Well, I don’t attend conferences just to get one SPSS-file, there more in this. I’m currently working with Nokia to solve some of the threats and risks caused by children’s using Internet and connected context-aware handheld devices, or simply put: mobile phones and other gadgets. Based on my current understanding of this phenomenon, the key tools are to increase mediation with parents and peers and to develop media literacy and coping skills in this new World2.0.

As well pointed out by Kuno Sorensen: as we teach our children on traffic and correct behaviors there, we should teach the basics of mediated environments and communication in same way. And, I believe this can be achieved by increasing the interactions and guidance children receive when growing up.

Now you ask: “Well, Matti – that model is a nice sounding idea, but does that really happen … or is this just a daydream?” That is a good point, and requiring evidence is only sensible thing to do. I don’t know if mediation and support affect on the experiences of harm, it sounds valid and sound. But, after getting my hands on the File, I can run some of statistical analysis and see, if this makes sense with data too.

As we all know, the mobile application market has boomed, mainly due to iOS and Anrdoid-systems and the online market places they have. However, what I haven’t seen yet is a study on the application use and lifetime in a more broad manner. I remember seeing in an paper in the Pervasive 2010 about one game and the usage patterns of it. But, we don’t know so much on how the applications are used, in what situations they are used and more focused, why are they used. We know… they are used.

Böhmer et al. suggest a new sensor type called appsensor, only to focus on application and use of them. This allows us to go deeper in the use, just seeing what applications are popular at what time and what places — like done in the paper. Naturally, one can figure out more uses for appsensors — self organizing maps, data mining, … all the cool applications. Maybe I briefly highlight some aspects observed in this study to demonstrate the value.

Firstly, the sample is based on 4 000 something Android users, mostly from the states. They use all applications about one hour per day, and an average time application is opend… is 72 seconds. Short time… The core functionalities of traditional phones are used even more shortly: communication 47 seconds, maps 45 seconds, productivity — like calender — 61 secs. The “new” emerging things, multimedia, browsers, games, lifestyle apps, clearly are in the better side: 83 secs, 74 secs, 114 secs and 168 secs.

There are spikes when specific application categories become more important: tools category is popular around 6 am to 8 am, communication apps dominate the use 11 am till 8 pm and games are played during the evening. And location affects this too, some apps are popular in airports, and there are differences between Europeans and US users.

In general, what the results indicate is that we can build smarter smartphones. Instead of being a multipurpose device, it seems that certain patterns exists and the next step would be to facilitate these. And, for science — now this data was anonymized, can more data of users make us see even more. Especially this data is important, as similar kind of data surely exists in the HQs of Apple, Google and Nokia: we need to understand what that means as a privacy question.

But, why this topic? Why to care of the children? Well, as the studies, such as EU Kids Online, have shown, even pre-teen children use more and more of ‘multimedia’ features of devices, such as cameras, apps and the Internet.

This gives interesting opportunities in various fields, such as safety, education, … But also threads are there, such as being exposed to porn((Actually, my strangest memory ever was when being in Assembly-event and some children asked if our mobile phones had filtering software on them.)) to cases such as bullying  or hover-parenting.

The technology around us is changing once again and the question is that what will society do. This is why more and deeper research is needed. As the Portal song says: “There’s research to be done.”

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.

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.

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…

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!

But it was break after all. The short break for my brains was rather usefu. Today I made some modifications to user survey and asked for comments. I made progress with service metrics. I still need to rewrite the Mindtrek-paper The Use of Ubiquitous Media in Politics – How ubiquitous life effects into political life today and what might happen in the future. I’ll keep this blog posted on the development of it — but the core idea is that new technological tools like video sharing and location based services might have something to offer also for political life.

But, actually this is my last full day at the office this week. Tomorrow I’m in Nokia House for lunch date and generally just stop by. From Wednesday to Sunday I’m supporting the Summer Assembly team and thus working remotly most likely from the scene.