Entries Tagged 'Geo location' ↓

I’d like to recommend to you some of the articles in the most recent edition of the Nieman Reports from Harvard.

There are a few interesting articles by people I had the good fortune to meet over the last year while at Stanford.

You can find the entire report here but I would like to draw your particular attention to a few stories filed by friends and colleagues.

Professor Clifford Nass explores the issue of multi-tasking here.

Knight Fellow Krissy Clark looks at geo-location in reporting here.

Mike Liebhold, a researcher from the Institute For the Future and a speaker at Stanford at a number of events looks at augmented reality here.

And past Knight Fellow Burt Herman looks at how journalists and computer scientists can work together here.

In full disclosure, I did a speculation on what the semantic Web could mean if some of the visions of standardized linked data become true for this same magazine.

It was a pleasure to work with editor Melissa Ludtke and her team and I can recommend it to other journalists who might have the opportunity.

One of the topics that I was researching during this year was augmented reality and how mobile devices can provide information to you…and in turn how they can “mine” your reality. It all sounds a bit science fiction like…something I realized as I tried to explain some of this to some of my colleagues at the home office.

Here is one example that always seems to impress people.

We were talking about mobile phone microtriangulation in one of the classes here at Stanford…which I think will have a lot of marketing/news possibilities… if you have time, take a look at these…they will change journalism.

http://www.pathintelligence.com/
Here is the quote about them: “Path Intelligence provides FootPath™, the only automated measurement technology that can continuously monitor the path that your shoppers or passengers take”

This concept of humans as sensors…with their mobile phones and the larger concept of reality mining is being explored by quite a few companies.

https://www.waze.com/
(this company has operations in Palo Alto…this is a crowd sourcing solution for generating and sharing information)

http://www.aloqa.com/#
(this is the company I have mentioned before …they crowd source/cluster information based on your behavior in locations)

Related to this are a range of companies that want to use your location and your mobile.
Foursquare is getting a lot of attention but they are not the only one:
http://www.loopt.com/
(this is a mobile social networking tool)
http://www.plutolife.com/
(this is another mobile social company)
http://www.meetnowlive.com/
(this is active in New York and LA)
http://groovr.com/
(similar to the above)
http://www.glympse.com/
(“share your where” concept)
http://whrrl.com/
(share your story while being mobile) http://www.match2blue.com/m2b/
(mobile social networking)
http://www.squareloop.com/
(geo-located information concept)
http://www.rummble.com/
(location based social search tool)
http://www.mobilizy.com/
(their focus is location based service solutions and augmented reality)
http://www.traffictalk.info/
(using mobiles to allow people to share traffic information live by talking)
http://traffic.berkeley.edu/index.html
(This is a local project that uses phones a mobile traffic sensors)
http://www.car-to-car.org/
(This is a consortium that is looking on ways to improve car to car communication)

This is a big part of the future of news and information…you will tell information systems about where you are (through your car, phone or other device) and in exchange you will get information that is tied to your location.

There was a big crowd that turned out for the 2009 Risser Prize Forum “Visualizing the Environment:
Mapping Data and Telling Stories in Journalism, Scholarship, and Environmental Policy” tonight at Stanford.

If you have any interest in mapping and data visualization story telling tools, I recommend you look at some of the work that was recognized this year, an interesting two parter, “Logging and Landslides: What Went Wrong” by Hal Bernton, Justin Mayo and Steve Ringman at the Seattle Times.

They pulled a range of public records and using mapping software, were able to make the public aware of an issue that was taking place on private land but having wide and serious impact on the community.

So who is Risser prize honoring? It is named after James Risser, the director emeritus of the John S. Knight Fellowships for Professional Journalists at Stanford University and two-time Pulitzer Prize winner.

In full disclosure: I am a Knight Fellow this year.

There is a lot of discussion about augmented reality in some of the classes I’ve taken here at Stanford. I’ve heard it mentioned in a communications class as well as marketing and in the design school.

I’ve touched on it briefly as part of the discussion we had with one of the leaders of the Institute For the Future in an earlier post and hardly a day goes by without one story or another.

