Webcast IFIP 8.2

Carsten is chairing this years IFIP 8.2 Working Conference in Cleveland, Ohio, USA, August 1-3 ( http://ifip2005.cwru.edu/). Here the plenary sessions with keynote speeches will be available via webcast. The theme of the conference this year is, "Designing Ubiquitous Information Environments: Socio-technical issues and challenges". For those who are not able to physically join the conference can watch the plenary sessions at http://weatherhead.cwru.edu/webcast. The schedule of the plenary sessions are: Monday, August 1, 2005 [8:30 AM - 10:00 AM, EDT] (2:30pm London time) Tom Malone, MIT, The future of work Tuesday, August 2, 2005 [8:30 AM - 10:00 AM, EDT] Lee Green, IBM, It's the experience, not the price Wednesday, August 3, 2005 [8:30 AM - 10:00 AM, EDT] Paul Dourish, UC-Irvine, The culture of information: Ubiquitous Computing and Representations of Reality Of course, for those who are able to physically join us, you can still register for the conference at http://ifip2005.cwru.edu.

Reality Mining from MIT Media Lab. Reality Mining defines the collection of machine-sensed environmental data pertaining to human social behavior. This new paradigm of data mining makes possible the modeling of conversation context, proximity sensing, and temporospatial location throughout large communities of individuals. Mobile phones (and similarly innocuous devices) are used for data collection, opening social network analysis to new methods of empirical stochastic modeling. The original Reality Mining experiment is one of the largest mobile phone projects attempted in academia. Our research agenda takes advantage of the increasingly widespread use of mobile phones to provide insight into the dynamics of both individual and group behavior. Reat abouth the project on Reality Mining.

From Slashdot.org.

Wired News reports that cell phones were used in a recent project at MIT to both document and predict the lives of 100 MIT faculty and staff members. During the Reality Mining Project at MIT, Researcher Nathan Eagle logged 350,000 hours of data over nine months about the location, proximity, activity and communication of volunteers through cell phones carried by the participants. From the article, "Given enough data, Eagle's algorithms were able to predict what people -- especially professors and Media Lab employees -- would do next and be right up to 85 percent of the time."

Wireless: A peer-to-peer music asylum. While the technology has been vilified for making it easier to swap illegally copied music over the Internet, peer-to-peer software is increasingly being embraced by cellular phone manufacturers and service providers to help their nascent music businesses. Handset maker Nokia has reportedly developed peer-to-peer software that would allow sharing of text documents, photos and, eventually, music between its 6600 model phones. Reat it on News.com.

High-tech parking meters could pull in WiFi users. Houston's downtown parking meters may soon do a lot more than gobble money in exchange for curbside real estate. They may connect you wirelessly to the Internet. Reat it on HoustonChronicle.com.

BBC Trials Mobile Barcodes. The BBC is trialing mobile barcode technology to provide location-specific for its TV program ‘Coast’ that will allow people to “reach for their phone and call up site-specific extra audio and WAP content from the programme using “visual triggers” and their mobiles phones”. Reat it on Digital-Lifestyles.info.

IDC has predicted the U.S. wireless full-track music downloads market segment — a component of the overall wireless music market — will surge to $1.2 billion in revenue and over 50 million full-track customers and subscribers by 2009. “IDC believes that there is opportunity for wireless music services to include a range of bundled services designed to complement full tracks, and to deliver music to consumers however and whenever they want it. Wireless devices and networks are emerging as a great new channel for the delivery of not just a la carte tracks, but subscription-oriented packages that include radio and song identification technologies, ring tones, ring back tones, music videos, concert information alerts and more,” said IDC. Reat it on TekRati.com .

Comments given by one person are made available to another when users pass each other in the mall, when they approach connection hot spots, or on demand.” The project is a prototype being used to “reseach hypotheses about mobile services as a whole, about distributed recommender systems, about social computation”, and only works on the P800. Reat on MobiTip Project from Swedish Institute of Computer Science.

Terrorist Attack in London

4 confirmed bombs in London: Just a brief note to let you know that so far no casualties has been reported from the Department of Information Systems in relation to the horrific events that happened around 10am this morning in London. We will return with any news as and when we hear more.