Shaun Lawson, Director of the Lincoln Social Computing (LiSC) Research Centre and Professor in Social Computing, will deliver his inaugral lecture entitled Seriously Connected: Changing Behaviour Through Social Media, taking place on 1 May.

Since co-founding LiSC in 2006 – just ahead of the phenomenal interest in services such as Facebook and Twitter – Professor Lawson has directed many studies in this area, funded by organisations including the EPSRC (Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council) and Microsoft Research. He said: “The research we have been undertaking in LiSC has been helping us to understand people’s emergent everyday use of social media. We are also involved in experimental work, attempting to use social media platforms to deliver serious applications that raise awareness and positively change behaviour. Areas we have already been working on include energy consumption and sustainability, healthy eating and exercise, and mental health and wellbeing.”
In his lecture Professor Lawson will draw on these experiences to explain what we really understand about people’s use of social media and how it might be used in the future to positively affect people’s lives.

Professor Lawson’s applied, cutting edge work has attracted funding from sources such as EPSRC, the EU, Microsoft Research and UK charities. He currently directs a number of major research projects including: multi-university ENACT project which has received half a million pounds of funding from the EPSRC, and is designing psychotherapy interventions, based on social media, for sleep disorders; HEFCE-funded Electro-Magnates project exploring how social games can be used to reduce energy costs in the public sector.
Seriously Connected: Changing Behaviour Through Social Media takes place from 6pm on Tuesday 1 May in the EMMTEC Auditorium, Brayford Campus, University of Lincoln. Registration starts at 5:30pm.

The Lincoln Academy Lectures are free to attend but places must be booked in advance by calling 01522 837100 or emailing events@lincoln.ac.uk

Furthermore, a few screenshots of the most recent iteration of the simulation:

Feel free to share the video, read the related papers and to contact Olivier Szymanezyk if you have any further comments or questions!

A quick update about the upcoming CHI 2012 conference, which is taking place from May 5-10th in Austin, Texas. A total of five members of LiSC are heading to the USA next month for CHI – the worlds leading HCI conference. If you are interested in the work we are doing and will be at CHI, make sure to get in touch for a chat over a coffee (i.e, a beer) at some stage in the week.

Click here for a brief summary of why we are going

Conor is a co-organizer of a workshop on “Interaction Design and Emotional Wellbeing”, which will be held on Sunday the 6th May. There has been huge interest in this topic, with the workshop itself over-subscribed and many heavy-hitting internationally recognized researchers signed up to attend. Fittingly, both Shaun and Sue have papers accepted to the workshop.

Derek “DF” Foster had a full paper based on his PhD work accepted to the main track of the conference. The paper is entitled “’Watts in it for me?’ Design implications for implementing effective energy interventions in organizations.” The paper describes a grounded theory analysis of data collected from a number of focus groups throughout the past year.

Sue is also presenting a full paper in the main track of the conference. Her paper entitled “I can’t get no sleep: discussing #insomnia on Twitter, describes a mixed-methods analysis of tweets on the topic of insomnia. This work is part of the EPSRC-funded ENACT project currently underway at LiSC.

Ben is continuing his success in publishing provocative papers in the alt.CHI stream of the conference. His paper entitled “Exploring mischief and mayhem in social computing or: how we learned to stop worrying and love the trolls,” is sure to draw a big crowd. This work is based on his recently completed PhD.

Shaun is on the organizing committee of the Animal-Computer Interaction Special Interest Group meeting, which is intended to examine animals as technology users and co-participants in technological interactions, in the context of human-animal relationships and animal engagement with technology in different settings.

Ben will present a Work-in-Progress paper entitled: “Get Lost: Facilitating Serendipitous exploration in Location-Sharing Services.” We will post this paper online shortly. Ben also has a paper accepted to the “Cool aX Continents, Cultures and Communities” workshop, as does Derek. Andy has a paper accepted to the “Personal Informatics” workshop. We will add further details of these workshop papers shortly.

All of the relevant papers will be available in our e-prints repository after the conference has taken place. If you want to get in touch with us at the conference, or if you cant make it and want to get in touch about the papers, then don’t hesitate to do so.

See you in Austin!

