Categories
Random observations

Good to sea

I like this.

Categories
Random observations

A nice little video

I’ve seen this video – about digital information and its categorisation – linked on various websites over the last week or so. I thought I’d share it here as well. Very nice.

Categories
Eco-philo-pol

Killer or Koder?

I did say “enough politics” in my last post, but I’d like to direct readers of my blog to Kerry’s response to my recent post on libertarianism, which is rather less emotion-filled than both her initial post and my response to it. :-)

On a more light-hearted note (depending on how you look at it), Kerry directs us (via the DSTC-Alumni mailing list) to this little quiz. But be warned: you either need to know about programming language design or serial killers to do well on this test. My score was 7/10. I wonder how many other computer scientists might be mistaken for serial killers?

Categories
Random observations

Meeting of the minds

Enough politics. Back to a more wholesome topic…

Here’s a photo of a dinner we held for Anind Dey at the Brasserie on the River a couple of weeks ago. The photo contains two of my previously mentioned ubiquitous computing inspirators.

Dinner for Anind

Clockwise from the top right we have Jaga Indulska, Anind Dey, Karen Henricksen (Robinson), Ricky’s camera case, Pei Hu, Ryan Wishart, Myilone Anandarajah, Andry Rakotonirainy and Bob Hardian. The food was great and the conversation stimulating. A good night was had by all.

Categories
Eco-philo-pol

Libertarianism is not anarchism

Jim considers standing for the LDP at the next election (I take my hat off to you, sir), and Kerry gets all hot under the collar at the prospect. Libertarianism upholds the principle of individual conscience and responsibility in preference to the nannying state, an idea which I whole-heartedly support. Kerry is essentially saying that she doesn’t trust me or you to behave sensibly, and that the government is required to somehow force us all to behave sensibly. If you wonder why common sense is dying a slow death, look no further than this. Too many of us are inclined to delegate personal decision-making to the government, allowing our consciences, our common sense and our sense of ethics to atrophy. Too many of us, also, are wont to apply a jackhammer where a chisel would suffice.

Categories
Innovation

Ubiquitous Computing: People who inspire me

A few weeks ago, I discovered that IEEE Distributed Systems Online maintains a list of the key people in the field of mobile and pervasive computing. Here’s a much shorter list of people in pervasive computing whose work has inspired me. The list might be biased towards the sub-areas of ubiquitous computing with which I am more familiar, and in all cases, I acknowledge the involvement of Ph.D. supervisors and colleagues without explicitly mentioning them.

Mark Weiser

Often called the father of pervasive computing, he wrote the seminal paper on the topic (I know some people have their own views about this, but history will always see it this way).

Most important, ubiquitous computers will help overcome the problem of information overload. There is more information available at our fingertips during a walk in the woods than in any computer system, yet people find a walk among trees relaxing and computers frustrating. Machines that fit the human environment, instead of forcing humans to enter theirs, will make using a computer as refreshing as taking a walk in the woods. (The Computer for the 21st Century, 1991)

Anind Dey

Dey provided the first useful (i.e., operational) definition of context in this field, and one of the first non-monolithic approaches to developing context-aware applications by way of the Context Toolkit (Schilit was perhaps the pioneer in that respect).

Context is any information that can be used to characterize the situation of an entity. An entity is a person, place, or object that is considered relevant to the interaction between a user and an application, including the user and applications themselves. (Understanding and Using Context, 2001)

Karen Henricksen

While Dey provided the often-quoted definition of what context is, Henricksen filled in the details about the nature of context information in ubiquitous computing environments, and made one of the first real attempts to formally model it. Henricksen, in conjunction with her colleagues, also developed one of the most sophisticated approaches to engineering context-aware applications, beginning with modelling and ending with a set of programming abstractions. Henricksen and Indulska authored the Elsevier Journal of Pervasive and Mobile Computing‘s most downloaded article of the year from May 2006 to April 2007.

[Our] system will allow abstract models described in our notation to be mapped with little effort to corresponding implementation models that can be populated with context information and queried by applications. It will be responsible for a range of management tasks, such as integration of context information from a variety of sources, management of sensors and derived context, detection of conflicting information and so on. (Modeling context information in pervasive computing systems, 2002)

Guanling Chen

Chen and Kotz developed a novel platform, called Solar, for building context-aware applications. I found their approach particularly inspiring for what I would call its bottom-up approach. What excited me about their idea is the same thing that excited me about the DSTC’s Elvin protocol: the ability to quickly build an application by mashing up various sources of information.

A fundamental challenge in pervasive computing, then, is to collect raw data from thousands of diverse sensors, process the data into context information, and disseminate the information to hundreds of diverse applications running on thousands of devices, while scaling to large numbers of sources, applications, and users, securing context information from unauthorized uses, and respecting individuals’ privacy. (Solar: A pervasive-computing infrastructure for context-aware mobile applications, 2002)

The Cambridge Contingent

Andys Hopper and Harter, Roy Want and others gave the world Active Badges, which were initially used to divert incoming phone calls to the nearest phone to the user. Active Badges soon gained a following in ubiquitous computing research centres around the world, with installations at MIT, Xerox PARC, EuroPARC and elsewhere. These researchers also showed remarkable awareness of the social impact their technology could have in the world. The honesty and openness with which they wrote their papers is something that ought to be replicated in more of the papers of the current generation. I’m sure this project has inspired many a ubiquitous computing researcher.

The most important result of this work is not, “Can we build a location system?”, but, “Do we want to be a part of a location system?” There is a danger that in the future this technology will be abused by unscrupulous employers. (The Active Badge Location System, 1992)

The Lancaster League

Nigel Davies, Adrian Friday, Gordon Blair, Keith Cheverst and maybe a few others have made a large contribution to the field. I remember reading their stuff – about mobility, adaptation, service discovery and more – around the year 2000 and thought it was fantastic. Their papers often disclosed important findings.