Today I received two links from two different people related to AR.

This first is a TED posting about what some call the sixth sense.

This second is a NYT about sensors in mobile phones becoming much better.

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/01/06/mobile-phones-ingest-more-single-serving-devices/#preview

The importance of the second one is connected to the first. When you can have 12-14 mp cameras with you at all times and can connect it with the computational power in the cloud…you could have a second awareness…more than AR…it could be a way to be operating in a 360 real time real world data stream that is being processed constantly and separately from you…where cameras on your person (imagine them being embedded in your clothes or glasses) are monitoring everything around you and highlighting important opportunities for you to interact with your environment, in effect, being like a guardian angel, coach, and yes, even match maker.

These very powerful sensors could see more and process more around you, notifying you if a friend is walking by across the street or that a news stand has a cover story you might be interested in or that a car is coming too fast from a direction that you are not looking at. Yes, in theory it could even scan a criminal database and tell you to stay away from some people or use an algorithm to calculate your chance of being harmed in a certain neighborhood. It could, as we have seen in some experiments already, record your day and offer you the chance to play it back, giving you a transcript of your day and looking for patterns in the data that could help you succeed in the future (it could look into your frig and then remind you that you are low on milk when walking by a store).

I imagine a day when lawyers will be able to finally accurately bill hours because this 360 camera system could detect when they are reading about one case and then taking a call from another. Of course there are concerns about privacy and being marketed when being out and about but what a tremendous boost this could offer to some people who want to have a second consciousness helping them make the most of their day.

Call it your Artificial Twin…Artificial Intelligence married to a virtual version of yourself.

In the last month the Knight Fellows had a conversation with Mike Liebhold who has graciously allowed me to share some of the observations from his presentation on the future of the web.

Liebhold has a deep background in technology and the media which make his view points particularly valuable to innovation focused journalists.  Before he was a senior research for the Institute For The Future he was a VP CTO for Times Mirror Publishing and Senior Scientist for Apple Computer.

For those not familiar with the IFTF in Silicon Valley, Liebhold gave us a little introduction into this think tank focused on tomorrow.  He described how they had a wide range of clients and how their team in most cases is doing a three to five year forecast. How accurate are they with their predictions? Liebhold said they had someone do a look at past predictions and believe they have a seventy percent accuracy rate.

The IFTF team members create their forecasts by aggregating a large number of expert opinions and using the philosophy of “the future is already here but not evenly distributed”. Liebhold says the key is to look for “signals” of disruptive change. With this foresight, the IFTF believe that their clients can have insights into opportunities and take action to guard against threats.

So what is the future of the web? Liebhold had these bullet points for the next five to ten years.

Supercomputing cloud

Immersive Web Thing

Web Sensor

Web Real time

Web Video

Web Geospatial

Web 2.0

Semantic Web

Worldwide Web

Here is a quick and incomplete summary (his comments went beyond my notes) of what he shared with us on each of these points.

In web 2.0, Liebhold says the critical factor to embrace is that information is not static and can change dynamically.

Liebhold says when it comes to the mobile web, he thinks we will look back and see that this time is day one of the mobile web. He credits the iphone as kicking off the mobile web saying that you could look at the web on prior phones but in an unsatisfactory way.

Built on top of the mobile web, he sees the geospatial web (more on that in a moment).

He believes the video web is just beginning. He says the statistics around the growth of the video web are startling and that the world wide web will in many ways be a video web. He acknowledges that words/text are usually the most compact way to convey information and that some videos are relatively content free but much of what is consumed on the web will be video.

The Real Time Web is emergence of concepts like Twitter and Facebook updates. Sensor Web is how we can think of little electronic devices reporting back to the web. Liebhold described the emergence of very small HTML capable servers which could mean many devices could be linked to the web.

The Thing Web is lots and lots of mechanical devices that will interact with the web.

The Immersive Web is where you will have 3-d displays of information to interact with.

All of this is taking place in the supercomputing cloud. Liebhold says this concept is much more than just placing services on the cloud but super abundant computer power that will be available to use in almost any application. In Liebhold’s mind, networks are changing. One of the founders of IFTF was a pioneer in packet information so the institute is familiar with different kinds of networks. He said that we are entering the era of meshed networks. When every node will be able to repeat and pass along information we says we can anticipate many new peer to peer services.