Microsoft's Joanna Tong kicking off Lincoln's #phonecamp

Microsoft’s Joanna Tong presented at the phonecamp with nearly 50 students in attendance. The afternoon kicked off with presentations covering the UI design of Windows Phone (Metro), app development tools and submitting apps to the Windows Phone marketplace. Following a quick afternoon break involving Scotland’s other national drink – Irn Bru – the students set about building mobile apps with a keen eye on the prizes up for grabs; 3x Nokia Lumia 800 phones and 2x t-shirts. For fairness the phone prizes were handed out with the use of a random number generator with the t-shirts given for ‘best tweet’ and ‘best app ‘. This levelled the playing field as not all the students present had the skills to quickly prototype a mobile app in an afternoon.

Nearly 50 students took part in the phonecamp

Some pretty neat app prototypes and concepts where conceived, complete with some lively elevator pitches, particularly from LiSC’s very own Andy Garbett and Oliver Szymanezyk. As it turned out there were two other parallel phonecamp events taking place in the UK at the same time as Lincoln’s, one at Imperial College and the other at Robert Gordon University. This instantly put us in competition mode by striving to get the most and best tweets with #phonecamp hashtag on Twitter. Needless to say we won and on that note the best tweet award at Lincoln went to @arne3000 with his stunningly embarrassing tweet in reference to Joanna Tong, the Microsoft representative hosting the event with us. The bio-@arne3000 wasn’t forthcoming with his identity but was soon sighted due to bright red gamma rays bursting out from the left side of the room. He was duly dragged out and forced to accept his XS t-shirt for his efforts, below photo says it all.

@arne3000 bashfully receiving his well earned prize

Feedback from students at the event was positive, we are now looking at the possibility of running similar events students in the School of Computer Science will engage with and enjoy. Mobile computing is here to stay and will only become more embedded in our daily lifestyles, equipping our students with the skillsets necessary to design, build and evaluate mobile applications is a great way to enhance both their CV and future job prospects.

Three lucky students went home with a Nokia Lumia 800 and the day finished with a behemoth pizza order from Domino’s – who else? There was no beer at this event so unfortunately I cannot add an extra ‘beer’ paragraph.

Figure 1 Left to right; Multilog data logger with GSM modem allowing remote access to energy data

For several years I have been accessing UoL’s smart meters and pulling off energy consumption data for use in our EM project. A good relationship with our estates sustainability team facilitated timely access to the meters and monitoring software, highlighting the importance of interdepartmental relationships when attempting to enable pragmatic research.  The background on Lincoln’s smart meter infrastructure reveals arcane hardware overlaid on modern, using dated and limited software from an era still suffering growing pains of moving from 16bit to 32bit platforms; the mid-90’s. One of EM’s requirements was the ‘opening up’ of our energy data so third party applications developed by anyone, and indeed our own study trials could use it. Sounds simple but it’s actually a tall order due to the currently available infrastructure at Lincoln. Even though we do currently have a working means of making the energy data open, it’s still not 100% where we would like it to be in terms of update frequency and reliability.

Figure 2 Data silo vs. internet of things

A little more technical detail – yawn inducing for some!  - each smart meter has a data logger and GSM modem with SIM card strapped to its back, see figure 1; energy data is stored in the logger and can be pulled by dialling into the GSM modem. Dialling in? Yes we currently dial-in (not for much longer though, more on that later) using a standard PCI modem over an analogue telephone line, basically a traditional data silo using a Machine-to-Machine (M2M) connection, see figure 2. This approach is not uncommon as you might think, for example remote weather stations may adopt it, likewise for some road/motorway signs where the near ubiquity of 3G/WIFI technologies or even GPRS is absent. In order for us to schedule frequent dialling-in to get the most recent energy data we had to use ‘specialised’ software from the mid 90′s called ‘Multilog’, see figure 3.

Figure 3 The delectable Multilog software circa. 1995

This process of dialling-in isn’t to be confused with using GPRS or 3G or any of the other ‘wondrous’ by comparison methods to pull data remotely, as we aren’t accessing the internet or intranet using venerable TCP/IP. We pull the energy data by initiating a ‘data call’ using the  Circuit Switched Data (CSD) transmission method for data transfer, so that data transfers much the same as it would during a FAX call – extremely slow at around 9.6kbps. An enabling feature of this is the receiving end SIM card you are dialling into (bolted onto smart meter) must be allocated a mobile ‘data’ number, not a voice number, and have CSD enabled – all of which can only be setup at the mobile provider’s end; importantly, not all mobile providers offer this service in the UK. For the more nerdy types out there and lovers of old tech, the following mobile provider CSD settings are required for talking to the receiving SIM, with corresponding Multilog network settings:

