hidden Rome

I know Rome well, but I still see new things every time I visit, and sometimes the old things from a different angle, or perhaps from some of the lesser trod ways.

A week ago I was there for the AVI conference and some other events (see previous post).  I am not a city lover preferring wild places, the sea, hills and margins of existence.  However, Rome is different, partly because I was introduced to Rome by Romans (of the modern variety), and saw it through their eyes, but partly because it is a city itself on the margins of civilisation and decay.  I would not have liked ancient Rome with its bureaucracy and mannered civil life, but this Rome we have now, that survived the Visigoths, flowered in the Renaissance, then struggled through war and invasion from the outside, and internal conflicts from within, where ancient buildings and bustling modern  life sit side by side, where humanity is dense, but nature always nestling in the interstices, and ready to reassert itself.  That is beautiful.

A week ago on Saturday I had a ‘day off’, a gap between the end of the AVI conference on the Friday and travelling to Milan on the Sunday.  It had been a good week, not just from an academic point of view, but also seeing old friends both in the conference and outside, including a lovely meal at the lake near Castello Gandalfi with Roberta, Manuela, Francesco and others.

Of course an academic day off has its own meaning, and I had a relaxed breakfast on the roof terrace looking out over the roof tops to the Colloseum … while reading papers to review.  Then after retiring to my room for some hours to type of the reviews, wandered across to the Trastevere, where there are the best pizzas, to of course review some more papers over lunch, then wandering as far as an Internet cafe near the Ponte Sisto to upload it all.  However, at 5pm I eventually laid aside my computer and decided it was time to just wander!

One of my favourite walks in Rome is to start at the north in Piazza del Popolo and then wander south towards Piazza Venezia.  So many familiar sights not far either side of that axis.  From Ponto Sisto a meandering way through backstreets led through Piazza Campo de Fiori, and Piazza Novona, past the Pantheon and Piazza Colonna on to Via del Corsa up towards the Piazza del Popolo.  In Campo de Fiori I found that it looked very different when viewed from behind the flower stands, and just off Via del Corso an American Indian encampment.

From Piazza del Popolo, the most obvious route is straight down Via del Babuino towards the Piazza di Spagna.  However, last year Manuela and Francesco introduced me to the Via Margutta, which runs parallel and set back from bustling Babuino.  At the time it was itself quite full as it was the annual street exhibition of 100 Painters, but last week, only yards from the tourist and traffic filled streets, a small oasis with just the odd Italian wandering past its old houses, small galleries and tumbling greenery.

From there back onto the main thoroughfares, through Piazza di Spagnia, and the flower filled steps still seem lovely despite the tourists and crowds, although also special if you visit them early in the morning, as I did a few years ago, when they are empty all bar a few bin bags awaiting collection.

Fontana di Trevi is as in every guidebook, splendid, glorious, and actually bigger than it looks in pictures.  The small square containing the  fountain is always awash with people.  However, imagine standing facing the fountain and then turnaround, facing away from the statues, the flowing water, the postcard and trinket sellers.  Away to your right is a tiny alleyway, vicolo del Forno.  It is too small to be named on most maps, it goes nowhere and consequently I had never turned into it before.

The narrow opening part shielded by the roast chestnut seller cuts out much of the noise, and its unprepossessing appearance puts off any visitors. But, I was not the first person to wander in.  A short way within is small side window to a shop, covered with wrought iron crossbars from the days before toughened glass and security alarms.  On each bar there were tiny padlocks, and on the padlocks more padlocks, tumbling from one another, like rock plants growing from walls.  Each padlock had names written on them, love trysts.

When I asked afterwards, Roberta told me there was a bridge Ponte Milvio, which, after a famous film popularised the idea, is so heavily hung with padlocks like this that it damaged some of the ironwork.  Lovers affix the padlock then throw the key into the Tiber symbolising unbreakable love. Looking now on the web I can see that these love padlocks are found at sites all over the world, even in Glasgow. I assume Fontana di Trevi is filling with small keys alongside the more numerous coins.  However, unlike the very public display at Ponte Milvio, this small alley is so well hidden that perhaps only those seeking a secluded embrace away from the crowds find it; certainly Roberta, a native Roman, did not know it existed.

