Jason Hong's Confabulations

One cross-cutting aspect common to many ubicomp applications is the need for a world model, some computational representation of the physical world. Some issues here include: Using sensors and existing data sources to acquire and update the model The precision and accuracy of that model with ground truth (ie the real world) Coming up with standard representations that can be shared across multiple apps Controlling how the world model is shared with others Mediating the conflict between high-fidelity models with privacy The last two points are especially interesting ones, and point to a larger question with respect to ubicomp. It seems that the more reliable and more fine-grained ubicomp world models are, the less inherent plausible deniability there is. Imagine if you could no longer tell white lies on the cell phone about where you were or what you were doing. In a perfect system, there is no place to hide. Of course I'm pushing an extreme case, but here...

I wonder how long it will be before we start seeing egregious uses of location-enabled cell phones. ----- http://news.com.com/Big+boss+is+watching/2100-1036_3-5379953.html?tag=nefd.lede Earlier this month, mobile tracking firm Xora showed off the latest version of its Nextel GPS (global positioning system) phone software. The company says 1,600 corporate customers have signed up for its services, including "geofences" technology that sets off an alarm at the office when field workers go to preprogrammed off-limits sites, such as a bar or a park. "There's no electro shock--yet," Xora CEO Sanjay Shirole said.

"You know it when you lose it." -- David Flaherty "My own hunch is that Big Brother, if he comes to the United States, will turn out to be not a greedy power-seeker but a relentless bureaucrat obsessed with efficiency" -- Vance Packard Privacy is "ultimately a psychological construct, with malleable ties to specific objective conditions" -- Jonathan Grudin, 2001 "Numerous mechanical devices threaten to make good the prediction that 'what is whispered in the closet shall be proclaimed from the housetops.'" -- Brandeis and Warren

Now this is a very cool resource for finding videos online. Let's you type in keywords, see similar searches, and most importantly, find useful videos. Link goes to a search for videos on "ubiquitous computing". http://www.open-video.org/

Just finished a talk for Topics in Privacy where I was making the case that both privacy and security are vitamins rather than aspirin. The old saw goes that businesses need to provide aspirin, that is solve an immediate problem, rather than provide vitamins, something that we all know is good for us but we don't do. The observation here is that privacy and security seem to be more of vitamins, something we know we should have in our systems and something we know we should take more care of, but rarely do. This insight struck me while I was reading the New York Times Magazine, more specifically The Autonomist's Manifesto . When this experiment began in 1996, some critics said it was unfair to create these ''Lexus lanes.'' But by now, even drivers who won't pay the toll have come to appreciate the lanes because they divert traffic from the regular highway. And while affluent drivers are more likely to pay the bill, surveys have found people of all...

http://emachineshop.com/users/index.htm This is pretty amazing, you can design custom physical parts and then have them created and then sent to you. From a research perspective, it would be really interesting if you could add behaviors to them (ie smart objects), or have a rapid prototyping tool that would make it easy to mock up some things before having to endure the cycle of waiting and finding that it wasn't exactly what you wanted.

And now, something completely off-topic... ---- http://www.cnn.com/2004/SHOWBIZ/Movies/09/21/demystifying.starwars.ap/index.html "I remember the memos from 20th Century Fox," Hamill said. " 'Can you put a pair of lederhosen on the Wookie?' All they could think of was, 'This character has no pants on!' This went back and forth. They did sketches of him in culottes and baggy shorts."

Amazing, if you think about it, how Google has become so pervasive that almost everyone uses it as a verb, ie "to Google". Even more amazing was that it didn't exist 6 years ago. I think WiFi is the only thing that belongs in this category. ----- Google began in 1998 as an academic research project by Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page, who were then graduate students at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California. http://www.economist.com/science/tq/displayStory.cfm?story_id=3171440

Interesting continuation of the smart mobs idea expounded by Rheingold. --- Wireless dating or Bluedating (from Bluetooth) is a form of dating which makes use of mobile phone and bluetooth technologies. Subscribers to the service enter details about themselves and about their ideal partner, as they would for other on-line dating services. When their mobile phone comes in the vicinity of that of another subscriber (a radius of about 10 meters) the phones exchange details of the two people (the vicinity can be a public and populated space too, like a pub, a street, plaza and so on). If there is a match then they are alerted and can seek each other out and directly chat using text bluetooth (bluechat). Settings can include an option which restricts alerts to subscribers who have a friend in common. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_dating

Data looks sparse, doesn't look good for PlaceLab support. Surely there must be more people here in Pittsburgh using WiFi.

ACM Transactions on Architecture and Code Optimization (TACO)

http://engadget.com/entry/7277417973116153/ For almost $5K, you can get about a dozen smart dust motes and a development environment.

