Darwinian markets and sub-optimal AI

Posted on August 22, 2021 by alan

Do free markets generate the best AI? Not always, and this not only hits the bottom line, but comes with costs for personal privacy and the environment. The combination of network effects and winner-takes-all advertising expenditure means that the resulting algorithms may be worst for everyone.

A few weeks ago I was talking with Maria Ferrario (Queens University Belfast) and Emily Winter (Lancaster University) regarding privacy and personal data. Social media sites and other platforms are using ever more sophisticated algorithms to micro-target advertising. However, Maria had recently read a paper suggesting that this had gone beyond the point of diminishing returns: far simpler – and less personally intrusive – algorithms achieve nearly as good performance as the most complex AI. As well as having an impact on privacy, this will also be contributing to the ever growing carbon impact of digital technology.

At first this seemed counter-intuitive. While privacy and the environment may not be central concerns, surely companies will not invest more resources in algorithms than is necessary to maximise profit?

However, I then remembered the peacock tail.

Jatin Sindhu, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia CommonsThe peacock tail is a stunning wonder of nature. However, in strict survival terms, it appears to be both flagrantly wasteful and positively dangerous – like eye-catching supermarket packaging for the passing predator.

The simple story of Darwinian selection suggests that this should never happen. The peacocks that have smaller and less noticeable tails should have a better chance of survival, passing their genes to the next generation, leading over time to more manageable and less bright plumage. In computational terms, evolution acts as a slow, but effective optimisation algorithm, moving a population ever closer to a perfect fit with its environment.

However, this simple story has twists, notably runaway sexual selection. The story goes like this. Many male birds develop brighter plumage during mating season so that they are more noticeable to females. This carries a risk of being caught by a predator, but there is a balance between the risks of being eaten and the benefits of copulation. Stronger, faster males are better able to fight off or escape a predator, and hence can afford to have slightly more gaudy plumage. Thus, for the canny female, brighter plumage is a proxy indicator of a more fit potential mate. As this becomes more firmly embedded into the female selection process, there is an arms race between males – those with less bright plumage will lose out to those with brighter plumage and hence die out. The baseline constantly increases.

Similar things can happen in free markets, which are often likened to Darwinian competition.

Large platforms such as Facebook or Google make the majority of their income through advertising. Companies with large advertising accounts are constantly seeking the best return on their marketing budgets and will place ads on the platform that offers the greatest impact (often measured by click-through) for the least expenditure. Rather like mating, this is a winner-takes-all choice. If Facebook’s advertising is 1% more effective than Google’s a canny advertiser will place all their adverts with Facebook and vice versa. Just like the peacock there is an existential need to outdo each other and thus almost no limit on the resources that should be squandered to gain that elusive edge.

In practice there are modifying factors; the differing demographics of platforms mean that one or other may be better for particular companies and also, perhaps most critically, the platform can adjust its pricing to reflect the effectiveness so that click-through-per-dollar is similar.

The latter is the way the hidden hand of the free market is supposed to operate to deliver ‘optimal’ productivity. If spending 10% more on a process can improve productivity by 11% you will make the investment. However, the theory of free markets (to the extent that it ever works) relies on an ‘ideal’ situation with perfect knowledge, free competition and low barriers to entry. Many countries operate collusion and monopoly laws in pursuit of this ‘ideal’ market.

Digital technology does not work like this.

For many application areas, network effects mean that emergent monopolies are almost inevitable. This was first noticed for software such as Microsoft Office – if all my collaborators use Office then it is easier to share documents with them if I use Office also. However, it becomes even more extreme with social networks – although there are different niches, it is hard to have multiple Facebooks, or at least to create a new one – the value of the platform is because all one’s friends use it.

For the large platforms this means that a substantial part of their expenditure is based on maintaining and growing this service (social network, search engine, etc.). While the income is obtained from advertising, only a small proportion of the costs are developing and running the algorithms that micro-target adverts.

Let’s assume that the ratio of platform to advertising algorithm costs is 10:1 (I suspect it is a lot greater). Now imagine platform P develops an algorithm that uses 50% more computational power, but improves advertising targeting effectiveness by 10%; at first this sounds a poor balance, but remember that 10:1 ratio.