Now charmed by the out of the way, I decided to abandon my normal route back to via Corso and on to Piazza Venezia and instead took roads going south, slightly to the east of Corso, but not so far as the route up to the Quirinale.  This led me to Via Pilotta, a glorious small road, like a chasm with tall buildings to the right and a high retaining wall to the left with the hints of a garden beyond peeking over its top.  Like a river canyon it is also spanned by numerous small bridges, presumably allowing those in the houses to the right to get to the forbidden gardens to the left without descending to the street and rabble below.

On Pilotta there is a single ristorante Le Lanterne, a perfect place to sit as the light fades on Rome … and even here it is the hidden places that are perhaps most special.

Italian conferences: PPD10, AVI2010 and Search Computing

I got back from trip to Rome and Milan last Tuesday, this included the PPD10 workshop that Aaron, Lucia, Sri and I had organised, and the AVI 2008 conference, both in University of Rome “La Sapienza”, and a day workshop on Search Computing at Milan Polytechnic.

PPD10

The PPD10 workshop on Coupled Display Visual Interfaces1 followed on from a previous event, PPD08 at AVI 2008 and also a workshop on “Designing And Evaluating Mobile Phone-Based Interaction With Public Displays” at CHI2008.  The linking of public and private displays is something I’ve been interested in for some years and it was exciting to see some of the kinds of scenarios discussed at Lancaster as potential futures some years ago now being implemented over a range of technologies.  Many of the key issues and problems proposed then are still to be resolved and new ones arising, but certainly it seems the technology is ‘coming of age’.  As well as much work filling in the space of interactions, there were also papers that pushed some of the existing dimensions/classifications, in particular, Rasmus Gude’s paper on “Digital Hospitality” stretched the public/private dimension by considering the appropriation of technology in the home by house guests.  The full proceedings are available at the PPD10 website.

AVI 2010

AVI is always a joy, and AVI 2010 no exception; a biennial, single-track conference with high-quality papers (20% accept rate this year), and always in lovely places in Italy with good food and good company!  I first went to AVI in 1996 when it was in Gubbio to give a keynote “Closing the Loop: modelling action, perception and information“, and have gone every time since — I always say that Stefano Levialdi is a bit like a drug pusher, the first experience for free and ever after you are hooked! The high spot this year was undoubtedly Hitomi Tsujita‘s “Complete fashion coordinator2, a system for using social networking to help choose clothes to wear — partly just fun with a wonderful video, but also a very thoughtful mix of physical and digital technology.


images from Complete Fashion Coordinator

The keynotes were all great, Daniel Keim gave a really lucid state of the art in Visual Analytics (more later) and Patrick Lynch a fresh view of visual understanding based on many years experience and highlighting particularly on some of the more immediate ‘gut’ reactions we have to interfaces.  Daniel Wigdor gave an almost blow-by-blow account of work at Microsoft on developing interaction methods for next-generation touch-based user interfaces.  His paper is a great methodological exemplar for researchers combining very practical considerations, more principled design space analysis and targeted experimentation.

Looking more at the detail of Daniel’s work at Microsoft, it is interesting that he has a harder job than Apple’s interaction developers.  While Apple can design the hardware and interaction together, MS as system providers need to deal with very diverse hardware, leading to a ‘least common denominator’ approach at the level of quite basic touch interactions.  For walk-up-and use systems such as Microsoft Surface in bar tables, this means that users have a consistent experience across devices.  However, I did wonder whether this approach which is basically the presentation/lexical level of Seeheim was best, or whether it would be better to settle at some higher-level primitives more at the Seeheim dialog level, thinking particularly of the way the iPhone turns pull down menus form web pages into spinning selectors.  For devices that people own it maybe that these more device specific variants of common logical interactions allow a richer user experience.

