TagMaps / World Explorer - A History Lesson

February 22, 2007 on 10:50 pm | by Mor | In TagMaps | Leave Comment

(News item first: Today we released an update to the TagMaps embed object - developers, check it out here.)

In late 2002, I first started working with geo-referenced photos as part of my PhD. We tried to imagine a future in which cameras have built-in location capabilities. What could we do to make the life of everyday photographers better? One of the first ideas that came to mind was based on the fact that location information allows you to correlate metadata (such as descriptions or tags) between media objects from different users. Based on this intuition, we developed a system called LOCALE (paper here) that allowed tourists (taking the Stanford campus tour, in our case) to snap geo-referenced photos, upload them, and add captions to the photos. The system them extracted terms from captions attached to these geo-located photos. After we had enough data (from over 50 participants) we could see that certain terms “float to the top”, or are more popular, in different campus locations : Hoover tower, Memorial Church, Fountain, etc.

While we ended our experiment with roughly 1000 photos, all taken on Stanford campus, we dreamed that a much larger dataset, covering the entire world, will be available one day. Such dataset can take us from LOCALE to “GLOBALE”: a system that provides a complete “picture” of the world, understanding and visualizing what every location is about. But where would we get the data? What would be the algorithm? How would one present this information to the user?

Four years after LOCALE, most of the answers for our imagined GLOBALE are finally here. It took the ingenious incentives system of Flickr to get people to contribute the data - geotagged photos and associated text tags (currenly over 5000 photos are available from Stanford campus). It took the researchers and interns of Y!RB to analyze the data and devise the algorithms in a way that allows extraction of meaningful patterns, and serving the data in real time without delay. It took some more clever ideas from the same research team to come up with the visualization and interaction techniques. Finally, it took some help and tips from our designer friends in making it all look good.

Let’s take one paragraph and acknowledge the people who made all this happen. The core Y!RB Media in Context team: Shane, Rahul, Simon, and Jeannie. The intern: Alex. Ideation: Marc Davis. Help with algorithms/methods: Tamir Tassa. The Flash SWAT team: Jeffery and Joe. Oversight and and adult supervision: Ellen. And, of course, the Flickr folks who created this wonderful world of photos, and the Flickr community who contributed, and continues to contribute, such compelling and rich data.

Oh, and by the way, if you still want to use the LOCALE data for research, give me a shout.

[update: I just learned that Arun Qamra at UCSB have been using the LOCALE dataset for his ICME 2005 paper. Cool!]


Do you listen to your cell phone?

February 9, 2007 on 2:22 pm | by ayman | In Media and Community, Mobile, ZoneTag | 1 Comment

Really, do you really listen to your cell phone? Does it compel you to take photos? Can it remind you to SMS a friend to meet at the park? Or maybe tell you to lay off the double-double at In-N-Out burger?

Last Friday, a few of us were on the greens of Stanford University trying to find some answers. Fortunately, that day members of the Persuasive Technology Lab were hosting a day long workshop on Mobile Persuasion which focused on several aspects of persuasive mobile technologies from games to advertising, from health to design.

The question of `how can mobility persuade you’ was addressed from several angles. Alex Kass, from Accenture Technology Labs showed a demonstration of a mobile coaching device which would remind you not to grab that candy bar from the machine or point out the stairs next to the elevator as the healthier option. Something about mobility being that little voice in your head captivated the attendees.

Thinking about mobility as location, Ian Bogost demonstrated Airport Insecurity: a game about inconvenience and insecurity in American airports. A game for Series 60 Nokias where you get to be the TSA agent screening passengers against a changing security checklist. Ian suggests the game is played best while waiting in the airport security line. It’s actually quite fun, but I haven’t had the chance to play it in situ yet.

Mirjiana Spasojevic from Nokia Research presented several principles for mobile design, reminding us to think of mobility not as a mini pc but as an ever present technology (not just on the go but also on the couch). The idea of mobile ‘web browsing’ was generally discouraged, rather technology should be proactive and provide what is essential just in time.

And while there was much discussion on social collaboration and connectivity, many of the speakers did not account for the phone’s contact list as a persuasive artifact. It’s clear that my phone can motivate me to do cool things, but I find I am more persuaded if a friend from my contact list sends me an MMS video message. I listen to my cellphone; I respond to to my friends.

Our own Mor Naaman presented a study the lab ran on the sharing motivations with geotagged images from Flickr using ZoneTag. In the talk, he presented a taxonomy of motivations for tagging and a breakdown of privacy considerations. We will post more about this soon; I have to go—my phone is telling me to get that double-double…


 

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