To help put your cell phone in perspective, given the current network, the “world computer” (meaning connected everywhere) is a voice and text phone. By 2015 the institute says the latest generation smartphone world computer will be voice, video, web, GPS, and sensors. The institute projects that these will be devices that are very cheap…Liebhold says there are iphone like devices in other parts of the world that are under $100. What is particularly interesting is that he says there is research that shows that people are buying iphone like smartphones in place of computers.

What does this mean for journalists in the big picture? People around the world (of all socio economic status and regions) will be related to each other through a vast network of multimedia information. These devices will be part of identity centric computing… mobile devices as the hub of our digital identity. That is because we are generating a lot of data as we use these emerging technologies and there are a lot of people who are going to be able to track that information about us.

Other exciting concepts? Wearable sensors that can track your respiration and body response to changing conditions. Liebhold told us he has a particular interest in this and if you think this is science fiction, he says he has already found over 60 different sensors that people could buy or wear today. These could connect real time to medical professionals which could dramatically change medicine.

Smart houses have been around for a while but Liebhold sees significant changes in technology. He thinks we are headed toward the day when the house or your phone or your personal assistant software knows all about your agenda and needs and thus can proactively generate a highly personalized experience or series of recommendations and options. This speaks to the emergence of context awareness in computing.

Now for a specific focus of his presentation as promised. Liebhold says the geospatial web is rapidly becoming reality. He asked us to imagine you can see the invisible information about a place…digital information visually draped around the real world you are walking around. This could come from your mobile or even glasses that you would wear. He pointed out we have all sorts of information on the web that has geocodes. Information is now being created that we can use and view “in space”.

Some of the things Liebhold thinks this could allow? You can imagine as you look at a wall, you could see the conduits, or if you are walking by a building, the history of it displayed next to it, or see a theater as you drive by and know what events are coming up inside your car. A related concept is the tricoder challenge, the concept that a device could display all the information you need to know about a place is starting to be realized. Fully realized, this is a device that will tell you all you need to know about the place and it’s infrastructure, help and safety, environment, public and civic information, related news and media, history and archives, social cultural webs, commerce nets, entertainment.

There are still challenges ahead for those who are creating these concepts. Liebhold says if we are lucky, web data has the necessary tags. There is no semantic framework that completely addresses the issues of geolocating information although he said there is important work taking place in this area. The challenge he described is merging structured and unstructured data. Much of the existing data around us is still not easy to get to and so not as useful. Missing meta data makes it a challenge mining geodata but he says this rapidly changing.

The good news is that in this geoweb development, Liebhold says we have the benefit of a convergence in software design. As content is being encoded using KML and other concepts, many data experts are are finding ways to better organize geographic information. For example, Liebhold says geocoding capabilities are now a standard in many digital cameras and similar capabilities are now being built into mobiles. He suggested journalists relax our view that news has to be new. If you can aggregate the information about a place, it has value. For example, Liebhold liked the idea of being able to show someone standing in Times Square a wide range of stories, pictures and views of that place on their mobile.

With the emerging computing capabilities (computer cycles dropping in cost), Liebhold says we can start to mine tremendous amounts of information about any place. Other values to geolocation? Liebhold says we will have computers that will translate text to speech. Tourist applications are obvious, like in an art gallery where your mobile could tell you about the painting you are looking at.

Environmental sensing is another application of geolocation. Liebhold says that we can build very dense monitoring systems that can give a tremendous amount of data in real time. One example, the idea of “citizen sensing” where your phone can monitor air quality. Location intelligence is rapidly developing and he referenced the idea by talking about augmented shopping… where just by taking a picture of the barcode or an image of the product, you could learn all about the product and how it was made, things like carbon footprint and of course, where it might be sold cheaper.

I hope this is a good introduction to some of the interesting concepts that the IFTF is looking into.  The Knight Fellows hope to have another meeting with the IFTF team over the winter to examine some of these concepts in depth.