Interaction with a context-aware/location-aware system is not affected by the design of the user interface alone. In fact, interaction with GUIDE is, to a large extent, governed by the design of the infrastructure, i.e. the strategic placement of cells in order to provide appropriate areas of location resolution and network connectivity. (Developing a context-aware electronic tourist guide: some issues and experiences, 2000)

Jack Schulze and Matt Webb

Although these guys aren’t strictly ubiquitous computing researchers, I find their work inspiring on a number of levels.

Tangible interactions can be more immediately familiar than ones we regularly use with our computers. (The Hills are Alive with the Sound of Interaction Design, 2007)

So, that’s my list. It’s short and sweet. As I said at the beginning of this year, I’d like to move my work more towards the HCI side of things, which means that if I were to rewrite this list in a year’s time, it might feature a different bunch of people (like Paul Dourish, perhaps).

Categories
Innovation

Steve Jobs: the second most powerful man on Earth

According to Vanity Fair’s 2007 ranking of the most powerful people on Earth, Steve Jobs comes in at number two, just behind Rupert Murdoch. That’s a big call, but not too far off the mark, I think. Apple has always been the company to beat in terms of style and innovation. The difference now is that their style and innovation is being converted into bigger bucks than before. The Google-meisters, Brin and Page, rank a joint third. I agree with Vanity Fair’s prediction that Apple will make the gadgets while Google processes the data; this partnership will blossom over the coming months and years.

Categories
Eco-philo-pol

A November 24 election

So, Howard calls the election for November 24. It’s been a rarity in the past, but I think I’ll be voting the same way as the majority of Australians if the polls and betting are anything to go by, despite my many differences with Duplo man.

Categories
Innovation

Innovation in a vacuum

Brisbane (and Australia, for that matter) needs more crazy rich people willing to invest in technology startups. Probably mindbogglingly obvious, but that’s the conclusion I’ve drawn after reading another of Paul Graham‘s insightful essays. Brisbane does not have nearly enough venture capitalists to create a critical mass of technology companies. This means that despite the existence of places like UniQuest and inQbator, any innovative ideas produced by universities, CRCs, NICTA and CSIRO (and I’ve seen a few of them) are released into a near vacuum, with the fruits of this labour dissipating according to the second law of thermodynamics. Only a critical mass of startups will have enough gravity to prevent this research fizzling away to nothing or leaping across the Pacific Ocean to the US, where the capital market is far more accommodating of crazy ideas. A critical mass of venture capitalists is required to gain a critical mass of startups, and once this is in place, a chain reaction is started whereby startups beget more startups. When this chain reaction gets going, that’s when we’ve created a sustainable, innovative technology industry.

So, what do we do to get the ball rolling? How do we get rich people to invest in our work? The first step might be to make them aware of what we do, which means inviting them to our workplaces, networking with them at dinner functions (hell, we the researchers should be organising these functions and not simply waiting for someone to do it for us) and marketing ourselves. While some of us might be doing this to some extent, we aren’t doing it nearly enough. It’s important to note that I’m not talking about targeting existing VCs – they’re already doing a fair enough job. I’m talking about attracting those rich people around Brisbane who aren’t currently part of the VC and angel investment scene. Think about all that cash hulled up in Hamilton, Ascot, Fig Tree Pocket and other leafy suburbs. It’s probably going into resource stocks, property and superannuation. The challenge is to convince these people to do something more exciting and potentially much more rewarding with their dollars. The goal is to enlarge the pool of funds available for investment in technology startups. Why will this work? Well, there’s a good chance it won’t. But I’m convinced the way to get more rich people involved in funding startups is not by trying to demonstrate the merits of any particular new idea, but by holding a conversation with them over the long term and getting them to buy into the big picture. Maybe this has been tried on numerous occasions before, but because it failed then doesn’t mean we should cease the conversation. Let’s organise a few functions with the help of organisations such as the AIC, scrape together the dosh to fly the Paul Graham’s and Guy Kawasaki‘s of the world to Brisbane and have them speak at the functions. These are small steps for sure, but they are steps that need to be taken if the Australian technology industry is to improve its position in the world. The other thing that might have to change is rates of taxation, but let’s do one thing at once!

I say it can be done.

Note: This article is covered by the standard disclaimer.

Categories
Innovation

Uncalculated threat: the stay-at-home generation

The excellent Paul Graham observes that the cost of getting a web startup off the ground is very low, and getting lower. Hence the proliferation of so-called Web 2.0 companies. He, like me, believes there’s still a lot of room for more web startups. Facebook, YouTube and company are only the beginning. Innovative minds will find ways to bring many more interesting things to the web. Some of them will be game-changing the way Google was. Some of them will change the web altogether.

What implications might this have for NICTA and other such places? It might just mean that these organisations shouldn’t be surprised if the next big web thing comes out of the suburban bedroom of a twenty-something year old rather than one of the universities or CRCs. Whether this turns out to be a threat or an opportunity partially depends on the way it is perceived by the general public, who might be inclined to ask “If a billion dollar technology company can emerge from some person’s bedroom, why do we need publicly funded ICT institutions again?” Of course, there are at least a few good reasons, like trying to ensure that the brightest computer scientists contribute to Australia’s GDP rather than that of another nation’s. And besides, one web startup, even a tremendously successful one, does not a Silicon Valley make. These institutions have an important part to play in spawning an innovative, self-perpetuating IT industry in this country, and from my point of view, it would be great if the hub of this industry was Brisbane. How to be Silicon Valley is the subject of another of Graham’s essays, and my next article.

Note: This article is covered by the standard disclaimer.