The complete AVI 2010 proceedings (in colour or B&W) can be found at the conference website.

The very last session of AVI was a panel I chaired on “Visual Analytics: people at the heart of data” with Daniel Keim, Margit Pohl, Bob Spence and Enrico Bertini (in the order they sat at the table!).  The panel was prompted largely because the EU VisMaster Coordinated Action is producing a roadmap document looking at future challenges for visual analytics research in Europe and elsewhere.  I had been worried that it could be a bit dead at 5pm on the last day of the conference, but it was a lively discussion … and Bob served well as the enthusiastic but also slightly sceptical outsider to VisMaster!

As I write this, there is still time (just, literally weeks!) for final input into the VisMaster roadmap and if you would like a draft I’ll be happy to send you a PDF and even happier if you give some feedback 🙂

Search Computing

I was invited to go to this one-day workshop and had the joy to travel up on the train from Rome with Stu Card and his daughter Gwyneth.

The search computing workshop was organised by the SeCo project. This is a large single-site project (around 25 people for 5 years) funded as one of the EU’s ‘IDEAS Advanced Grants’ supporting ‘investigation-driven frontier research’.  Really good to see the EU funding work at the bleeding edge as so many national and European projects end up being ‘safe’.

The term search computing was entirely new to me, although instantly brought several concepts to mind.  In fact the principle focus of SeCo is the bringing together of information in deep web resources including combining result rankings; in database terms a form of distributed join over heterogeneous data sources.

The work had many personal connections including work on concept classification using ODP data dating back to aQtive days as well as onCue itself and Snip!t.  It also has similarities with linked data in the semantic web word, however with crucial differences.  SeCo’s service approach uses meta-descriptions of the services to add semantics, whereas linked data in principle includes a degree of semantics in the RDF data.  Also the ‘join’ on services is on values and so uses a degree of run-time identity matching (Stu Card’s example was how to know that LA=’Los Angeles’), whereas linked data relies on URIs so (again in principle) matching has already been done during data preparation.  My feeling is that the linking of the two paradigms would be very powerful, and even for certain kinds of raw data, such as tables, external semantics seems sensible.

One of the real opportunities for both is to harness user interaction with data as an extra source of semantics.  For example, for the identity matching issue, if a user is linking two data sources and notices that ‘LA’ and ‘Los Angeles’ are not identified, this can be added as part of the interaction to serve the user’s own purposes at that time, but by so doing adding a special case that can be used for the benefit of future users.

While SeCo is predominantly focused on the search federation, the broader issue of using search as part of algorithmics is also fascinating.  Traditional algorithmics assumes that knowledge is basically in code or rules and is applied to data.  In contrast we are seeing the rise of web algorithmics where knowledge is garnered from vast volumes of data.  For example, Gianluca Demartini at the workshop mentioned that his group had used the Google suggest API to extend keywords and I’ve seen the same trick used previously3.  To some extent this is like classic techniques of information retrieval, but whereas IR is principally focused on a closed document set, here the document set is being used to establish knowledge that can be used elsewhere.  In work I’ve been involved with, both the concept classification and folksonomy mining with Alessio apply this same broad principle.

The slides from the workshop are appearing (but not all there yet!) at the workshop web page on the SeCo site.

  1. yes I know this doesn’t give ‘PPD’ this stands for “public and private displays”[back]
  2. Hitomi Tsujita, Koji Tsukada, Keisuke Kambara, Itiro Siio, Complete Fashion Coordinator: A support system for capturing and selecting daily clothes with social network, Proceedings of the Working Conference on Advanced Visual Interfaces (AVI2010), pp.127–132.[back]
  3. The Yahoo! Related Suggestions API offers a similar service.[back]

morning newspaper: MPs and Elgin Marbles

I usually only read the newspaper when travelling and either do the ‘free mineral water with newspaper’ deal (usually the Telegraph, maybe the only way they can sell newspapers), or whatever they have in the hotel or plane.

