Science and Industry

I was one of the student volunteers in Pervasive 2010 conference held in Helsinki, Finland. As a SV, I’m required to participate in the conference organizing but had the change to attend certain sessions also, luckily. It was interesting to see, what others are doing in the are of ubiquitous computing (or pervasive, what ever you want). Some highlights as part one of this…

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.

The University of Arts and Design Helsinki Media Lab held a two day conference called Open 2009. The discussion was around the concept of openness and what it actually means to our world and society. I did present one paper there, which I shall discuss in more detail later. So, in this post, I try to summarize the event in some way.

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…

I just came back from Mindtrek 2008 conference. The conference is related to new media and it’s usage in different fields, mostly about social media, ubiquitous media and games. So what I actually learned there? Maybe it was the tendency that social interaction is going to push itself to all areas we’re working on.

On the other hand it’s interesting to be in social media event where the use of social media seems to be… exception. I did Jaiku during the event, as did other’s too. But rather many did notes in the old fashion way (nothing against it — I love to work with pen&paper), which seemed strange. Actually this is every now and then happened in other places: for some reason formal settings seem to kill the use of social media tools.

So, I got an CD-rom with all the papers. I need to read the paper Social is the New Pink
by Damien Marchi, as it might have some new radical views. Then I got some new colleagues and met some old ones.

I spoke of ubiquitous media and political life, trying to argument that this new way we communicate has changed and will change how we do politics. Not allways in the good way but in some way anyhow. To see the presentation, head to Qik and SlideShare.

Updated: Link fixed!