The platform can charge 10% more whilst being competitive. However, the 50% increase in advertising algorithm costs is just 5% of the overall company running costs, as 90% are effectively fixed costs of maintaining the platform. A 5% increase in costs has led to a 10% increase in corporate income. Indeed one could afford to double the computational costs for that 10% increase in performance and still maintain profitability.

Of course, the competing platforms will also work hard to develop ever more sophisticated (and typically privacy reducing and carbon producing) algorithms, so that those gains will be rapidly eroded, leading to the next step.

In the end there are diminishing returns for effective advertising: there are only so many eye-hours and dollars in users’ pockets. The 10% increase in advertising effectiveness is not a real productivity gain, but is about gaining a temporary increase in users’ attention, given the current state of competing platforms’ advertising effectiveness.

Looking at the system as a whole, more and more energy and expenditure are spent on algorithms that are ever more invasive of personal autonomy, and in the end yield no return for anyone.

And it’s not even a beautiful extravagance.

the internet laws of the jungle

Posted on September 15, 2016 by alan

Where are the boundaries between freedom, license and exploitation, between fair use and theft?

I found myself getting increasingly angry today as Mozilla Foundation stepped firmly beyond those limits, and moreover with Trump-esque rhetoric attempts to dupe others into following them.

It all started with a small text add below the Firefox default screen search box:

Partly because of my ignorance of web-speak ‘TFW‘ (I know showing my age!), I clicked through to a petition page on Mozilla Foundation (PDF archive copy here).

It starts off fine, with stories of some of the silliness of current copyright law across Europe (can’t share photos of the Eiffel tower at night) and problems for use in education (which does in fact have quite a lot of copyright exemptions in many countries). It offers a petition to sign.

This sounds all good, partly due to rapid change, partly due to knee jerk reactions, internet law does seem to be a bit of a mess.

If you blink you might miss one or two odd parts:

“This means that if you live in or visit a country like Italy or France, you’re not permitted to take pictures of certain buildings, cityscapes, graffiti, and art, and share them online through Instagram, Twitter, or Facebook.”

Read this carefully, a tourist forbidden from photographing cityscapes – silly! But a few words on “… and art” … So if I visit an exhibition of an artist or maybe even photographer, and share a high definition (Nokia Lumia 1020 has 40 Mega pixel camera) is that OK? Perhaps a thumbnail in the background of a selfie, but does Mozilla object to any rules to prevent copying of artworks?

However, it is at the end, in a section labelled “don’t break the internet”, the cyber fundamentalism really starts.

“A key part of what makes the internet awesome is the principle of innovation without permission — that anyone, anywhere, can create and reach an audience without anyone standing in the way.”

Again at first this sounds like a cry for self expression, except if you happen to be an artist or writer and would like to make a living from that self-expression?

Again, it is clear that current laws have not kept up with change and in areas are unreasonably restrictive. We need to be ale to distinguish between a fair reference to something and seriously infringing its IP. Likewise, we could distinguish the aspects of social media that are more like looking at holiday snaps over a coffee, compared to pirate copies for commercial profit.

However, in so many areas it is the other way round, our laws are struggling to restrict the excesses of the internet.

Just a few weeks ago a 14 year old girl was given permission to sue Facebook. Multiple times over a 2 year period nude pictures of her were posted and reposted. Facebook hides behind the argument that it is user content, it takes down the images when they are pointed out, and yet a massive technology company, which is able to recognise faces is not able to identify the same photo being repeatedly posted. Back to Mozilla: “anyone, anywhere, can create and reach an audience without anyone standing in the way” – really?

Of course this vision of the internet without boundaries is not just about self expression, but freedom of speech:

“We need to defend the principle of innovation without permission in copyright law. Abandoning it by holding platforms liable for everything that happens online would have an immense chilling effect on speech, and would take away one of the best parts of the internet — the ability to innovate and breathe new meaning into old content.”

Of course, the petition is signalling out EU law, which inconveniently includes various provisions to protect the privacy and rights of individuals, not dictatorships or centrally controlled countries.

