The Internet of Things conference is focusing on sustainability issues this year. The IoT2010 CFP particularly encourages research on infrastructure and applications facilitating environmentaly responsibility under a theme “IoT for a Green Planet”. The CFP emphasizes work that addresses real-world implementation and deployment issues. The paper submissions are due March 15, 2010 and the workshop proposals are due March 20, 2010.
I have not submitted to IoT before and I’m not familiar with many researchers who do. A quick scan of the scientific proceedings from last year’s IoT in Zurich reveals a fairly Euro-centric community with a few Asian researchers contributing and only one US institution (the University of Virginia). However, this could be because of the conference’s location last year (I have not looked at other preceding years). The conference looks like it’s still getting off the ground (not sure how hold it is). In 2008, they had 92 submissions and accepted 23 for publication (25% acceptance rate).
On Friday, October 9th, I was part of an invited panel at the Walk21 conference on Using Powerful Web Apps to Build a Livable Streets Movement hosted by Nick Grossman from The Open Planning Project (TOPP) Labs. Other panelists included Ben Berkowitz from SeeClickFix, a tool to report and monitor community issues; Aaron Ogle from WalkShed.org, a visualization tool to explore very precise and personal walkability calculations; and Seth Priebatsch from SCVNGR, a website to host geo-based scavenger hunt games. It ended up being a tremendously successful panel with a very fruitful discussion which included questions about privacy, the pros/cons of transparency, motivating adoption, and government engagement. Discussions will continue on the mailing list: streets-advocacy-tech@googlegroups.com.
The title of my talk was The Feetback Cycle: Leveraging Everyday Technologies to Change the Way We Move. I focused on the emerging area of Persuasive Technology and the ways in which technology may be used to encourage particular behaviors. I began the talk with a brief overview of popular behavior motivation techniques, highlighted past studies by Sunny Consolvo and colleagues at Intel Research exploring the use of mobile phones to promote fitness activity and then transitioned into a lengthier overview of the UbiGreen Transportation Display. Unfortunately, due to time constraints, I was not able to go over commercial offerings of persuasive technology like the Nike+iPod, the newly released iPod Nano Pedometer or the long-awaited FitBit but you can see the slides here (pptx file, 33.9 MB).
Below are some pictures from the talk itself:
The Toyota Prius is perhaps the quintessential eco-feedback system, it provides real-time information about a driver’s fuel efficiency as well a historical graph to track progress over time.
Back in 2005-2006, Sunny Consolvo and colleagues from Intel Research, Seattle used a pedometer and mobile phone to show that rewards mediated by a technology could be effective in motivating fit behavior even if that reward was simple. In this case, study participants were rewarded with an asterisks when they achieved their step goals.
The UbiGreen Transportation Display semi-automatically senses transportation modes such as bicycling, running, and walking and feeds this information back to the user with the goal of motivating green transportation decisions.
The UbiGreen Transportation Display uses the background of the mobile phone (sometimes called the wallpaper) to display evocative imagery that changes based on sensed transit activity (sort of like a real-life Choose Your Own Adventure where the choices are sensed in the physical world rather than in a book).
The first USENIX Workshop on Sustainable Information Technology (SustainIT ‘10), February 22, 2010. San Jose, CA. Co-located with the 8th USENIX Conference on File and Storage Technologies (FAST ‘10). The workshop program committee is heavily skewed towards Systems researchers (which isn’t too surprising given the fact that (1) it’s USENIX and (2) it’s co-located with FAST). The CFP (below) seems to emphasize engineering trade-offs between performance, cost, reliability and the environment. However, it is more broad than I expected it to be (e.g., lifecycle analysis, including “applications”–although I don’t know what their definition of applications is).
Increasingly, designers of computer systems ranging from small mobile devices to massive datacenters are concerned with sustainable design, including both power and life-cycle costs; these costs should include manufacturing, operation, and disposal of IT systems. Energy costs are growing rapidly, as are the costs of producing, managing, and disposing of the material from which computing systems are built; worse, the long-term environmental impacts of this entire IT life-cycle are poorly understood. Whereas understanding the power that runs computer systems is important, it is not the only factor: the resources needed to manufacture a computer system can be comparable to and even exceed what it consumes in its useful lifetime. The research community and industry do not understand these issues sufficiently well, much less the trade-offs between energy used in various stages of a computer system’s life and its interactions with performance, cost, reliability, usability, security, and more.
This workshop brings together researchers as well as industry practitioners in a forum that presents the latest research and practices. We seek papers that evaluate energy-related issues and their aforementioned trade-offs, present novel new ideas, challenge and/or debunk past and present practices, and more. We especially encourage papers that discuss not just energy issues but also how they interact with other dimensions in a sustainable manner. The scope of this workshop is broad, covering research, theory, hardware, software, applications, techniques, etc.—all related to making computing systems greener.