The front-page news today is the Israeli attack on the Gaza aid convoy, which needs no further comment.

of MPs

However, I also got yesterday’s Independent when I arrived at the Holiday Inn near midnight.  One of the main stories then was still the ‘outing’ and resignation of David Laws.  The key issue here (at least in principle) was not that nature of his personal relationships, but that he had not disclosed that the flat on which he was claiming rent belonged to his partner.

I was glad to see Mark Pack’s commentary in today’s Independent take a robust view of this, noting that while Laws may have broken rules (still to be determined), there had been no financial gain involved, and indeed the arrangement had saved the taxpayer money.  Pack’s contempt of the Telegraph was perhaps not unexpected in a column in a rival newspaper, but echoed my own feelings.

I was happily abroad during the height of the MPs expense ‘scandal’ last year, but was appalled at the coverage, not least because my travels take me to countries in Europe which would give anything to have the high standards of public office we take for granted in the UK.  In the end a handful of MPs may (still sub judice) have abused the system, but the vast majority were simply trying to do their job.

A short while ago I happened on the web on a page detailing the expenses of a Cardiff (now ex) MP Julie Morgan, when MPs expenses came under the spotlight, she rechecked her previous claims and indeed, with more careful checking, it turned out that the claims she had made on her mortgage did not match the actual expenditure.  Over the five years of the last parliament she had accidentally over-claimed in two years to the total of £800 … but in the other three years had under-claimed to the tune of £1900.  The rules meant she could not retrospectively be paid for the under-claimed years, but did pay back the £800 for the over-claims.  Despite being £1100 out of pocket, one of the lowest claiming MPs and indeed paying significant amount of her own salary to help maintain her constituency office, on the books she will part of the statistics of the large number of MPs who repaid expenses and so appear to have been doing wrong.  Crazy!

and of Marbles

Back to today’s newspaper and deeper into the Independent a very old story that is entering a new phase: the fight for the return of treasures from around the world displayed in British Museums.  The most well know is of course the Elgin Marbles (maybe Germany may claim them as security for Greece’s Euro-bailout), but others include African treasures taken during punitive raids by British soldiers in the 19th Century.

The issues seem clear-cut for a Liberal-minded Independent reader, but maybe things are more complicated; certainly some of the items, including the bronze ‘Birmingham Buddha’ would not have survived to the present day if they had not been removed – if only the Victorian adventurers had also removed some of the giant Buddha statues destroyed by the Taliban in the 1990s.

I wonder how far repatriation should go, what is the statute of limitations for national treasure?  Maybe as the Birmingham Buddha travels back to India, several hundred shiploads of railtrack and steam trains will be repatriated to the UK, offloaded at Felixstowe docks and moved overland to form a mountainous sculpture of piled steel in the centre of Birmingham.

Having just been in Italy, I am sure there are many Italian artefacts in British museums, but then in Rome there are a number of Egyptian obelisk’s removed by the Romans 2000 years ago.  However, I would be surprised if, in turn, the Egyptians had not taken artefacts from other parts of the ancient world.  For that matter, what about the work done by the Israelites in Egypt before the Exodus?  If not for the fear it might be taken seriously I might suggest Israel could claim this.

In fact, these treasures are often more symbolic of the greater rape of natural resources and human labour that still continues today in many parts of the world today.  Indeed being brought up in the shadow of the South Wales coal valleys, I am well aware that the benefits of natural resources rarely go to the countries where they are found nor the labourers who mine them.

One of the key arguments against repatriation of ancient artefacts is that the curatorial standards are higher where they are presently.  Indeed the pillage of Iraqi sites after the fall of Saddam could be seen as overwhelming evidence that institutions such as the British Museum do the whole world a service.  Repatriation of artefacts to less secure countries would put at risk our shared global heritage; after all who knows what civilisation the UK and US will decide to decimate next.