So, who benefits from such an open and unlicensed world? Clearly not the small artist or the victim of cyber-bullying.

Laissez-faire has always been an aim for big business, but without constraint it is the law of the jungle and always ends up benefiting the powerful.

In the 19th century it was child labour in the mills only curtailed after long battles.

In the age of the internet, it is the vast US social media giants who hold sway, and of course the search engines, who just happen to account for $300 million of revenue for Mozilla Foundation annually, 90% of its income.

Of academic communication: overload, homeostatsis and nostalgia

Posted on April 13, 2016 by alan

Revisiting on an old paper on early email use and reflecting on scholarly communication now.

About 30 years ago, I was at a meeting in London and heard a presentation about a study of early email use in Xerox and the Open University. At Xerox the use of email was already part of their normal culture, but it was still new at OU. I’d thought they had done a before and after study of one of the departments, but remembered clearly their conclusions: email acted in addition to other forms of communication (face to face, phone, paper), but did not substitute.

It was one of those pieces of work that I could recall, but didn’t have a reference too. Facebook to the rescue! I posted about it and in no time had a series of helpful suggestions including Gilbert Cockton who nailed it, finding the meeting, the “IEE Colloquium on Human Factors in Electronic Mail and Conferencing Systems” (3 Feb 1989) and the precise paper:

Fung , T. O’Shea , S. Bly. Electronic mail viewed as a communications catalyst. IEE Colloquium on Human Factors in Electronic Mail and Conferencing Systems, , pp.1/1–1/3. INSPEC: 3381096 http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/articleDetails.jsp?arnumber=197821

In some extraordinary investigative journalism, Gilbert also noted that the first author, Pat Fung, went on to fresh territory after retirement, qualifying as a scuba-diving instructor at the age of 75.

The details of the paper were not exactly as I remembered. Rather than a before and after study, it was a comparison of computing departments at Xerox (mature use of email) and OU’s (email less ingrained, but already well used). Maybe I had simply embroidered the memory over the years, or maybe they presented newer work at the colloquium, than was in the 3 page extended abstract. In those days this was common as researchers did not feel they needed to milk every last result in a formal ‘publication’. However, the conclusions were just as I remembered:

“An exciting finding is its indication that the use of sophisticated electronic communications media is not seen by users as replacing existing methods of communicating. On the contrary, the use of such media is seen as a way of establishing new interactions and collaboration whilst catalysing the role of more traditional methods of communication.”

As part of this process following various leads by other Facebook friends, I spent some time looking at early CSCW conference proceedings, some at Saul Greenburg’s early CSCW bibliography [1] and Ducheneaut and Watts (15 years on) review of email research [2] in the 2005 HCI special issue on ‘reinventing email’ [3] (both notably missing the Fung et al. paper). I downloaded and skimmed several early papers including Wendy McKay’s lovely early (1988) study [4] that exposed the wide variety of ways in which people used email over and above simple ‘communication’. So much to learn from this work when the field was still fresh,

This all led me to reflect both on the Fung et al. paper, the process of finding it, and the lessons for email and other ‘communication’ media today.

Communication for new purposes

A key finding was that “the use of such media is seen as a way of establishing new interactions and collaboration“. Of course, the authors and their subjects could not have envisaged current social media, but the finding if this paper was exactly an example of this. In 1989 if I had been trying to find a paper, I would have scoured my own filing cabinet and bookshelves, those of my colleagues, and perhaps asked people when I met them. Nowadays I pop the question into Facebook and within minutes the advice starts to appear, and not long after I have a scanned copy of the paper I was after.

Communication as a good thing

In the paper abstract, the authors say that an “exciting finding” of the paper is that “the use of sophisticated electronic communications media is not seen by users as replacing existing methods of communicating.” Within paper, this is phrased even more strongly:

“The majority of subjects (nineteen) also saw no likelihood of a decrease in personal interactions due to an increase in sophisticated technological communications support and many felt that such a shift in communication patterns would be undesirable.”

Effectively, email was seen as potentially damaging if it replaced other more human means of communication, and the good outcome of this report was that this did not appear to be happening (or strictly subjects believed it was not happening).

