Fade to Play

Gene Smith @ Northern Voice

As I have stated before, one of the benefits of attending a large (40 000+) university is that you can request any book under the sun for the library and they will not only order it for you but will hold it at the front desk of your library of choice. When I read on Gene Smith’s blog that his book had become available, I immediately requested that my library purchase it as it relates to my thesis research.

Gene Smith is a great speaker whom I met most recently at Northern Voice this year. There is a companion website for the book. I have just began reading the first chapter so I am not able to provide a valid assessment as yet, however I do recommend everyone order it from Amazon.com or ask their school library to order it as so much of web2.0 technology is built on the foundation of tags.

Relevance: Most of us tag daily whether using flickr, wordpress, or delicious, but few of us understand why we tag. This book explores the value of tagging.

So are you interested in meeting some of the coolest übertech people in Vancouver? Well you are in luck. Cancel that August vacation if you are living here in Vangroovy. If you are out of town, check the dates, because you’ll want to come here for Vancouver barcamp August 17-18th (includes a sleepover hopefully with S’mores).

Spaces are going fast so register today.

What is Barcamp?

Barcamp Vancouver facebook event and group.

Barcamp Vancouver wiki

Let’s get some students there (share your research — hello?)

Yesterday was a busy day for me. I gave a presentation at the Media Annotations and Tagging workshop by MAGIC entitled “Playing tag in user-generated spaces” in which I discussed tagging in Facebook and Flickr.

I then attended a photowalk in Gastown (a section of Vancouver) organised by Kris Krüg that evening and afterwards we uploaded our photos to Flickr and and Facebook using appropriate tags to categorise our content. Some of us also became new friends/contacts on Flickr and Facebook.

After the walk Kris yelled out that we use a standardised tag “gastownphotowalk2″ to link our photos on flickr together. If you attend conferences, workshops, meetups, you will hear the organisers request that a common tag be used to link photos/blog entries related to the event. Although people believe in the power of the folksonomy, a little top-down intervention is very effective and sometimes necessary.

The result of using “gastownphotowalk2″ is that we are one of the hot tags of the last 24 hours on flickr. Sweet.

Check out our photos here.

Relevance: I am finding that I living what I research regarding tagging in flickr and facebook. It helps me better understand the culture of these spaces when I use these spaces daily because of my real world interactions and meetups. Having friends that live in these digital environments is quite beneficial.

I am fortunate to be invited to participate in a workshop organised by the Media and Graphics Interdisciplinary Centre (MAGIC) which is my home department. Both David Vogt and Sid Fels are knowledgeable and great to listen to, so it should be a useful session to attend if tagging interests you.

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MAGIC Workshop - Media Annotation and Tagging
June 6th, UBC Robson Square (downtown), 3-5:30pm

Directions are here.

Please distribute!

The 7th quarterly MAGIC workshop will explore the exploding area of media annotation and tagging. Please join us for 3 exciting talks:
Attendance is free but please RSVP to Lavana Lea (lavana@cs.ubc.ca)

David Vogt, CEO, CrowdTrust Technologies: Tagging technologies to make sense of everything that matters
Sid Fels, UBC: Perspectives on Human Communication Technologies, Smart Homes and Media annotation
Phillip Jeffrey, UBC: Playing tag in user-generated spaces

David Vogt, CEO, CrowdTrust Technologies ( http://www.crowdtrust.net)

“How often every day do you encounter things you know are meaningful and might need some day, yet inevitably get lost or forgotten? Think of CrowdTrust as your secure external memory drive and personal creative commons. We enable you to easily tag, keep and make sense of everything that matters in the digital blizzard of your life. Ideas, emails, places, people, images, etc, etc, - you can capture and automatically organize anything on the fly. Best of all, these ’semantic investments’ quickly become an invaluable identity asset, allowing you to create and manage actionable representations of “you” to yourself, your networks and the general public.

