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Archive for June, 2010

• Urban computing keynote

  Date: 2010.06.16 | Category: news | Response: 0

  Tim Kindberg of matter 2 media will give a keynote talk on City Machines at the ACM International Conference on Pervasive Services (ICPS 2010) in Berlin on 14th July.  

  Here’s the abstract:

  Urban computing is the integration of pervasive applications and services into the public spaces of our cities and towns.  Research into this relatively young field has concentrated on discrete, transient applications and installations based around individual public events.  A common example is a game played on city streets: the game begins with the induction of users and devices; it plays as an isolated application, perhaps with its own support services, for a short time of up to a few days; then it is over and the software is not reused except perhaps to run the same game again.  But what if a city presented an open system or ‘city machine’, for which programmers wrote both long-running and ephemeral applications using a common API across city spaces?  Local government, transportation, interest groups and other information providers, advertisers and commercial companies could all produce city applications.  Citizens could log on to this system as soon as (or before) they left their front doors.  They could participate casually in contextually discovered city applications, which ran on the citywide substrate as a whole but with their own spatial imperatives – across the city, on individual streets, in all the pubs, in particular neighbourhoods, perhaps moving from place to place according to social dynamics.  Users could engage with the applications in a single short session, or every now and then, for weeks on end.  They could join in with others: their friends, fellow-travellers, neighbourhood groups, people who happen to be in the same space.  Like cities themselves, the applications would evolve to be interconnected in ways as complicated as the dynamics of the people who live there.  What would be the architecture of this city machine – in both senses?  The programming model?  The I/O?  The applications?  In this talk, I will discuss this idea of a city considered as a system that we can program and instrument.  The talk will cover the opportunities and challenges both at the system level, including the question of system volatility and evolution, and at the human level, including the models we will need for human-city and crowd-computer interaction, and the political geography of urban computation.