Archive for July, 2011
The Bin Diaries are going live…
Jul 27th
We are looking to recruit a small number of participants to be involved in trialling a ‘Bin diary’, or to take part in a short focus group.
Participants need to be between 18 and 25, and have access to the internet. Preference given to those who like cake! Please see the link for details below- and note the chance to win iTunes vouchers!
Skype and Facebook
Jul 15th
The recent announcement that Facebook would be integrating Skype into the social network platform caught my attention. Chat on Facebook has great advantages in that it alleviates your cognitive load (essentially meaning you don’t have to remember great swathes of information) and it allows you to multitask.
Your previous conversations with your Facebook friend are displayed within the text chat window when you chat to them. You don’t have to refresh your memory as to what you were discussing the last time you communicated. I often chat to people whom I haven’t talked to in a while and some whom I am not particularly emotionally close to. This record allows me to talk to my friends without awkward pauses whilst I think “did they break up with so and so?” etc. This also reduces the potential for embarrassing faux pas.
Multitasking, supposedly a chiefly female skill (I have my doubts on the veracity of this claim), is something for which Facebook is particularly suited. I can have conversations with several people at once (one of my Facebook friends is remarkably adept at spotting this however – “Oi are you talking to someone else?!” is a typical response). I can be working on a word document, I can be coding some data, or I can be watching television and still carry out a semblance of a conversation with someone on Facebook (knowing that they are probably doing exactly the same thing).
Now the crux of this post; video messaging is a very private, directed thing. There is no record of your previously “face to screen to face” conversation, the capacity to multitask is severely reduced. I can have a very lazy Sunday morning, breakfast in bed, MacBook perched on my lap, and can pop on Facebook to catch up on the news. I can chat to people on there and they won’t know that I am in my tattiest PJs, hair akin to a birds nest and (because of a particularly late night) mascara burdened eyes producing a very good Alice Cooper impression. There would be absolutely no way I would even consider Skyping at that particular moment.
Photo by Laura Brown, Flickr
I predict we will only see a small number of select groups of people using Skype over Facebook. There will be those people who are geographically distant to each other such as friends who have emigrated. There will also be those who use Facebook chat for more intimate reasons, anyone who has ever used Chat Roulette will have probably encountered the more, erm, explicit uses of video chat. You will of course have people using it for much more innocent reasons – parents showing off new babies to friends and relatives, grandparents checking in with their grandchildren at university etc.
It is not just the goals of use that will have an impact on the adoption of Skype over Facebook. For someone who isn’t technically literate, Skype is a relatively complicated thing to set up, it also requires a webcam. Most laptops and netbooks have this functionality built in, but someone with a desktop pc may have to source this. Even easy access and relative expertise does not guarantee use. I have an iPhone, my husband has an iPhone. We could feasibly video call each other. This would allow for a supposedly richer experience, we would be able to see each other’s expressions and supposedly gain more meaning from our conversation. We have both had video message functionality for more than a year. We have never had a video chat. Whilst I would quite happily use Skype for professional purposes – a situation where I am selling my skills and knowledge, I would feel very uncomfortable using it in a social situation, particularly when communicating with acquaintances.
So it will be interesting to see who uses Skype, and whether its integration with Facebook actually produces a new set of individuals who prefer video communication to text in every day online conversations. We may also find that in 40 years’ time video communication is the norm just as telephone communication is today.
Conference report: KES-AMSTA 2011
Jul 12th
A quick update about the KES-AMSTA 2011 conference, which took place between June 29 and July 1, 2011 in Manchester, United Kingdom. The conference attracted many researchers who discussed and presented their work covering subjects such as agent and multi-agent systems and their applications and methodologies. In addition to the main track of the conference, a Doctoral Track was organised, in which LiSC member Olivier presented his work entitled “Towards Agent-Based Crowd Simulation in Airports using Games Technology“, which has been co-authored with Patrick Dickinson and Tom Duckett.