CrowdTrust approaches media tagging and annotation from a social/semantic perspective. All of our personal accounts are free; we offer identity, marketing and collective intelligence services for organizations.”
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Sid Fels: Perspectives on Human Communication Technologies, Smart Homes and Media annotation

Recent trends in human communication technologies focus on people’s relationships with each other, with computational artifacts and various environments people encounter in their daily lives. Research at MAGIC and the Human Communication Technologies laboratory are pushing this trend from the perspective of relationship aesthetics and design of experience and expresssion. Design for human experience and expression using information technology requires attention to how and why people form relationships with entities beyond themselves. An awareness of people’s different cognitive, physical and emotional capabilities provides a foundation for acquiring, analyzing, representing, storing, retrieving, transmitting, communicating and ultimately synthesizing human experience. In this presentation, I will discuss some of our current work on a context-aware multimedia project for the Winter Olympics and other related activities. This project sets the foundation to proceed to speculate on some new perspectives on how these technologies may develop in the future as we look at people’s relationship to their digital environment in the home and the new opportunities this uncovers.

Bio:

Sidney has been in the department of Electrical & Computer Engineering at the University of British Columbia since 1998. Sidney received his Ph. D. and M.Sc . in Computer Science at the University of Toronto in 1994 and 1990 respectively supervised by Dr. Geoffrey Hinton and Bill Buxton. He received his B.A.Sc. in Electrical Engineering at the
University of Waterloo in 1988. He was recognized as a Distinguished University Scholar at UBC from 2004. He was a visiting researcher at ATR Media Integration & Communications Research Laboratories in Kyoto, Japan from 1996 to 1997. He also worked at Virtual Technologies Inc. in Palo Alto, CA. He is internationally known for his work in human-computer interaction, biomechanical modeling, neural networks, intelligent
agents, new interfaces for musical expression and interactive arts with over 100 scholarly publications and exhibitions. Sidney is one of the principal investigators of the Institute of Computing, Information and Cognitive Systems through his authoring a grant to create a new $22.1M facility to house interdisciplinary research using advanced technologies. He has been the Director of MAGIC since 2001.

Sidney is currently a visiting professor at NTT Cyber Solutions laboratory at Yokosuka Research Laboratories.
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Phillip Jeffrey: Playing tag in user-generated spaces.

In today’s Web 2.0 environment, tools exist to classify and organize digital content that has been uploaded – in a sense providing users with control over information they are sharing. These technologies have value in enabling both consumers and producers of the content to easily find media such as pictures, webpages, or blog posts that have been tagged. User generated sites such as Flickr and Facebook which enable tagging attach additional information or descriptions to content. These online environments provide powerful social tools for creative expression, networking, and feedback from their audience. In this presentation, I will discuss how tagging differs within these shared spaces, how the dynamics of culture manifests itself, and shed light on how the design of these environments facilitate forms of creative expression.

Bio

Phillip Jeffrey is a Masters of Science student in the Interdisciplinary Studies program. His home department is the Media and Graphics Interdisciplinary Centre. His thesis research investigates how user-generated digital spaces are being used in social and personal ways. His broader research explores social and cultural issues that emerge within the areas of pervasive games and ubiquitous computing in everyday life. His research blog is fadetoplay.com.

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Relevance: It will be good preparation for my town hall presentation later in June.

According to Ars Technica, the RFID Guardian created by Melanie Rieback is a portable device for personal RFID privacy. The device creates a firewall which will either enable or prevent RFID queries.

As the tags showed up in increasingly sensitive applications, security became more of a concern—at least to researchers and privacy advocates. Rieback was one of those people. As a graduate student searching for a Ph.D. dissertation topic, she spent eight months reading computer science research papers and discovered that the number of published works on RFID security could be counted on both hands. “It became painfully obvious that there was a deficiency in the area of RFID, and there is so much work to be done,” she says.

So Rieback turned herself into one of the foremost academic authorities on RFID security and went on to develop the first RFID virus as a proof of concept. That got the industry’s attention. As Rieback tactfully puts it, there was a “mixed reaction” that even included some personal attacks. But other companies approached her team for consulting assistance within days of publishing the paper.

After doing her part to publicize these security shortcomings of many RFID implementations, Rieback moved on to the RFID Guardian project, which would give people a measure of control over their tags. It became her Ph.D. project, and when she finalizes the next version in the next eight months or so, she should earn her doctorate. Even when that happens, though, she has no plans to drop the project. “I think this is important enough that we should finish it,” she says. “We should get it out there.”

Eventual plans call for the Guardian to be incorporated into cell phones and PDAs, but the current model is a pocket-sized device that runs on its own battery and provides a circular 1m field of control over RFID tags, jamming any tags that the user does not want read.

Relevance: Seeing how she was able to create a really cool PhD project gives me inspiration when am developing my own project in the future.

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