However, by the mid-1990s, papers discussing ’email overload’ started to appear [5].

I recall a morning radio discussion of email overload about ten years ago. The presenter asked someone else in the studio if they thought this was a problem. Quite un-ironically, they answered, “no, I only spend a couple of hours a day”. I have found my own pattern of email change when I switched from highly structured Eudora (with over 2000 email folders), to Gmail (mail is like a Facebook feed, if it isn’t on the first page it doesn’t exist). I was recently talking to another academic who explained that two years ago he had deliberately taken “email as stream” as a policy to control unmanageable volumes.

If only they had known …

Communication as substitute

While Fung et al.’s respondents reported that they did not foresee a reduction in other forms of non-electronic communication, in fact even in the paper the signs of this shift to digital are evident.

Here are the graphs of communication frequency for the Open University (30 people, more recent use of email) and Xerox (36 people, more established use) respectively.

( from Fung et al., 1989)

It is hard to draw exact comparisons as it appears there may have been a higher overall volume of communication at Xerox (because of email?). Certainly, at that point, face-to-face communication remains strong at Xerox, but it appears that not only the proportion, but total volume of non-digital non-face-to-face communications is lower than at OU. That is sub substitution has already happened.

Again, this is obvious nowadays, although the volume of electronic communications would have been untenable in paper (I’ve sometimes imagined printing out a day’s email and trying to cram it in a pigeon-hole), the volume of paper communications has diminished markedly. A report in 2013 for Royal Mail recorded 3-6% pa reduction in letters over recent years and projected a further 4% pa for the foreseeable future [6].

academic communication and national meetungs

However, this also made me think about the IEE Colloquium itself. Back in the late 1980s and 1990s it was common to attend small national or local meetings to meet with others and present work, often early stage, for discussion. In other fields this still happens, but in HCI it has all but disappeared. Maybe I have is a little nostalgia, but this does seem a real loss as it was a great way for new PhD students to present their work and meet with the leaders in their field. Of course, this can happen if you get your CHI paper accepted, but the barriers are higher, particularly for those in smaller and less well-resourced departments.

Some of this is because international travel is cheaper and faster, and so national meetings have reduced in importance – everyone goes to the big global (largely US) conferences. Many years ago research on day-to-day time use suggested that we have a travel ‘time budget’ reactively constant across counties and across different kinds of areas within the same country [7]. The same is clearly true of academic travel time; we have a certain budget and if we travel more internationally then we do correspondingly less nationally.

(from Zahavi, 1979)

However, I wonder if digital communication also had a part to play. I knew about the Fung et al. paper, even though it was not in the large reviews of CSCW and email, because I had been there. Indeed, the reason that the Fung et al.paper was not cited in relevant reviews would have been because it was in a small venue and only available as paper copy, and only if you know it existed. Indeed, it was presumably also below the digital radar until it was, I assume, scanned by IEE archivists and deposited in IEEE digital library.

However, despite the advantages of this easy access to one another and scholarly communication, I wonder if we have also lost something.

In the 1980s, physical presence and co-presence at an event was crucial for academic communication. Proceedings were paper and precious, I would at least skim read all of the proceedings of any event I had been to, even those of large conferences, because they were rare and because they were available. Reference lists at the end of my papers were shorter than now, but possibly more diverse and more in-depth, as compared to more directed ‘search for the relevant terms’ literature reviews of the digital age.

And looking back at some of those early papers, in days when publish-or-perish was not so extreme, when cardiac failure was not an occupational hazard for academics (except maybe due to the Cambridge sherry allowance), at the way this crucial piece of early research was not dressed up with an extra 6000 words of window dressing to make a ‘high impact’ publication, but simply shared. Were things more fun?