Last days in Rome

Five weeks in Rome seemed like a long time, but with a week mainly in Milan and Trento and the coming week in India, in fact just three full weeks and they have flown by.

I had imagined long evenings reading philosophy of the physical world, and weekend afternoons under the shade of a tree on the Palatine Hill, but it didn’t quite work out like that.

Of the ‘work’ books I brought to Rome (and borrowed here), I have only read Gibson’s “The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception“, Goodman’s “Languages of Art” and Noe’s “Action in Perception“; and of the ‘fun’ books only Tamara Pierce’s  The Healing in the Vine. I have flights back and forth to India next week, so may manage a bit more then, but mainly overnight, so I fear most of my bookshelf will return to the UK unread 🙁

One of the reasons is evident on a table in my office. Normally at home when I finish something the paper from it ‘goes away’ somewhere, but here as I have read something or finished with printouts I have been laying them out on an empty table in case I wanted to refer to them again. So the table is now covered, smothered, in the results of three weeks normal academic work. I am amazed, if not aghast, at the volume. The entire table between 50 and 500 sheets thick in paper, I’d guess somewhere between one and two thousand sheets of paper printed, read and to be discarded. I mentioned climate change in last post and, boy, it looks like one academic can wipe out most of the Amazon and drown the South Pacific single-handed.

I have printed out a bit more than I normally would as I knew I couldn’t print things during the evenings at the apartment and so tended to do so ‘just in case’ before heading out of the office.  So normally some of this would have been dealt with purely electronically, but nevertheless, the volume is frightening. And I don’t think this was a particularly unusual three weeks in terms of volume.

So what is here?

On the one side there is input: there is a PhD thesis, twenty of or so papers reviewed or meta-reviewed during the period, several papers given to me by people to read while here, one EPSRC grant proposal I reviewed, and a few piles of papers I was referring to in things I was producing during the period. On the output side during the three weeks two grant proposals have been submitted, one other needed extra work and a STREP is in process of preparation for the autumn, two journal papers, a book chapter, an article for Interfaces, some work on other papers, and a few internal reports for discussions about future work. Other things never saw paper: a couple of long blog posts (5000 words between them), three job references, innumerable emails, and the preparation for 33 hours of masters and PhD teaching and two other talks.

Although I often feel busy seeing all that paper makes it tangible and does shock me somewhat. But I know this is relatively normal; Aaron Quigley‘s twitter feed is exhausting just to read!

So, did I see much of Rome …

Well on one Sunday, with Manuela, Francesco and his daughter I visited the annual open-air art exhibition of the 100 painters in Via Margutta (between Piazza di Spagna and Piazza del Popolo). One of the artists was, Paul Van den Nieuwenhof, a friend of Manuela and Francesco from whom they had recently bought a still life (apples). Paul’s real passion is more avant-garde installations, but the still lives are mainly focused on the Italian market where modern art is not so popular. Looking at his more traditional paintings I was impressed again by the way an expert oil painter creates light from pigment: shapes and solids seem more the medium and the pure light the message.

Another Sunday I took lunch in a pizzeria on the Trastevere (my favourite place for both pizza and bread), and took a meandering path there nearly as far as St Angelo and sauntering along the Tiber … but mainly because I took the wrong road out of Largo di Torre Argentina. In the middle of Argentina is a large exposed ruin, and I was told (but by whom I have forgotten!) that this was where Julius Caesar was assassinated.

Incidentally, while in Milan (which I will write about separately sometime) I learnt that in Julius Caesar’s time it would have been pronounced Kaiser as in German today, the softer ‘c’ came later.

Apart from that I am ashamed to say no art galleries or exhibitions, and my main view of Rome has been the area between Termini station, the Department, and my appartment, ‘Al Colosseo’, a lovely location within sight (just) of the Collosseum (see below).