Mobile Provider Settings:

· 9600bps

· 8 data bits, No Parity bits, 1 Stop Bit

· Non-Transparency enabled (also known as error corrected or “RLP”)

 Figure 4 Mobile provider CSD settings and corresponding Multilog network settings

Each hour Multilog initiates a scheduled data call or ‘dialling-in session’ with each session taking ~30 minutes to get round all the smart meters for the most recent data,  the time quoted assumes all meters are online with no power-pack failures of which unfortunately we have had many. If any meters are offline Multilog subjects you to repeated dial-in attempts which can increase a session to 1 hour+.  The result after each successful dial-in session is we have pulled the most recent energy data from the meters which are then stored locally in Multilog’s ASCII format .dat files, one .dat file for each meter of which there is most likely big chunky holes in the data– all rather unpalatable as a data format. By holes I mean some of the meter readings may be missing simply because of the slow process of dialling into all the meters, the meters themselves log energy readings every 30 minutes so we could easily miss the latest one. Suffice to say it’s predictable that the latest energy data available is usually at least 60 minutes old by the time Multilog stores it. This is the best achievable near-realtime data we can get given smart meter infrastructure that captures data at 30 minute intervals and uses GSM modems and data calls for energy data retrieval. At this stage we are still many steps away from making the energy data available to third party applications in an easily consumed open format.

What happens next? Most institutions the size of a university will have Carbon Management Software (CMS) that pulls in and parses these ASCII files for carbon analytics and graphical presentation, as the Multilog software thankfully offers none of this. Multilog data formats appear to be akin to a standard in this area, with interoperability with most enterprise-level CMS. Unsurprisingly, this type of software is expensive with associated yearly licensing and maintenance fees, at Lincoln the choice of CMS is the common Esight package, a web based CMS which stores parsed energy data in an encrypted SQL database.

All of the above is generally an indicative vanilla installation for many organisations; a standard M2M method to get energy consumption data out of remote smart meters and into an enterprise class CMS, purely for consumption by carbon managers and senior management. There is hardly any notion of open energy data in the processes described here as these types of installations are designed with a proprietary mind-set with data locked down. Unsurprisingly, some CMS companies genuinely assume (having engaged in multiple dialogues with them) that by offering graphing and at a push basic widgets, you won’t ever need access to the energy data for anything else, this is a strategic business stance as they want you locked down. The mere mention of offering an open API would likely result in a sharp intake of breath, followed by some business vitriol of ‘they know best’ and ‘data corruption’ (!)

Jemmying the data open

Senior management and sustainability teams are probably relatively happy with the data they get out of their CMS; they just want the numbers to crunch. What if we want more? What if we want to build our own innovative and interactive applications using the energy data and feed it back to the end-users as part of bespoke energy interventions i.e. we want to do some research with real people with measurable results? Who incidentally for the most part are completely unaware of their own consumption behaviours. To do this the data really needs to be smashed open – publicly. At this point there aren’t many viable options to hack a workaround in making the energy data open at Lincoln, the ASCII .dat files that Multilog create contain energy data which would be painful to parse and be locked by Multilog for reading/writing to for an indeterminate amount of time – messy. The Esight CMS database itself is also a no go being locked down and encrypted. The only feasible way we could begin to make the data open was to use Esight’s export data function on a schedule. By using the export function we scheduled an hourly export to CSV format, time-stamped at 30 minute intervals for the current day’s energy usage. Again, the CSV file was far from in good shape, patchy at best. Of course there are ways to fix the holes, develop an algorithm to patch them by looking at previous patterns of energy usage for that specific day/time in the past. Later you can go back and replace these auto-generated readings with the real values when you have them – this amounts to quite a lot of work and all in the name of forcing the data open, tantamount to using a jemmy on it.

At this stage our energy data is open to all by parsing the aforementioned exported CSV files for consumption via public facing REST API’s. The API’s were built in-house as well as using external data storage platforms, however the process is not as robust as we’d like due to the infrastructure constraints. The data is available through Pachube and our colleagues over in the LNCD group who are actively building and promoting university-generated opendata through data.lincoln.ac.uk. Things will soon be a lot better in terms of reliability and update frequency, when pulling from the smart meters; our carbon manager Cara Tabuka has secured funding from the Salix/HEFCE revolving green fund that will remove the whole dialling-in process and place the smart meters within the campus network through wireless or LAN. The same funding may also be used for a pilot sub-metering project which would facilitate further novel research with more granular energy data being made available. Overall the upgrades to the smart meter infrastructure will greatly improve the data collection process giving access to energy data 30 minutes old or better without the reliability problems of using GSM modems.

