Mid-term presentations

Friday, July 11th was the Odysseus mid-term event at DCU. There were eighteen students who presented the work they have done so far and the game plan for the next six weeks. The poster session was for about two hours, during which several people, including the extreme blue interns, supervisors, school director and mentors went around asking questions and giving feedback.

It was a helpful session. I think it was a crucial time to stop and think about the direction, progress and goals of the project. It was also a good opportunity to see what other people received your ideas. It was particularly important for me because my project is application-led. Understanding the user's needs and feedback was very essential.

From user surveys and conversations with people I found out that most people felt that Chumby was a good idea. They could see themselves, and their not-so-tech-savvy family members use it. But, some felt that showing location on a map was "big-brother" like. Some also felt that they wouldn't want families to see their facebook status, but since they already use twitter to interact with work groups, those status messages were O.K. to share.

I also received help from some of the Extreme Blue interns. Neil Cowzer owns a Chumby and I am going to contact him soon to see if he can give feedback on my widgets. Tim Hayes offered help with Flash as he has previous experience with it.

Apart from the feedback I got, just answering questions helped me get a better focus on my project and re-evaluate my goals.

Target Demo

In the meeting with Lorcan today, we decided to have a demo by this Thursday. The demo would have Chumby communicating with twitter. Right now it just detects orientation, and all the twitter data is on the website. The goal is to get the twitter data on Chumby, and have the Chumby orientations updated to twitter.

Minutes of Today's meeting

Today's meeting was mainly about preparations for this week's demo. We decided to do a demo run on Wednesday and I will have the powerpoint, layout for the poster, and survey questions ready by then. I will also do another blog post on evaluation of applications, and technologies that can be used for location sensing- like GPS, bluetooth, etc.

We got a domain name for the project - www.neardear.org. It still needs to be updated with project details; will do that before Friday of this week.

Another important thing we decided was that I take notes during the poster session to record invaluable feedback and discuss the evaluations right after.

I will also try to get a webcam widget up and running for the Chumby.

What Makes Good Application-Led Research?

"What Makes Good Application-Led Research?" is a paper from the 2005 UbiApp Workshop writtern by Richard Sharp and Kasim Rehman. This paper outlines the essential steps for a successful application-led research.

An application-led research arises from an existing need. It is about coming up with a solution to that need and evaluating the effectiveness of that solution. It is different from technology-led research in a way that the later is carried out because it is interesting from a technical perspective. Both kinds of research are essential in the are of ubiquitous computing.

A good application-led research is based on a severe, persistent problem. It is built in a way that the infrastructure can be reused for further development. This application ought to be deployed in the real-world for evaluation; lab testing does not suffice. It is also important that it is evaluated against similar applications. The results of the evaluation should be released publicly so that they can be verified by researchers around the world.

This paper gives me a good idea of the kind of questions I should ask myself and the users in order to evaluate my application.

Ambient google talk??

Since I started my internship in Dublin, my mom and I use google talk to call eachother. Because both of us are online most of the time, it is almost like calling a phone. But, this weekend she did something amazing. She took her laptop to my aunt's place (about a mile away from our home) and called me. After talking for a while, she just left the laptop in the living room without disconnecting the call. I could hear their conversations and they could hear me. They were not directly talking to me, nor was I sitting at my computer listening to everything they said. I was doing my regular tasks in my room and their voices were just floating in the background. Whenever I heard something that caught my attention, I would join their conversation. It felt great, I felt so "connected" :) Isn't that simple ambient technology at its best!

Chumby Widget Ideas

I was, and still am, super excited about the Chumby and made it evident through very weird gtalk and facebook status messages. Seeing my excitement, a few of my friends and family shared their chumby thoughts and gave some excellent Chumby widget ideas. Here are some of them-

1) Chumby Falldown - A widget that makes Chumby's alarm go off when it falls down (or even better if it is about to fall !)
2) Birthday Reminder - A widget that reminds birthdays and automatically sends them a birthday e-card.
3) School Sign- Widget to show off you alma mater, school seal, motto etc.
4) A widget that updates twitter with "good morning" when you turn off the alarm.
5) Chumby linked to other sensors at home- like the car key, mobile phone, pressure pads, sensors in ducts etc.
6) Chumby linked to a webcam to upload pictures every now and then to the internet.

Well thats what I got. If you have any more cool ideas, please leave a comment!

Minutes of Yesterday's Meeting

A few tasks for the next few days:
1) Blog posts on-
- how are new ideas/products evaluated in the papers I have read
- a more elaborate description of my project
-the other Odysseus projects

2) Set up a webpage exclusively for the project
3) A list of survey questions before the midterms for validating my project.
4) To get a Chumby application up and running before the midterm.