Olivier is highly interested in research involving crowd simulations, more specifically, he focus his work on the modelling of the social aspects of emotions for groups of individuals in virtual crowds for video-games. His recent paper discusses the use of games technology for crowd simulation in an airport terminal and investigates the unique traits of airport terminals as a backdrop for novel gaming experiences. LiSC also recently used airport terminals as a gaming backdrop for the pervasive mobile phone game ‘BlowTooth’.
The conference was well attended by researchers worldwide. Several work from many fields were presented, for instance: conversational agents, dialogue systems, text processing, agents and social networks, modelling, planning and prediction, robotics and manufacturing, agent optimisation, negotiation and security, agent profiling etc. To cite a couple of work, Kazienko et al. uses social network analysis as a tool for improving enterprise architecture, Wojewnik et al. investigates the social network effects of attrition rates on telecommunication customers, Crossley and Amos uses a zombie-infection case-study in relationship with agent-based simulations and Nikolaev and Ayesh uses policy based HTN Planning and multi agent e-Learning Systems. Those are just a handful of the presented work; the full proceedings of the conference are available through Springer.
Good News! During the closing session of the conference, the chairman, James D. O’Shea, from the Manchester University, congratulated the LiSC member Oliver with the “Best student paper”-award in front of the KES-AMSTA conference audience for his presented work. Good stuff! A few pints of fine ale and peach flavoured beer (?) celebrated the occasion.
Open Data Bonanza
Jul 10th
There has been much talk recently of the potential use and impact of open data at LiSC including our attendance at an open data master class and a visit from Tony Hirst, a leading UK open data advocate, at a joint LiSC and LNCD meeting. This short(ish!) post gives a brief overview of these two events.
Open Data Master Classes
With large amounts of open data now being published at both the local and national government level on sites such as data.gov.uk and data.london.gov.uk there is huge scope for developers to create innovative ‘mashups’ that provide useful services for citizens. In order to make these open data sets usable and interactive normally has the prerequisite of sufficient development skills, thereby significantly raising the barrier for individuals with no development skills to successfully leverage open data sets in meaningful fashion. To help address this, the Horizon Research Institute has developed a series of Open Data Master Classes delivered by lecturers from academia, government and business.
Andy Garbett and I attended the class at Nottingham University and thoroughly enjoyed the presentations and opportunity to network. The class was themed around integrating maps with open data with presentations from Ordnance Survey and the Royal Geographical Society. A few key messages on open data from the presentations were ‘Discoverability’ and ‘Sense Making’ – is the open data easy to find and catalogued appropriately? Is it actually useful data being published? There was also mention of ‘Fear of Misunderstanding’ as a barrier to publishing open data with the perspective being negative inferences being made to the source of the data. We only have to look at the divisive press when UK crime data was released.
Overall we found the class to be engaging with great speakers delivering a range of perspectives from the technical to the ethical. Andy and I made some rough collaborative notes during the class which you can view here. You can also download the master class handbook from here and if you are keen to participate you can catch the last master class at the University of Reading on July 21st.
In keeping with tradition and Nottingham’s sterling reputation for first class breweries, we stopped off for a few ales before heading home where I sampled the excellent Nottingham Rock Bitter1. Being of slight disposition, Andy could only manage a half pint in haste.
LiSC and LNCD Meeting
LiSC had a joint meeting with the new LNCD group with a wall to wall turn out including staff from Journalism and ICT interested in open data. We had guest speaker Tony Hirst from the OU telling us all about his open data interests which are primarily focussed on HE generated data with other interests in visualising social networks. Tony is passionate about moving open data and research out of academic/government silos for public engagement in wider culture and society. However he believes that the public needs a greater understanding of statistics in order to make an informed decision on representations and sense making of open data. Tony also spoke of the interesting term ‘Data Burdens’ which relate to single data lists produced by government to help prevent duplication and collection of open data sets. This is a good indicator that open data collection and publication is being taken seriously by the government and in turn helping drive transparency. We are relatively new to open data at LiSC and having Tony at the table for Q & A was very informative, thanks Tony!
1. Nottingham Brewery (2008) Rock Bitter, available from http://www.nottinghambrewery.com/rock.html