In this post¹, I focus in the two interesting keynotes, first by Dr. Nashir Contractor and the second one by the famous Dr. Alex Sandy Pentland.

World of Warcraft, Katrina and multilevel networks

Nashir Contractor spoke how networks could be seen as multilevel — instead of just people (or objects) networking and generic links, there could be social objects and people mashed together with meaningful links: I could be the author of this blog text.

Nashir also spoke about computational social science² — a field where both computer sciences scholars and social sciences scholars need to collaborate.

However, he had some more actual content too. They’ve isolated eight different kind of reasons why we network:

• self-interest
• social and resource exchange
• collective action
• social status
• balance
• homophily
• proximity
• co-evolution

And guess what. Based on their research we can distinct these patterns based on structural behavior. They’ve actually used this method in Science of Networks in Communities-research group to detect gold farmers in EverQuest 2.  They’ve also examined the hurricane Katrina and pinpointed the time when FEMA’s role in relief efforts failed. Thus, the question rise: what if we had this kind of tools every day to help us make better decisions.

How social networks make us smart?

The topic of making these part of our every day toolset was continued by Sandy. His approach was a bit more technical: putting sensors every where. And what can we get out of that?

The first examples came from organization studies: the project where one team was only contacted via email and others regularly meet face to face failed nicely. And, these kind of tools allowed visualization of the information flow inside the company. These technologies are now tested also in the Army to make their work more efficient.

However, from that we moved to more urban sensing, maybe something I would call city movements. With this amount of technology we can pinpoint where you live and move. First nice result from that is smart traffic applications, busses and taxis being in right locations. However this gets more deeper, as Sandy explained.

Based on where you live and move, they actually could estimate weather you had an iPhone or an Android, and all sorts of strange data. We went trough bunch of colorful maps and it almost got a bit scary. And, as said: this data is already now easy to collect.

But as said, this was scary, and privacy issues were discussed. Let’s see what actually happens in data ownership in few years…

1. and some comments on papers will follow later…
2. This is defined Science-magazine and seems to be big thing in the States, severals degree programs in this area… Some of them actually sound interesting.

However every now and then you get interesting ideas that what could be done when data just emerges and you take a deeper look to it. The following is something Juuso Karikoski (Aalto University) and me have worked on and shall present in the IEEE Social Computing 2010 (stay tuned for a conference report), but I’ll make a human readable version out of here.

It’s even now possible to use one data source and try to understand structure in a service. Sometimes it’s unidirectional and sometimes the system allows you to weight this data. However, the problem is that it just shows one channel of communication, but we use several different kinds of channels: I communicate via IRC, Facebook, email etc. — and looking just one service gives us a limited view.

What we worked out was a solution to mash together two different kind of data sources: phone call log data and a data from an Internet service called OtaSizzle. Naturally, this view is still limited and our sample size was hilariously tiny (n << 100), but it’s more than nothing. What we basically show is difference in these two networks.

As you might guess, we are not the only ones who have this kind of results: Karien Van Cleenput has just shown similar thing using a survey, and with decent sample size too. She suggest that strong ties are maintained with full variety of communication where as weak ties are maintained using social networking sites and face to face as their means.

What these results mean for me at least then? By looking several data sources together, we can build superior experiences for the users, something that makes them smile every day. And we need to understand the complexity of human nature, how they communicate using variety of media…

1. For example, see Huberman et al (2009), Golder et al (2007) and Eagle et al (2009) for using online or mobile phones as data sources and making observations of the data and Donath et al (2004), Donath (2007) and Fono et al (2006) for explaining human behavior in online networks.

There was an interesting video on human-pet interaction enhanced with a sensor pack for the cat. Also, as I’m a cat lover, this naturally got my eye. However, there were several similar things ongoing, namely sensor stuff and wearable computing. Maybe some day we learn to play music with the help of wearable stuff or I wouldn’t get so lost when my belt would vibrate when I’m not moving to the right direction — or then not. One of the big things I’ve learned is that things living  the lab may still be too freaky to be used in every day environment…

Secondly, as my background is in political science, it was nice to see the term citizen science in one of the papers. The idea was rather trivial: having a sensor network (yeah, old stuff) to have some data on air pollution. However, there was a tiny twist: the prototype also included a web based service, where the results gathered were discussed — and this is where the deliberative democracy just might kick in… Need to re-read that paper, definitely and check how to cite that stuff in my Master’s thesis.

And the rest will come later: it’s sunny outside and I’m sitting in the office; clearly not using all the possibilities of today’s pervasive stuff. So, off I go.

However, often the problem seems to be around getting this kind of data — and being allowed to share the results you make. Luckily, I go acceptance from Helsinki Insitute of Information Technology to develop and publish my, yet unfinished ideas in the project blog. The story there is in Finnish, but I’ll summarize the one main point below.

From the figure we note, that there are two distinct islands. What has caused this kind of behavior? Are there e.g. two different departments there, or some other reason. How to study this further? Luckily the OtaSizzle research project has also other details of users, such as sex, age, survey data, which can be overlaid to this data, and look what we get out. This is, what I (and others from HIIT) will be doing in 2010.

First, what we mean with open? Rather many presenters seemed to approach this from the open source-phenomena. This meant loaning some of the practices from open source world, which didn’t all the times work. Others high lighted openness as a feature of decision making system, such as participatory democracy and freedom of speech. Also, open was seen as an organizational behavior pattern. Thus, maybe the conclusion could be, that the meaning of openness is not trivial, and to quote Saara Taalas, one of the presenters, the definition of closeness is not trivial either: even mathematicians have a term to both open and close system at the same time.

