Palm Foleo: what?

Just read today from Engadget that Jeff Hawkins unveilled a new product from Palm, and no it's not a Palm handheld or a Treo. It's something totally different, it's what he calls the Palm Foleo mobile companion. You can see it below.



The Foleo is meant to complement your Treo smartphone, in the sense that if you want to read your e-mail on a large screen, you can just press a button on the Foleo and it will transfer the e-mail via Bluetooth to the Foleo and you can read it there. So, when I read about this, I thought so what? What's so cool about this? I mean we already have 10-inch laptops which can do more, we have Ultra Mobile PCs that Microsoft unveilled whose size and form factor lies between a handheld and a laptop. What does Palm add that makes it so exciting, and why is Palm adding it to its lineup, rather than focussing on making a better Palm handheld, something like one similar to iPhone that can do video, MP3, cell phone, handheld?

I really am not quite sure what Palm is thinking, I mean most executives have a laptop and a smartphone or RIM or Treo, so why would they need a Palm Foleo? The only thing I can think of is that to transfer the data from the Treo onto the Foleo, so you can see it in a bigger screen. You could probably do that with a regular laptop although it probably wouldn't be that easy or seamless. For e-mail, you would probably have to connect to the Internet on the laptop and then download the e-mail but there may not be Internet or wireless on the train for example. Then, that might be a reason to use the Foleo. But other than transferring documents over to see at a bigger screen, I don't see any other benefit.

On Technorati: Palm Foleo, Palm, mobile companion, Jeff Hawkins

mesh: Canada's web 2.0 conference starts tomorrow!

Tomorrow and May 31 is mesh, Canada's Web 2.0 conference. There seems to be a lot of speakers and workshops lined up including David Crow from TorCamp, Amber MacArthur, and Mark Evans. The schedule for mesh is here. Unfortunately, mesh is already sold out, the student tickets were really quickly sold out, they were going for like I think $25, while the actual conference fee is like $200.

I hope there will be some podcasts from mesh, so I can listen to the speakers and sessions that I missed.

On Technorati: mesh, web 2.0

Facebook opens site to developers

Facebook has now opened its site to developers. What does this mean? Developers can add Facebook functionality and tools to their own web site, essentially tapping into the Facebook social network and community. I think what this will lead to is 'social mashup', adding social networking features to web sites and make web sites more 'social'. Web sites don't have to create their own social networking tools and features, when they can use Facebook. It will be interesting, perhaps there might be a logo on a web site that says "Facebook certified", or "Facebook approved", or "Facebook enabled", or "Facebook compatible". I believe this is the start of creating an open social networking platform for the web, and in essence, "socializing" the web. Perhaps, using Facebook on a web site, is a way of creating and maintaining a sense of community part of my PhD research.

On Technorati: Facebook, social web, social mashup

Google 2.0

This article from Time Magazine shows that Google today has unveiled an upgrade to their popular search, called "universal search". The idea here is that when you're searching, instead of searching for video using videos.google.com or images like images.google.com, you just enter the search in the box, and all relevant search results will be categorized accordingly. If it's an image, the image will be shown, and if it's a video, then a video will be shown.

I just tried going to Google now, but it's still the same Google, I guess they haven't initiated the change quite yet on the google.ca site. Google is still the king of search having a commanding 64% of the search market, Yahoo with 22% and MSN with 9%. However, this begs the question how far can Google have the lead? Remember how Palm used to have a commanding lead over Microsoft? Now, Palm is not the disputed leader in PDAs. Same for Windows NT or for Internet Explorer, Microsoft seems to always catch up. However, Microsoft is having a tough time competing in the search space, so it'll be interesting to see how Microsoft will try to combat Google. Yahoo is going real strong into social networking, and I wonder when Google will start to realize that social networking will power searching, that sometimes you want to find things through your social network. But it seems so far, the Google search is king, even if you can't find your search result within the first 5 results.

On Technorati: Google, search

Doctoral colloquium slides, podcast and paper from Pervasive

I've just uploaded my slides, talk and paper from the doctoral colloquium talk from the Pervasive conference last week. Thanks to all for the great feedback. Pervasive was a great conference, and I really enjoyed meeting new and familiar faces, and explaining about my research. It was also great to be a student volunteer and helping out in whatever way I could. Next year's Pervasive is going to be Australia!

If you haven't already, check out my Pervasive photos on Flickr, or all the Pervasive photos on Flickr. At the same time, I've also updated my publications list and my web site so go and check that out.

And for those in Canada, have a happy and safe Victoria Day! For those in the US, have a happy and safe Memorial Day!