I have to admit, it has a retro cool feeling to it. http://users.net1plus.com/scottm/HomeComputer.jpg

"A Canadian inventor has designed a computer mouse steered by movements of the nose and eyelids. The invention, dubbed a "Nouse," is meant to help people with a disability use a computer." http://www.cbc.ca/story/science/national/2004/09/16/nouse040916.html ----- I hope the inventor didn't get inspiration from this paper... A Nose Gesture Interface Device: Extending Virtual Realities http://www-2.cs.cmu.edu/~hudson/datanose/uist91_henry_datanose.pdf This paper reports on the development of a nose-machine interface device that provides real-time gesture, position, smell and facial expression information. The DATA NOSETM — Data AtomaTa CORNUCOPIA pNeumatic Olfactory I/O-deviSE Tactile Manipulation[Olsen86, Myers91] — allows novice users without any formal nose training to perform complex interactive tasks.

http://globetrotter.berkeley.edu/people3/Weber/weber-con4.html "Sometimes, I say it this way -- it's kind of a tag line -- but I think it's not incorrect to say that there are at least three and a half or four billion people on this planet who believe that they have nothing to lose from the decline of the West... Now is the time at which we need to stand up and say what we think that world ought to look like for all those other people, as well as ourselves, five or seven years out, and start building institutions that move things in that direction in a way that people see as being honest, an honest effort and a willingness to experiment, and a willingness to bear costs for those experiments, because most of them will fail. And a willingness to call them a failure and move on to the next experiment, in which case we can probably maintain some hope for ourselves and everyone else. But if we don't do that, if we keep postponing that vision, then we're fighting...

http://www.acm.org/ubiquity/book_reviews/v5i28_stuckey-ling.html "Asia/Middle East averaged only 12 per 100, but Taiwan's national rate was the highest in the world, at 106 mobile phones per 100 persons." Sort of makes you wonder what one does with the extra phones.

http://www.interesting-people.org/archives/interesting-people/200409/msg00122.html Interesting article, though unfortunately confuses the term "wardriving" with actually using an open WiFi port. ---- WiFi - Was That Wardriving or Joyriding? Wardriving. Even if you don't know what it is, you know that it must be illegal. And if you have any doubts, federal prosecutors don't. On August 3, they announced that Paul Timmins had pleaded guilty to a single count of fraudulent and unauthorized WiFi access to the private corporate network of a Lowe's store. Timmins stumbled on the network while engaged in "wardriving" - the practice of driving around with a laptop computer while looking for open wireless connections. In this case, he found one - in the parking lot of a Lowe's store in suburban Detroit. Timmins' guilty plea in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of North Carolina marks what is believed to ...

On this third anniversary of a great loss, I hope some important words from the past will help guide our way into what will be a very difficult future: "America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves." - Abraham Lincoln

I was flipping through an old Georgia Tech yearbook, and saw that Jorge Cham, the creator of PhD Comics , was an undergrad there the same time I was. Small world.

So I'm doing remote login to a machine to copy some web files, and I accidentally try to login as EECS Administrator (the administrator for the entire domain) rather than the local machine Administrator. This is a easy mistake to make, since you specify the domain separately from the user name. An error is returned, stating that the EECS Administrator account has expired, go see the Administrator.

A friend of mine was at my house the other day when one of my cats jumped in his lap. "I love cats," he said, "I just wish they would come when you call them." I said, "They have those. They're called dogs." http://allendowney.com/essays/tyranny.html

After seeing a public policy talk on RFIDs, I can't help but wonder if we're headed for a very difficult and muddled situation with respect to privacy. One reason for this is that there is already a large base of RFIDs out there. Couple this with the expected wide deployment due to WalMart and the Department of Defense, the lack of any kind of meaningful control and feedback over disclosures, and the lack of coherent policy, and you've got a potentially bad situation coming in under the radar, despite the efforts of researchers, watch dog groups, and public policy makers to the contrary. It seems that one fundamental problem here is that RFIDs can be used for so many different things. They can be used as keys (think cardkeys), financial payments (think FastTrak tolls or gas station key fobs), inventory trackers, as well as anti-theft devices. This one-size-fits-all approach makes it difficult to come up with meaningful solutions that maximize the real benefit while mi...

A little game I play is, whenever I see someone talking to themselves, try to guess whether they are crazy, drunk, or on the phone. I used to be pretty accurate, but I've noticed that it's been getting harder. For example, a while back, I thought this fairly well-dressed person in Berkeley was talking to someone on the phone, but I saw him the very next day standing on the same curb still chatting away, with wires near his ears or mouth. I suspect with current technology trends, this game will be more interesting to play in the near future.

Best site I've seen for misheard lyrics. Now I no longer have to wonder if I was the only one... http://www.kissthisguy.com/archive/lyric.9.html

I've been slowly becoming convinced that communication is the killer app for ubicomp. There's actually more to this statement than is immediately obvious, because researchers have been talking about ubicomp for nearly 15 years, and have come up with lots of applications, very few of which are compelling. Seriously, does anyone really want their refrigerator to tell them to buy more milk? Communication seems to be the key in many past applications, ranging from email to instant messenger to cell phones. By mixing location technologies, wireless communications, and multiple modes of input and output, ubicomp might be able to make new strides in this area, lowering barriers to entry and increasing the richness of communication with others. Apparently, this is something that some social scientists have been arguing for a while (so my colleagues say), but only recently have tech researchers started thinking along these lines. Besides the basic human need for communication, the...

Had lunch with a faculty member today, and he had this incredible insight into business schools. Having went through Berkeley computer science PhD program, I had somewhat of an idea on how influential US News and World Reports was in terms of their rankings of grad programs. However, things seem far worse with business schools. The basic issue here is that all business schools want to be in the top ten. However, one of the factors influencing rankings is how much money people make after they finish business school. Given this, what motivation do business schools have to really emphasize ethics? To encourage people to go into non-profits (who probably really could use the help of MBAs in developing feasible strategies)? To support people in going overseas and make a real difference in developing countries? Very little, because it would likely hurt their overall rankings. I remember David Patterson once said in class, "For better or for worse, metrics define a field....