Ubicomp'05 Demos

Some of you may be interested in having a look at some of the product demonstrations at the recent Ubiquitous Computing conference. Ubicomp seems fairly split between mobile devices that are somewhat aware of their environment and embedded systems in environments that react to users. Some of the location-sensing applications are interesting and the mobile mp3 sharing system is a groovy idea.

A Network of Wearables

A system is presented which records audio-data from individuals, transcribes it and infers the topics of conversations and social networks from it. They are arguing that quantifying variables within speech communication is important to restructure organization charts and let groups understand themselves better. It seems to be a technology centred approach where they built it first and are trying to figure out how to use it. It is impressive that they can transcribe as much as they claim from normal speech and could have other interesting applications. Using this data for contextually-aware actions has it's own problems not easily solved by simply have more data at one's disposal. The application of this technology for understanding social networks is a trend.Since the data is recorded from real activities (in-context) it is likely to not suffer from the biases of self-reporting and memory-reliant methods.

Eagle, N., & Pentland, A. S. (2003). Social Network Computing. In A. K. Dey (Ed.), UbiComp 2003 (pp. 289–296): Springer-Verlag.

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Supporting Mobile Businesspeople

This study interviewed 17 businesspeople before and after their travels to determine how they used technology in real travel situations. It's also a rare case of a book chapter being published online for free. Check out the full book for a lot of other good research papers.

O'Hara, K., Perry, M., Sellen, A., & Brown, B. (2002). Exploring the relationship between mobile phone and document activity during business travel. In Wireless world: social and interactional aspects of the mobile age (pp. 180-194): Springer-Verlag New York, Inc.

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