On Technorati: Pervasive07, Doctoral Colloquium

Pervasive conference, tutorial on Context-Aware Computing

The last tutorial of the conference is Context-aware computing presented by Anind Dey of Carnegie Mellon University. Context is all the stuff that is important for understanding a user's goals and motivation. What is the important part for context is reminders, when and where to deliver context? It is easy to grab context, but more difficult in my opinion, to infer context. Context is a very difficult and slippery word to define because it means different things to different people. Inferring an activity or task as context is difficult. Finding social norms as context is, according to Anind, is slippery. My PhD work is looking at community as a metaphor for finding social context. I believe that there is some way that we can infer social context automatically from the links within the social hypertext. As a pervasive computing community, we need to look at real problems instead of recycling over the same applications like location guides. Anind says that grad students should not do work in context infrastructures because it is extremely difficult to publish your work.

One of the challenges of context is how to leverage real human context and realize that you're not really getting at human intention. Anind showed some videos of examples of context, one video was about an automatic door made in Japan that conforms to the type of body you have and will open that much.

Pervasive conference, tutorial on Machine Learning for Ubicomp

Bernt is presenting the tutorial on machine learning for ubicomp. Machine learning comes from artificial intelligence and I think this is needed to make ubicomp systems intelligent and more smart. How to learn to perform a task from experience? Learning has a lot to do with optimization. We can use Bayes decision theory to classify some class based on some previous class. We can also use naive Bayes classifier, we need the probability given a class, and the probability of the class. There are graphical models of Bayesian networks such as Hidden Markov Models (directed, dynamic Bayesian network).

Pervasive conference, tutorial on Evaluation of Real Deployments in Ubicomp

Gregory Abowd from Georgia Tech is giving the tutorial on Evaluation of Real Deployments in Ubicomp. He is talking about what are the issues you need to think about when deploying a ubicomp system. Very often papers get rejected because there is no evaluation of the system in a deployed environment. What is important is how to do research with human subjects, how there needs to be an ethics approval, compensation, getting the right demographic and retaining participants. Sometimes it is OK to be the end-user and the designer. We also have to ask users what they think through surveys, questionnaires, and interviews. You need to spend a lot of time to prepare the survey or interview, but in the end the analysis is much easier, so basically you should not rush writing a survey or questionnaire.

In designing a study, you need to be a devil's advocate and ask yourself what things could affect the interpretation of the study and controlling variables. What kind of study is it, within subjects design or between subjects design. How do we get information from a person's every day life? We don't want to follow them every hour, every minute, by instrumenting a camera or recording device. Instead, the better way is to use experience sampling, where you interrupt the person to gather relevant information.

With experience sampling, you can use a diary where you ask the participant to record what they were doing, where they were doing it, why they were doing it. However, there are social-legal implications of recording this. Basically, in the end, we need to balance tracking participants with asking participants questions so that can be able to match between them.

Pervasive conference, tutorial on Ethnography

This next tutorial is on Ethnography: Thick and Thin being presented by Ken Anderson of Intel and Paul Dourish of UC Irvine. According to Marilyn Strathern, Cambridge, ethnography is "the deliberate attempt to generate more data than the investigator is aware of at the time of collection". Ethnography has started since the 1910s, even further than computer science, with anthropology. People think of ethnography as a tool for studying long-term studies and participatory observation. Ethnography is about not just about capturing the experience, but taking that experience, and determining how this experience can relate to the real world. So, ethnography is not about replicating the experience, making you become part of the culture that you're studying. Tom's talk talked about just because you can do this, doesn't mean that you should, whereas with this talk, just because you should doesn't mean that you can which is the opposite.

Ethnographic data is interpreted, and I believe that culture is important in understanding, deploying and evaluating ubiquitous computing systems. When you deploy a ubicomp system, how is this going to affect the culture? If it starts breaking culture, people won't use it. The systems need to be embedded within the culture, without disrupting it. Ethnography is about writing about people, after the things happen not during. The ethnographer has two roles: one as author and one as participant. So what does ethnography have to do within ubiquitous computing, we can think of technology as a site of social and cultural production. What are the good questions to ask of an ethnography? What are the empirical claims? What theoretical claims are made? How does this contribute to the corpus? What was the context of production?

Pervasive conference, tutorial on Interaction in Ubiquitous Computing

Right now is the tutorial on interaction and ubiquitous computing presented by Tom Rodden of the University of Nottingham. Tom is talking about how do we achieve Mark Weiser's vision? Technology is vanishing into smaller and smaller devices which we don't now even think about, like USB keys and iPods. What are the key issues of ubiquitous computing? First is natural interfaces and an example of this is Stanford's iRoom which is a smart room environment where there are wall-mounted displays and controllers are used to transfer files to the display and to interact with the tabletop display. The real challenge for HCI is how may these things be used in real life. The second part is context, how to use context to provide awareness? We need to ask these questions when we measure and use context: who, what, where, when and why. The challenges of context-awareness to add more context or to fuse data to infer context.
Digital information is being augmented in the physical world, actions on physical objects have meaning in the virtual world and vice versa.

