Science and Industry

As discussed previously, Juuso Karikoski and I made a tiny study of multiple social networks. And we got trough the peer-review, and thus headed to IEEE Social Computing 2010.

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. [↩]

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…