[1] Saul Greenberg (1991) “An annotated bibliography of computer supported cooperative work.” ACM SIGCHI Bulletin, 23(3), pp. 29-62. July. Reprinted in Greenberg, S. ed. (1991) “Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Groupware”, pp. 359-413, Academic Press. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/126505.126508
https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/52b4/d0bb76fcd628c00c71e0dfbf511505ae8a30.pdf

[2] Nicolas Ducheneaut and Leon A. Watts (2005). In search of coherence: a review of e-mail research. Hum.-Comput. Interact. 20, 1 (June 2005), 11-48. DOI= 10.1080/07370024.2005.9667360
http://www2.parc.com/csl/members/nicolas/documents/HCIJ-Coherence.pdf

[3] Steve Whittaker, Victoria Bellotti, and Paul Moody (2005). Introduction to this special issue on revisiting and reinventing e-mail. Hum.-Comput. Interact. 20, 1 (June 2005), 1-9.
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/07370024.2005.9667359

[4] Wendy E. Mackay. 1988. More than just a communication system: diversity in the use of electronic mail. In Proceedings of the 1988 ACM conference on Computer-supported cooperative work (CSCW ’88). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 344-353. DOI=http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/62266.62293
https://www.lri.fr/~mackay/pdffiles/TOIS88.Diversity.pdf

[5] Steve Whittaker and Candace Sidner (1996). Email overload: exploring personal information management of email. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’96), Michael J. Tauber (Ed.). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 276-283. DOI=http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/238386.238530
https://www.ischool.utexas.edu/~i385q/readings/Whittaker_Sidner-1996-Email.pdf

[6] The outlook for UK mail volumes to 2023. PwC prepared for Royal Mail Group, 15 July 2013
http://www.royalmailgroup.com/sites/default/files/ The%20outlook%20for%20UK%20mail%20volumes%20to%202023.pdf

[7] Yacov Zahavi (1979). The ‘UMOT’ Project. Prepared For U.S. Department Of Transportation Ministry Of Transport and Fed. Rep. Of Germany.
http://www.surveyarchive.org/Zahavi/UMOT_79.pdf

Alt-HCI open reviews – please join in

Posted on July 23, 2012 by alan

Papers are online for the Alt-HCI trcak of British HCI conference in September.

These are papers that are trying in various ways to push the limits of HCI, and we would like as many people as possible to join in discussion around them … and this discussion will be part of process for deciding which papers are presented at the conference, and possibly how long we give them!

Here are the papers — please visit the site, comment, discuss, Tweet/Facebook about them.

paper #154 — How good is this conference? Evaluating conference reviewing and selectivity
do conference reviews get it right? is it possible to measure this?

paper #165 — Hackinars: tinkering with academic practice
doing vs talking – would you swop seminars for hack days?

paper #170 — Deriving Global Navigation from Taxonomic Lexical Relations
website design – can you find perfect words and structure for everyone?

paper #181 — User Experience Study of Multiple Photo Streams Visualization
lots of photos, devices, people – how to see them all?

paper #186 — You Only Live Twice or The Years We Wasted Caring about Shoulder-Surfing
are people peeking at your passwords? what’s the real security problem?

paper #191 — Constructing the Cool Wall: A Tool to Explore Teen Meanings of Cool
do you want to make thing teens think cool? find out how!

paper #201 — A computer for the mature: what might it look like, and can we get there from here?
over 50s have 80% of wealth, do you design well for them?

paper #222 — Remediation of the wearable space at the intersection of wearable technologies and interactive architecture
wearable technology meets interactive architecture

paper #223 — Designing Blended Spaces
where real and digital worlds collide

The value of networks: mining and building

Posted on May 11, 2012 by alan

The value of networks or graphs underlies many of the internet (and for that read global corporate) giants. Two of the biggest: Google and Facebook harness this in very different ways — mining and building.

Years ago, when I was part of the dot.com startup aQtive, we found there was no effective understanding of internet marketing, and so had to create our own. Part of this we called ‘market ecology‘. This basically involved mapping out the relationships of influence between different kinds of people within some domain, and then designing families of products that exploited that structure.

The networks we were looking at were about human relationships: for example teachers who teach children, who have other children as friends and siblings, and who go home to parents. Effectively we were into (too) early social networking¹!

The first element of this was about mining — exploiting the existing network of relationships.

However in our early white papers on the topic, we also noted that the power of internet products was that it was also possible to create new relationships, for example, adding ‘share’ links. That is building the graph.