One of the issues that start to emerge is that will each object have a little instruction manual? One of the general theme of this tutorial is that we design interaction in ubicomp, but will they actually be used in everyday life. Tom showed some really neat videos, one with a weight table and key table, that based on weight, the image moves faster or the picture tilts more. Attendees in the audience laughed, because would you have that kind of device in your home? Nonetheless, a great talk, I thoroughly enjoyed it.

Pervasive conference, Day 4

Today is Day 4 and the last day of the Pervasive conference, with the tutorial sessions. I'm once again doing my duty as a student volunteer, so if you see me in between breaks, come and say hi! I'm really enjoying this conference, it was a great chance to meet lots of new people, researchers that I've always wanted to meet. Dinner last night at the CN Tower was great, I really liked the appetizers that were given to us while we were in the cafe. I've been to the CN Tower many times, but never to the cafe, and only maybe twice at the 360 revolving restaurant. I took some pictures, although others at the conference on Flickr will have done a much better job than my Palm Zire 71, so you can check them there.

There will be a student volunteer party tonight for all the hard work we the student volunteers did!

Pervasive conference, Day 2

Today is Day 2 of the Pervasive conference. Adam Greenfield is the keynote speaker and will talk about Everyware. Khai is the conference chair and he is now introducing the Pervasive conference and talking about why Toronto is a perfect fit for hosting Pervasive 2007.



This is the first time Pervasive has ventured outside Europe, there are over 300 attendees from Europe, Asia, Australia and North America. Khai is talking about the structure and composition of the Pervasive conference. There will be posters and demo presentations today, along with papers. Khai is thanking all the various people that made the conference possible, including the student volunteers yeah! And now, Khai is thanking the industry sponsors. All photos from the conference will be tagged in Flickr with the tag "pervasive07".

This year, there were 142 papers of which 132 were valid. There were 403 submitting authors from 32 countries out of which 21 papers were accepted for a 16% acceptance rate. For the paper review process, all papers were given to the two PC members, where there were a total of 4 reviews per paper. There were 28 PC members, 178 external reviewers, and 532 completed reviews. Khai is introducing Adam Greenfield and how his work is considered as "soulful" by Bruce Sterling, the keynote speaker at Ubicomp 2006.



Adam had a 200 slide Flickr presentation at the CHI conference. Adam's book on Everyware is the first book on ubiquitous computing that the lay person can understand, trying to make sense of Mark Weiser's vision. Some characteristics of Weiser's ubicomp are embedded, wireless, imperceptible, multiple, post-GUI. Adam says that Weiser's vision is considered still radical, and a lot of the things PARC had to create from scratch, which we take for granted right now like wireless 802.11. We are now beginning to see an emergent "internet of things", a class of systems that tends to colonize everyday life. This is an aggressive claim over a large domain. Adam says that "information processing" is "dissolving in behavior". One example of this that Adam gives is about the Octopus card in Hong Kong used for transit which is a wireless reader card where you can wave it towards the reader without having to take out the card (women in Hong Kong leave that card into their handbags). So what happens is that the visible (eg. the card) becomes invisible. I can say that I really love the Octopus card, Toronto transit should adopt that (so I don't have to use tokens for the TTC and GO Train ticket for the GO Train, and I can use the same card to take the ferry, the Oakville bus, York region transit, or any other transit system in the GTA).

So is this science fiction? Adam believes that we are beginning to see some of these visions happening but in a different fashion. The opt out feature is probably something that ubicomp researchers don't really think about when designing ubicomp systems, so to me that is a new thing. I met Adam before in San Francisco when I was doing my internship at PARC and had the privilege of doing a small interview with him which you can see from this post on my blog.

I just uploaded my photos that I took from my Palm Zire 71 up on the Flickr site, tagged with pervasive07.

On Technorati: pervasive07

Yahoo Research hires Duncan Watts

Just read about this article that Yahoo Research just hired Duncan Watts, who is the professor behind the science of six degrees and the small-world model. Duncan Watts is going to lead Yahoo's research in human social dynamics, including social networks and collaborative problem solving. This shows that Yahoo is really serious into social networking, having bought out del.icio.us, Flickr and Upcoming, but specifically using sociology to drive new web interfaces and interaction. This is what the web is going to, and clearly Yahoo is in that direction. In my opinion, this begs the question what Google is doing, and why they are not into the social networking arena (besides having Orkut and Blogger).