The technical problems of energy monitoring in a large organisation are not trivial, but neither should they be the most important thing when addressing energy monitoring overall, as I pointed out at the start of this post. We know how to build and develop systems to monitor energy effectively; it’s largely a matter of getting the funding to do it with a keen eye on scaling. What we don’t know much about is what to do with that data when it is open – visualise it in a compelling fashion? design interventions around it? post it to a data portal and hope someone else does something with it? how do we evaluate an end-user’s experience of consuming energy? These are just a few of the research areas that need to be rigorously investigated around open energy data in an organisational context, otherwise we are just building stuff to open up data – simply because we can.

If you are interested in how to effectively design an organisational energy intervention from a user-centred design approach, you may find our latest peer-reviewed paper useful: ‘Watts in it for me?’ Design implications for implementing effective energy interventions in organisations. The paper will be presented at the CHI2012 conference in Austin, Texas this coming May.

Details are below:

Newcastle, UK

June 11, 2012

http://www.urbaninformatics.net/workshop/ffthought

The workshop addresses the opportunities and challenges for the design of digital interactive systems that engage individuals in critical reflection on their everyday food practices – including designing for engagement in more environmentally aware, socially inclusive, and healthier behaviour. These three themes represent the focus of much recent HCI work related to food. The proposed workshop aims to further the conversation on these themes through understanding specifically how the process of critical reflection can be encouraged by interactive technology. While the focus will be on food as an application area, the intention is to also explore, more generally, how the process of critical reflection can be facilitated through interactive technology.

The workshop will include a design session, where participants will be asked to respond to the challenging local issue of alcohol and fast food consumption, to create innovative design solutions that facilitate people’s engagement in critical reflection on their food consumption, ultimately leading to broader socio-cultural transformation of Newcastle-upon-Tyne’s foodscape. The workshop will provide a unique forum to discuss existing theoretical and pragmatic approaches, and to envision novel ways to design technology that encourages sustained critical reflection.

Interested participants should submit position papers to Jaz Hee-jeong Choi (h.choi [at] qut.edu.au, outlining their work, brief biographies, and what they would like to gain from the workshop. Submissions should be no longer than 2 pages, in PDF Format, and styled using the DIS paper format (http://dis2012.org/dis2012format.doc). Participants will be selected based on their expertise and to ensure overall disciplinary and geo-cultural diversity.

Deadline for submissions: March 16, 2012

Notification of acceptance: April 16, 2012

Workshop: June 11, 2012

We look forward to hearing from you!

Jaz, Rob, Conor, and John

Workshop Organisers

fitsquare is a research project undertaken by Sam Smith (final year computer science student at the University of Lincoln) which sends users real-time messages in order to encourage them to check in to healthy venues on foursquare. They can also earn exclusive badges, compete against friends and track progress. Plus it’s completely free to participate!

Sam is currently looking for volunteer participants, anybody who uses foursquare on a regular basis is more than welcome to sign up. Participation in this research project involves connecting your foursquare account with fitsquare and you will also be expected to actively check-in on foursquare on a regular basis. You are also encouraged to take advantage of the fitsquare social, competition and tracking features made available from the web application.

According to the World Health Organisation, physical inactivity is the fourth highest risk factor for global mortality, accounting for 6% of deaths around the world. fitsquare attempts to increase physical activity for users of the foursquare social network by using persuasive technology to encourage positive behaviour change.

If you are interested in research in health in social media or persuasive technology then please do visit fitsquare to find out more about the research project and to get involved. Also if you have any questions about the project then please do email mail @ fitplusapp dot com

Here are some screenshots showing fitsquare and the main features in action…

Receive realtime persuasive messages via Twitter or email when you check in using foursquare. Great for keeping you motivated to exercise & stay healthy!

Race against your foursquare friends and other fitsquare users to climb to the top of the leaderboards. And be the first to earn exclusive fitsquare badges!

View your check-in history from your wall, log your progress and send messages to your friends. Comment, like and dislike wall posts to let your friends know what you think of their check-ins!

Track your progress with detailed line graphs, bar charts and pie charts. Find out how healthy your check-ins are.