This workshop is co-located with FAST ‘10 in order to encourage researchers from the two events to interact with each other.
I just got done presenting at IJCAI09 on the shared bicycling research I conducted while a visiting researcher in the summer of 2008 at Telefonica Research in Barcelona, Spain. This is joint work with Joachim Neumann and Nuria Oliver (both of Telefonica Research). You can download the talk (PowerPoint slides) here.
Abstract
City-wide urban infrastructures are increasingly reliant on network technology to improve and ex-pand their services. As a side effect of this digitali-zation, large amounts of data can be sensed and analyzed to uncover patterns of human behavior. In this paper, we focus on the digital footprints from one type of emerging urban infrastructure: shared bicycling systems. We provide a spatiotemporal analysis of 13 weeks of bicycle station usage from Barcelona’s shared bicycling system, called Bicing. We apply clustering techniques to identify shared behaviors across stations and show how these behaviors relate to location, neighborhood, and time of day. We then compare experimental results from four predictive models of near-term station usage. Finally, we analyze the impact of factors such as time of day and station activity in the prediction capabilities of the algorithms.
Some pictures (with captions) from the talk:
Our focus was on utilizing existing urban infrastructure to sense data about human behavior that is *freely* available (e.g., not proprietary data but data that we can freely access). In this case, we use shared bicycling usage to uncover spatiotemporal patterns of human mobility in the city of Barcelona.
We have reached a pivotal point in time where city infrastructures are transitioning from mechanical/analog systems to digital systems thereby creating digital traces of human activity. Bruno Latour notes the potential to access the masses of data that are of the same order of magnitude as that of the natural sciences.
Our main contributions were: (1) demonstrating the potential of using shared bicycling as a data source to gain insights into city dynamics and aggregated human be-havior; (2) exploring the relationship between spatiotemporal patterns of bicycle usage and underlying city behavior and geography; and (3) studying patterns in bicycle station usage, including the prediction of usage patterns and an analysis of how factors such as the time of the day affect this prediction.
We obtained our data by scraping the bicing website once every two minutes. We downloaded station geolocation information as well as the number of current free parking spots and number of currently available bicycles.
One of our motivations to explore prediction was the fact that 66% respondents to an online survey about Bicing stated that they had difficulty finding a free parking slot when trying to drop off a bicycle. This is a major impediment to Barcelona residents adopting Bicing as a primary form of transportation as searching for a station with a free parking spot takes time. Indeed, 50% of respondents avoid Bicing when they are traveling to a place where they must be on time.
We used dendrogram clustering on station temporal usage data to see how Bicing usage patterns are shared across the city. We also explored how our prediction algorithms performed in relation to these clusters.
One longterm goal of our work is to explore ways to make shared bicycling more self-sustainable. Current shared bicycling systems rely on trucks to load balance the bicycles (i.e., to make sure they are well distributed throughout the city). We are looking at ways to incentivize bicing users to drop off/pick up bicycles slightly out of their way to reduce the maintenance/operating overhead on the city. A mobile phone application could recommend a station close to a user’s final destination that is predicted to have a need for bicycles.
This work would not have been possible without my colleagues Joachim Neumann and Nuria Oliver. Joachim, in particular, worked tirelessly on this project for six months and was absolutely essential to many parts of the project including data logging, model building, and evaluation.
Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) will play a central role in this future, not only because ICT have become in just two decades a key driver of the development of all countries worldwide, but also because ICT can efficiently contribute to the achievement of the revised economic, social and environmental objectives which this future envisages. Moreover, Europe is undoubtedly well placed to proactively promote this new concept of progress towards a true sustainable future. In this context, the “ICT for a global sustainable future†conference is organised, with the support of the PARADISO project, on January 22-23, 2009 at the European Commission in Brussels (Charlemagne building, 170 rue de la Loi).
Regarding registration:
Registration for this event is free of charge but preregistration is compulsory due to security rules linked to access into the Charlemagne building. It is highly recommended to register as soon as possible since, due to room capacity constraints, the registration process may be closed prior to the event. Only online registrations (through the event web site: http://www.paradiso-fp7.eu) are accepted and subject to confirmation. Thank you in advance for your kind understanding.
Regarding call-for-papers:
Please note that there is no Call for papers published for this conference but that some contributions submitted in response to the open consultation launched following the release of the draft version of the PARADISO reference document will be selected and presented during the conference. We therefore invite you to submit a contribution to the open consultation.
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Author
jon froehlich is a phd candidate in
computer science at the university of washington.
his research focuses on building and studying technology that promotes healthier lifestyles and proenvironmental behaviors.