However, most mornings I have taken a run down past the Colloseum as far as Circo Massimo and one or more laps of that. It is a popular spot for morning runners, although I prefer it best when I get there a little earlier. Not to avoid the others, but because from about 7am when the sun starts to rise it gets so hot. The most interesting end of Circo Massimo is currently boarded off as they do works there and in the last 2 weeks the far end has turned into a mini-stadium for Beach Soccer, I assume to coincide with the UEFA football next week.

Tonight it will be another pizza evening and I am promised it will be at a place that specialises in Roman-style pizzas and those lovely deep fried vegetables. Italy is about sun and ruins, about design and expensive cars and the Vatican and bureaucracy, … but above all it is about food and friends.

bookshelf in Rome

I posted a few weeks ago about books I had got to bring to Rome.  Since then I got another small collection because I had done some reviewing for Routledge.

Mostly philosophy of the mind and materiality … the latter to help as we work on the DEPtH book on Physicality, TouchIT

  • Shaun Gallagher, Dan Zahavi. The Phenomenological Mind: An Introduction to Philosophy of Mind and Cognitive Science, Routledge, 2007.
  • John Lechte. Fifty Key Contemporary Thinkers: From Structuralism to Post-Humanism, 2nd Edition, Routledge, 2007.
  • Jean-Paul Sartre.  Being and Nothingnes: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology, 1943.  Routledge Classics, , 2nd Edition, 2003.
  • Jay Friedenberg. Artificial Psychology, Routledge , 2008.
  • Max Velmans.  Understanding Consciousness, Routledge, 2009.
  • Peter Carruthers. The Nature of the Mind, Routledge, 2003.

In fact, with these and the previous  set I had far too many even for a month of evenings, and below you can see the books I actually brought.

As well as a selection from the academic books also some fiction/leisure reading, some old favourites and some new ones:

  • How Green was My Valley, Richard Llewellyn – a Welshman has to read this :-/
  • The Catcher in the Rye, J.D. Salinger – a classic I’ve never read
  • More of the Good Life – the TV series was formative for me as a child, but 40 seemed so far away
  • Lark Rise to Candleford, Flora Thompson – some years since I’ve read it last, and have been loving the TV series, but I don’t think it has stayed very close to the book!
  • Nella Last’s War – this is the book that was the basis for the TV drama Housewife 49 and part of the Mass Observation that collected diaries from ordinary people across Britain during the Second World War.
  • Ruth, Elizabeth Gaskill – another classic that I’ve not read yet!
  • As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning.  Laurie Lee’s account of travelling in Spain in the run up to the Civel War.  I read it in school for O’level.
  • Swallowdale, Arthur Ransome – Couldn’t find Swallow’s an Amazons, I think one of the girls might have it on their shelves!
  • The Shining Company, Rosemary Sutcliff – we have loads of her histroical novels for children.  I find that good children’s writing is so much better than most adult books, which often feel they need to be incomprehensible to be good.
  • The Growing Summer, Noel Streatfield – lovely story, children visiting a quirky old lady in west coast of Ireland.
  • Hovel in the Hills, Elizabeth West  – another book I’ve read many times, but not for many years.  True story about a couple who buy an old house on a Welsh hillside.

In addition, but missing from the picture, is one I borrowed from my daughter, Tamara Pierce’s  The Healing in the Vine, and one I’ve borrowed from Tiziana Catarci during my visit the Languages of Art.

So, two weeks in and how far have I got …

Well, been a little busy, two journal papers, a book chapter, an interfaces article, two 3 hour lectures to the masters students here, a seminar, reading thesis chapters and helping with two grant proposals … so not got very far through the bookshelf.

In fact, to be brutally honest, so far only finished the Tamora Pierce and nearly finished Gibson (just conclusions to go):

As you can see LOTS of notes on Gibson, I will write a very long blog sometime about this, but several others in line first!

But next week several train journeys, so may get through a few more books 🙂