On Technorati: Yahoo, Duncan Watts

At Pervasive today, workshops and doctoral colloquium

The Pervasive conference starts today with the workshops and doctoral colloquium. As a student volunteer, I helped with stuffing conference bags with proceedings and adjunct proceedings, and giving them to attendees. I'm right now in the student volunteer room now reviewing my slides for the doctoral colloquium and hanging out with other student volunteers. I also took pictures from the conference so far which will be uploaded later.

On Technorati: Pervasive07

Pervasive conference starts tomorrow!

I'm going to give a doctoral colloquium talk tomorrow at Pervasive called "Searching for Sense of Virtual Community in Social Hypertext". Looking forward to some great discussion. I'll also be working as a student volunteer as well. If you're at Pervasive, come and see me, I'll be working at the registration desk tomorrow from 8 to 10 am. Then, my talk is at 2:30 pm.

Got to finish those doctoral colloquium slides!

On Technorati: Pervasive2007, doctoral colloquium

Gregory D. Abowd talk at DCS today

Today is a talk from Gregory D. Abowd from the School of Interactive Computing and GVU Center, Georgia Tech called "Using Computing Technologies to Face the Challenges of Autism". This is an application of ubiquitous computing to a real-life health problems. I think this is what ubiquitous computing really should be, how computing can be applied to problems in real life. Gregory will be at the Pervasive conference doing a tutorial, which I'm in the doctoral colloquium and a student volunteer in.

Here is the abstract for the talk:
In the Fall of 1999, my wife and I learned that our son, Aidan, age 2, had
been diagnosed with autism. In the summer of 2003, our second son, Blaise,
was also diagnosed with autism, at the age of 3. A recent CDC study
estimates the incidence of autism in several regions of the U.S. at 1 in
1150, so my wife and I are not alone in having to come to grips with the
everyday struggles of this perplexing neurological developmental
disability. Since I prescribe to the research philosophy of "scratching your own itch," it is no surprise that I have looked for ways to have my research in
ubiquitous computing address the challenges of those impacted by autism. My
goal is not to use technology to "cure" autism, but to have it play a vital
role in increasing our understanding of that unique human condition and to
have it ease the everyday struggles for those who deal with it. In this
talk, I will give an overview of my group's research trajectory, reflecting
the efforts of a growing community of researchers who are using this
real-world health challenge to drive a human-centered research agenda. I
will summarize four years of research and give a glimpse of what I think
are the important challenges for the next four years, and why I think
technologists are an important part of the solution.

Gregory is talking about Family Video Archive which he created for annotating metadata on video which he converted from his father's tapes. His research is now delving into medical disorders like autism to apply his research based on his sons who have autism. Autism is a developmental disability impacting language, socialization and behaviour. I knew a student who I was a tutor when I was working in Kumon who had autism and how her mother was so persistent in trying to get all the help she could get for her son. The research projects that he is doing to help with autism deals with automated capture of a live experience.

The three projects that deal with automated capture are Abaris, which deals with data capture of developmental therapy. Lots of data get generated from these therapy sessions. The idea is to instrument the therapy sessions with automated data capture tools, by detecting when the trial begins using phonetic-based speech, and recording handwriting using Anoto to locate grading at end of trial. An application was created to detect differences between different sessions from different therapists, which therapists may not have remembered. This helps caregivers use real data to assess progress.

The second project is called CareLog which captures rich behavioural data in the
unstructured environment. This behavioural data could be the good and bad behaviours, so therapists can detect behavioural changes in children. This is called retroactive capturing and is using selective archiving. This technology can be used at home or in a school setting, and is part of Gillian Hayes' PhD thesis who gave a talk at U of T about 1-2 months ago.

The third project deals with early detection of autism and can be applied to other medical disorders. How does HCI come into this problem? Gregory says we need to have better screening and diagnosis practices in parent reporting and child observation. One research area deals with automated video analysis to find automatic scene extraction and automatic scene annotation to compare to see what is different between two sessions. Gregory just mentioned that not just Google is a good research tool, so is YouTube which he showed a video of a child and then showed short extractions of clips that demonstrate certain behaviours.

So how does capturing play into the science of autism? According to Gregory, capturing is a form of imaging and that capturing is considered behavior imaging and can transform the science of autism, just like imaging has impacted medical science.

Map of online communities

Check out this really great map of online communities! The size of the geographic region is proportional to the estimated size of membership.



On Technorati: online communities, social networks