Thursday 12-2PM, 1-25-2007

From CENS Urban Sensing

Sorry, the notes are a bit sparse in some areas because I missed what was said. And formatting is a bit off. Please feel free to add and edit as necessary! ~Elisa

Urban Sensing Meeting Notes
Thursday, 1/28/07
12-2pm:
In attendance: Deborah, Mark, Andrew, Nicolai, August, Sasank, Gong, Robert, Vids, Frank, Jeff, Eitan, Jason, Elisa, David

• Campaign Ideas: quick 1 minute idea pitch per person
  

Note: Andrew posted on wiki about the nature of our campaigns
-Nicolai: Campaign shoulder surfing
-checking out the environment while talking to someone.
-much like the blogging atmospheres of MySpace and Facebook, associating interests in virtual space but with real-time activities
-tracking what’s going on NOW in the city instead of in the past, with photos, videos, etc.
- blogs would be available to other people with similar interests
-Andrew noted how specific methods were used for the rural women in China (cultural probes paper).
-Deborah: exposure and interests…
-David: medical alerts with location and time transmitted to EMS
-Elisa: similar to give phones out to people in LA to let them record what they perceive as “their LA” (cultural probes)
-Jason: give people personal devices to record the neighborhood they’re living in. Notice if there are structural upgrades to the neighborhood, does the amount of exercise change?
-Eitan:
-find most appropriate way to solicit info (i.e. postcards)
-extend GPS campaign to wifi?
1) graffiti survey: take pic of graffiti and log it. Responses? Clean them up?
2) clean up streets: make a note every time you hit a pothole in LA [ask Thomas Schmid about measuring potholes with accelerometers]
3) homeless census
4) GPS data, clustering it, location similarities?  visualization of similar areas
-Jeff: meta-campaign of Healthy/Livable cities. What makes your city healthy? Ask people what other determinants they consider other than just traffic, pollution, etc. Inspired by Krzysztof Wodiczko.
-Vids:
-Thomas Schmid (via email): when sprinklers water the street instead of lawns, take a pic and geotag it!
-Robert: packet sensing with GPS and N80. See how many people use phone type X in the area.
-Sasank: urban garbage. Geolocate where trash buildups are, and feedback to users so that they know where to avoid walking. Which neighborhood produces the most trash?
-Andrew: might depend on amt of info people are contributing
-Eitan: Flickr had something where someone could request a pic, then people could take that pic and submit it
-August: pictures of broken sidewalks. Certain areas are more heavily trafficked, so don’t need dozens of same pic. Maybe can download map the night before to know where not to walk.

• Campaign summary pages, linked from front page, has been created
  

-4 stages: Tech Pilot, Publish/Recruit, Execute, Evaluate
-Campaign general form was sent out by email
-maybe we should take participant names off of the public server

• Location Traces (Gong) – tracking people 24/7 for a week
  

- security issues w/Gong knowing who users are  maybe develop feature so that you can turn off for periods of time, but document why you turn it off (even if it’s just “I don’t feel comfortable with the GPS on right now)
- temporarily email project owner (Gong) for access control
- as long as participants sign “I allow myself to be GPS-recorded” form.
- may go to the “publish” stage by next week
- battery life only lasts max of 5 hours
-record only every 5 secs between samples
-upload less? Stop Bluetooth (in C++, not java)? (which factor drains the battery most?)
-someone needs to stop and implement how to maximize battery life.
-> for now, maybe just turn on for first 4 hours of day instead
-developmental ideas: only track if new location; everyone turn on for 4 hours in the morning when you get up.
-Useful feedback: user id, last upload time, # of uploads
-for now, just ignore all of the pop ups. App will work until it crashes.
-no more additional users for now.

• Collection of interfaces to start up campaigns between authors and users/participants?
  
• Code signing: Nicolai, Robert, and ? are working to get apps signed easily on the phones
  

-who’s involved in this work? August, Eitan, Nicolai
-non-developer certificates not tied to IME? -> Nokia wouldn’t allow that
-freeware: free, but they only process them when they have time
-VeriSign certificate we have is for signing the 100 phones we have (Vids owns it)
-proxy program: Eitan is working on a workaround, potentially done by next week

• Diet campaign: next week
  
• SVN: Users? Permissions? Repository names?
  

-internal: test code
-stable: extracted from internal
-public
*issue: moving from internal to stable is a pain
-> Since Nicolai owns this projects, he chooses to use the standard version of trunks, tagged

• Andrew requests help with Java development
  

-will be explaining his code for people starting out in Java on Friday from 2-3, 4:30-6

• Location, image, & audio capturing
  

-we’ll be using Andrew’s code in its current state