The two are not distinct, if one is not able to exploit new relationships within a product it will die, and the mining of existing networks can establish new links (e.g. Twitter suggesting who to follow). Furthermore, creating of links is rarely ex nihilo, an email ‘share’ link uses an existing relationships (contact in address book), but brings it into a potentially different domain (e.g. bookmarking a web page).

It is interesting to see Google and Facebook against this backdrop. Their core strengths are in different domains (web information and social relationships), but moreover they focus differently on mining and building.

Google is, par excellence, about mining graphs (the web). While it has been augmented and modified over the years, the link structure used in PageRank is what made Google great. Google also mine tacit relationships, for example the use of word collocation to understand concepts and relationships, so in a sense build from what they mine.

Facebook’s power, in contrast, is in the way it is building the social graph as hundreds of millions of people tell it about their own social relationships. As noted, this is not ex nihilo, the social relationships exist in the real word, but Facebook captures them digitally. Of course, then Facebook mines this graph in order to derive revenue form advertisements, and (although people debate this) attempt to improve the user experience by ranking posts.

Perhaps the greatest power comes in marrying the two. Amazon does this to great effect within the world of books and products.

As well as a long-standing academic interest, these issues are particularly germane to my research at Talis where the Education Graph is a core element. However, they apply equally whether the core network is kite surfers, chess or bio-technology.

Between the two it is probably building that is ultimately most critical. When one has a graph or network it is possible to find ways to exploit it, but without the network there is nothing to mine. Page and Brin knew this in the early days of their pre-Google project at Stanford, and a major effort was focused on simply gathering the crawl of the web on which they built their algorithms². Now Google is aware that, in principle, others can exploit the open resources on which much of its business depends; its strength lies in its intellectual capital. In contrast, with a few geographical exceptions, Facebook is the social graph, far more defensible as Google has discovered as it struggles with Google Plus.

See our retrospective about vfridge at last year’s HCI conference and our original web sharer vision.[back]
See the description of this in “In The Plex: How Google Thinks, Works and Shapes Our Lives“.[back]

Phoenix rises – vfridge online again

Posted on June 11, 2010 by alan

vfridge is back!

I mentioned ‘Project Phoenix’ in my last previous post, and this was it – getting vfridge up and running again.

Ten years ago I was part of a dot.com company aQtive¹ with Russell Beale, Andy Wood and others. Just before it folded in the aftermath of the dot.com crash, aQtive spawned a small spin-off vfridge.com. The virtual fridge was a social networking web site before the term existed, and while vfridge the company went the way of most dot.coms, for some time after I kept the vfridge web site running on Fiona’s servers until it gradually ‘decayed’ partly due to Javascript/DOM changes and partly due to Java’s interactions with mysql becoming unstable (note very, very old Java code!). But it is now back online 🙂

The core idea of vfridge is placing small notes, photos and ‘magnets’ in a shareable web area that can be moved around and arranged like you might with notes held by magnets to a fridge door.

Underlying vfridge was what we called the websharer vision, which looked towards a web of user-generated content. Now this is passé, but at the time was directly counter to accepted wisdom and looking back seem prescient – remember this was written in 1999:

Although everyone isn’t a web developer, it is likely that soon everyone will become an Internet communicator — email, PC-voice-comms, bulletin boards, etc. For some this will be via a PC, for others using a web-phone, set-top box or Internet-enabled games console.
…

The web/Internet is not just a medium for publishing, but a potential shared place.

Everyone may be a web sharer — not a publisher of formal public ‘content’, but personal or semi-private sharing of informal ‘bits and pieces’ with family, friends, local community and virtual communities such as fan clubs.

This is not just a future for the cognoscenti, but for anyone who chats in the pub or wants to show granny in Scunthorpe the baby’s first photos.

