is great to see the results appearing. Stay tune for upcoming papers. Besides other research we have done interesting observational work and have gained understanding what matters for people when setting up public displays and this informs our system design.

In summer we have the opportunity to try our system by deploying two applications in Oulu, Finland. With two applications proposals we were selected as finalist for UbiChallenge. In June we will go with our students to Oulu and implement our system and study the usage in a public deployment.

Food was amazing…

PD-NET web page and facebook page

For our European FET open project PD-NET we have a web page at http://pd-net.org/ online. There we describe the project and there is already the first publication (a paper we will present at ACM Multimedia 2010) listed. The page also includes a description of the project and the partners. If you work on public displays or if you are interested in this topic (e.g. as developer, service provider, device manufacturer, content designer, or user) please feel free to contact us. Perhaps there is chance for collaboration.

The project objectives are:

• To create enabling technologies for large-scale pervasive display networks through the design, development and evaluation of a robust, scalable, distributed and open platform for interconnecting displays and their sensors.
• To establish Europe as the international centre for work on pervasive display networks.
• To address key scientific challenges that may inhibit the widespread adoption of pervasive display network technology: Tensions between privacy and personalization, situated displays, business and legislative requirements, User Interaction.

To share resources and ideas with a community of researchers interested in the topic we have setup a facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/pdnet. There is one album where we hope to collect a larger number of photos of public displays (traditional and digital) from around the world to document the variety of public displays and people’s interaction with them. If you have interesting photos of public displays please share them on the page. We also encourage researchers publishing in this research field to share their publications (or links to the publications) with the community (and it is obvious that everyone will cite you ;-)

pdnet kick-off in Lancaster - starting a new communication era?

We are excitet to start a new European FET Open project on pervasive display networks. With pdnet we hope to create an entirely new communication media in public spaces. At the University of Lancaster we had two intensive days to get the project started and it we developed a lot of exciting ideas!

pdnet project abstract: "The project aims to lay the scientific foundations for a new form of communications medium with the same potential impact on society as radio, television and the Internet. The goal is to explore the scientific challenges and new technologies required to enable the emergence of large scale networks of pervasive public displays and associated sensors that are open to applications and content from many sources.
In effect, the project will look to provide the foundations for work on a brand new global communications medium for information access and interaction and to ensure that Europe is in the best possible position to benefit from this new medium.
The project is highly innovative - no such pervasive display networks exist today and their emergence would represent a radical transformation in the way we think about information dissemination in public spaces; it is high risk - numerous technical and societal challenges need to be addressed before pervasive display networks are possible; and potentially high pay-off - if successful, the project will pioneer a new research area and provide the foundations for a new communications medium that offers entirely new opportunities for economic activity and a means to radically change public spaces - from today's environments in which information is pushed to passers-by in the form of adverts to spaces that can utilize public displays and ambient intelligence to reflect the hopes, aspirations and interests of its occupants using content and applications created anywhere in a global network."

PS: I learned about a new toy/educational kit from Ben: Lego WeDo Robotics kit connected to Scratch.