To further enhance the students experience of the module we are  hosting a Windows Phone workshop with Microsoft on Wednesday March 7th @1pm-5pm – by registering and coming along you could be in with a chance to win a brand new Nokia Lumia 800 on the day! The event will take place in the Lincoln School of Computer Science in room MC3204 (Comp Lab B), and will include presentations by Microsoft on Windows Phone followed by a coding session then finishing the day off with pizza.  If you are interested (you don’t have to be enrolled on the Social Applications Development module) then it would be helpful to familiarise yourself with developing for Windows Phone using Visual Studio 2010 and the ‘Mango’ SDK, by doing so you will get more out of the workshop. All machines in room MC3204 are installed with the prerequisite tools if you want to get a head start!

Most of you who read this will not know what Human Technology is. Human Technology deals with all kinds of human-technology interaction and tries to enhance user-friendly interfaces. I will eventually become a ‘soft’ engineer, mainly interested in human factors and behaviour, but with enough technical education to be able to communicate with developers/designers. I’ve been taught from basic usability studies to broad investigations on the societal demands on technological innovations. The focus is on ICT, building environment and product design. As an HT-engineer I know that the situations in which technicians design a product, service or interface are pretty complex. At the end of my study I will not only know how the end users think, but also how the designers think and how those minds can be brought together.

During my time at LiSC I assisted in the ENACT, Eat,Cook,Grow and KillaWhatts project. In the ENACT project I worked together with Shaun Lawson, Conor Linehan, Sue Jamison-Powell and Andy Garbett. The goal of this project is to set up a new way of Computerized Cognitive Behavioural Therapy for people suffering from insomnia.My work in the ENACT project involved the set up of the usability testing for the mobile phone application. The usability trials are still running at the moment.

In Eat,Cook,Grow I worked together with Shaun Lawson and Jaz Choi from the Queensland University in Australia. Eat,Cook,Grow is a project on sustainable food. The main goal of the is toraise people’s awareness of healthy and ecological food options with nutritional data and educational information. Shaun and I were in charge of recruiting participants for the website I8Dat and the focus group. Together with Jaz we had a really interesting focus group, and the analyses showed lots of usable data.When I am back in The Hague, I will run the I8Dat trial in The Netherlands!

Killawhats is a project on energy usage in student courts on the Lincoln University Campus. The goal of the project is to reduce the amount of energy students use by introducing the students of various courts with a Facebook application that monitors the energy usage per court.On this project I worked together with Derek Foster. Originally I was going to be in charge of the recruitment and the focus group, but the project got postponed.

I also worked on a literature review oncognitive behavioral therapy for people suffering from posttraumatic stress syndrome after sexual abuse and what the possibilities and requirements are to set up an online group cognitive behavioral therapy.

I want to thank everyone in LiSC, I had a really great time and would love to come back when I finish Human Technology.

To see if this is the case and technology can enhance the monitoring and nutritional processing side of a person’s diet, my final year project will look at this. Being a Web Technology student a web application was developed, Plate and Rate lets users upload images of the food, other users of the application then rate and tag these food choices for how closely they believe they match the NHS Eat Well plate.

Plate and Rate makes it easy for you to tag the content, all you have to do is increase or decrease the size of the segments in a pie chart for how much of that food type you think is in the plate you’ve been given to rate. Plate and Rate then collates all of this data and gives you information back on how well you did.

Firstly, Plate and Rate tells you how close you were to the guideline for each plate you uploaded and awards you points for how well you did. Then, the application collates all of your plate data and creates an ‘overall plate’ this is every plate you have uploaded mashed together into one big plate which you can then compare to the guideline. Plate and Rate then plots how far away from the guideline you were for each meal you uploaded allowing for an overview and a progression on how you did. The application also allows for you to view your uploads for the past 7 days for finer control. Plate and Rate also awards you points for how accurately you rated other people’s plates, letting you gain ideas and enhancing your knowledge of balanced meals. This work carries on where a previous project left off – read the results of that project here.

This is currently very exciting and promising research for the future and lets you make it easier to see the food you’re eating over a period of time, simply by uploading images and using the application. The trial is expected to run for three weeks and if you’d like to participate then please visit http://chrisborrowdale.co.uk/participate/ and complete the form. Here you’ll be asked a few questions to assess your current eating habits – to get an even spread of participants.

If you have any queries then please feel free to contact me at chris@chrisborrowdale.co.uk