Just over a year ago I thought it would be good to write a retrospective about vfridge in the light of the social networking revolution. We did a poster “Designing a virtual fridge” about vfridge years ago at a Computers and Fun workshop, but have never written at length abut its design and development. In particular it would be good to analyse the reasons, technical, social and commercial, why it did not ‘take off’ the time. However, it is hard to do write about it without good screen shots, and could I find any? (Although now I have) So I thought it would be good to revive it and now you can try it out again. I started with a few days effort last year at Christmas and Easter time (leisure activity), but now over the last week have at last used the fact that I have half my time unpaid and so free for my own activities … and it is done 🙂

The original vfridge was implemented using Java Servlets, but I have rebuilt it in PHP. While the original development took over a year (starting down in Coornwall while on holiday watching the solar eclipse), this re-build took about 10 days effort, although of course with no design decisions needed. The reason it took so much development back then is one of the things I want to consider when I write the retrospective.

As far as possible the actual behaviour and design is exactly as it was back in 2000 … and yes it does feel clunky, with lots of refreshing (remember no AJAX or web2.0 in those days) and of course loads of frames! In fact there is a little cleverness that allowed some client-end processing pre-AJAX². Also the new implementation uses the same templates as the original one, although the expansion engine had to be rewritten in PHP. In fact this template engine was one of our most re-used bits of Java code, although now of course many alternatives. Maybe I will return to a discussion of that in another post.

I have even resurrected the old mobile interface. Yes there were WAP phones even in 2000, albeit with tiny green and black screens. I still recall the excitement I felt the first time I entered a note on the phone and saw it appear on a web page 🙂 However, this was one place I had to extensively edit the page templates as nothing seems to process WML anymore, so the WML had to be converted to plain-text-ish HTML, as close as possible to those old phones! Looks rather odd on the iPhone :-/

So, if you were one of those who had an account back in 2000 (Panos Markopoulos used it to share his baby photos 🙂 ), then everything is still there just as you left it!

If not, then you can register now and play.

The old aQtive website is still viewable at aqtive.org, but don’t try to install onCue, it was developed in the days of Windows NT.[back]
One trick used the fact that you can get Javascript to pre-load images. When the front-end Javascript code wanted to send information back to the server it preloaded an image URL that was really just to activate a back-end script. The frames used a change-propagation system, so that only those frames that were dependent on particular user actions were refreshed. All of this is preserved in the current system, peek at the Javascript on the pages. Maybe I’ll write about the details of these another time.[back]

Italian conferences: PPD10, AVI2010 and Search Computing

Posted on June 5, 2010 by alan

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 coordinator”², 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.

yes I know this doesn’t give ‘PPD’ this stands for “public and private displays”[back]
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]
The Yahoo! Related Suggestions API offers a similar service.[back]

From raw experience to personal reflection

Posted on October 18, 2008 by alan

Just a week to go for deadline for this workshop on the Designing for Reflection on Experience that Corina and I are organising at CHI. Much of the time discussions of user experience are focused on trivia and even social networking often appears to stop at superficial levels. While throwing a virtual banana at a friend may serve to maintain relationships and is perhaps less trivial than it at first appears; still there is little support for deeper reflection on life, with the possible exception of the many topic-focused chat groups. However, in researching social networks we have found, amongst the flotsam, clear moments of poinency and conflict, traces of major life events … even divorce by Facebook. Too much navel gazing would not be a good thing, but some attention to expressing deeper issues to others and to ourselves seems overdue.

HCI and CSCW – is your usability too small

Posted on January 3, 2008 by alan

Recently heard some group feedback on our HCI textbook. Nearly all said that they did NOT want any CSCW. I was appalled as considering any sort of user interaction without its surrounding social and organisational settings seems as fundamentally misbegotten as considering a system without its users.

Has the usability world gone mad or is it just that our conception of HCI has become too narrow?

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Usabilty and Web2.0

Posted on December 13, 2007 by alan

Nad did a brilliant guest lecture for our undergraduate HCI class at Lancaster on Monday. His slides and blog about the lecture are at Virtual Chaos. He touched on issues of democracy vs. authority of information, dynamic content vs. accessibility and of course increasing issues of privacy on social networking sites. He also had awesome slides to using loads of Flickr photos under creative commons … community content in action not just words! Of course also touched on Web3.0 and future convergence between emergent community phenomena and structured Semantic Web technologies.