Then, some of the good things I still remember. Yrjö Engeström discussed nicely of existing systems and how we break ourself free from the restrictions. His example was from exams and how he considered, that preparing to cheat is better learning than regular learning.

Secondly, there were some interesting views on how to engage citizens to participate more in the every day life. Peter Tattersall spoke about wikiplaning and Sandra Viña presented her work on creating new public spaces. Peter actually noted an important thing; administration should serve us, not the other way around. Thus, when doing a city plan, he used a method where citizens made the first drafts, that he then worked to a more formal presentation for review. Sandra’s work was to test, how people react to different kind of public spaces.

Lastly, Jarno Koponen discussed on data, streams, privacy and openness. Good idea, that instead of every system building their own data collection infrastructure, there would be some common way of sharing your data. For example, I want certain services to access my location, so instead of actually installing a new app handling this, I would just tell them that this is the URL that you should ping to get my data. One data source, where I then could easily choose, to what extend different services are allowed to access my data. Let’s see, maybe I should try to do a nasty demo on that…

Now the system is go in the sense that there has been a huge marketing push of the two lead services, Kassi and Ossi.¹ There are even actual users of in these services.

Well, this is a research thing after all. The guys in HIIT are intressed in the groups and related stuff. I might be doing some social network analysis based on that data… And let’s see what else we can pull out from this.

1. Kassi is a service that facilitates exchange of favors and items and Ossi is a mobile, context aware social service

The story presented in Digitoday discusses this from the viewpoint of hobby filmmakers, which should according to strict interpretation pay the supervision fee, 800 euros per film in 2010. The more interesting thing is, what happens to videos I film and publish e.g. Youtube.

Youtube is a public media, meaning that publishing content there is bound with the legal framework we Finns have. My video could be something that is not excluded as a special case, meaning that I must — according to law — pay the feed. And 800 euros is a big sum for a random video in Youtube, at least for me.

Let’s jump to the next topic, from social to ubiquitous media, but let’s keep the same focus, namely videos, here. What does ubiquitous media mean in practice? Let’s start from the assumption, that cameras will be everywhere — most mobile terminals nowadays have them — and they may be connected to the Internet. Forget the Google Street view, that is tiny compared to this — we can change the world!

But, there are also some problems here. Some problems are created by social norms, things such as privacy. Google Street view caused a mess, and they do an extra effort to anonymize the pictures¹. I remember a few new year’s ago, I walked in the city of Helsinki and streamed video directly to Internet². What happens when pictures of use are pushed to the Web instantly, from the spot? Am I ready to show the whole world that I walked somewhere with someone — the recording is easy now and may become popular later.

These two cases presented above mean, that two key technological changes, the Internet and mobile technology, will change how we think of certain things³. At the same time there is both legal and social frames, that bound what is accepted, but these frames must adapt⁴ to the changes information- and communication technology have brought and will bring.

How do you feel about related topics, such as the copyright, privacy and publicity? Are those ready for 2010 and the networked society of tomorrows?

Notes: Author does not hold any degree in law and thus this discussion may not be legally solid.

1. Well, most of the issues are related to the fact that Google creates an easy to search index, not separate sources of data that need to me mashed up by the user
2. I did do an extra effort not to shoot faces to the film, as I didn’t feel that would be fair.
3. Obvious cat is obvious here.
4. Or do they? Can the frames behave in same way even when context has changed? I shall argue no, as we can see from the copyright laws, which seem to be more and more hilarious when I follow up news on those topics

What I felt nasty is lack of developer tools here. Of course I had both Firebug and Safari 4 developer tools available and they do a good job on desktop. And thus, the code worked fine on the desktop, then I tested it on N97 – still working. But on S60 3.1 – namely N95 and E90, it just crashed. If a read the document right, the Javascript core of these browsers is from early 2007, so in the age of Internet they are rather old.

Thus, I got a bit lost there and started the usual debugging strategies: removing and lines until it started to work. Firstly, I found out that the parser is rather strict on old Nokia devices – my objects had a last comma

o = {

a = ‘a’,

b = ‘b’,

}

which is invalid and thus makes the whole object invalid. So, no comma in the end. The problem for me was, that on desktop browsers it works even with that comma, which makes finding bugs a bit harder. A nice tool here is JSLint, which allows you to check the syntax validity of Javascript code. Otherwise, it’s like hide and seek.

In reality this means a wide range of activities, from cleaning the environment to supporting societies during crises. My contribution this summer was on youth education, giving a nice experience for kids in elementary school. Well, as I’m not so imaginative person, I choose a topic close to me: programming. I didn’t have the guts to show Java, Python or some web technologies, so the choice was Scratch.

Scratch seemed to be easy to learn (and teach) and what’s most important, kids loved it! Some of them even said they might continue learning it at their home… So, a successful event — that pushed me to think these things once again, maybe I should try to contribute more in this field.

About the OtaSizzle (for those who didn’t click the above link): the idea is allow easy creation of context aware social media services, which means in reality building an infrastructure of some core enablers, like user management and context collection, and then building some lead services on top of that. The coolness is, that the core enablers are just easy to use rest-apis, meaning that you can use e.g. common web technologies to build new services around them — making the application writing more fun, hopefully.

I’m now planing to build my first tiny application, for demonstration purposes, using this core enablers, called cos. Still need to developed an idea for simple but nice application, but I’ll get back to this topic when the application is ready and out there for comments and more input.