Category: research

• Michelle Hua of *Made With Glove*.
  • Christine Farion ‘s research on

assistive wearables, specifically bags with electronic memory aids.
Ariel Garten, female founder and CEO of Muse, the brain sensing
headband here.

This week:
RFID system. New papers and insight from Susan Imberman and Dan McCloskey (CUNY) about their RFID tracking systems. They are willing to share the data they have, in real-time too when it’s ready.
TO DO: read papers carefully and ascertain what kind of analysis they are using and how relevant, if at all, to us.

Contacted Pet Detect who have a universal scanner that detects AVID tags. They are quoting for a system.
Plan B is to get Mike Harrison to build it. I am happy to just pay for this and get it installed, would rather focus on the software framework, which needs to be reusable and future proof, initial specifications developing here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1mgJJ2LX2fCUtRphFdgwWl2YxhFc5v-MTgbadHfOahGE/edit

MATERIALS:
Skylar Tibbets et al – paper on active 3D printed materials. Thoroughly assessed this and am exploring how this technique can be used to activate the objects, would be best if not water activated but electrically conductive / heat responsive. Heat response material probably faster than the water expansion, and much more precision to target small areas.

In the paper, the author talks about self-evolving structures, which gives too much importance to the relatively simple motion driven by a state change. The object moves to a position and then returns to its start point. Self-transformation (used on page 5) is also not strictly true as the material changes in response to an environmental change, it doesn’t come from within itself. Anyway.

How can I combine a data-driven response with an object that has some innate movement? Does the data become a trigger, a time of activation? or permission for the thing to move? Would it be the ‘life’ in the object – i.e. without a data stream this object is inert (dead) even with it’s potential. Could the data affect the environmental conditions that the objects exist in as well as sending/modulating electrical signals?

The objects fabricated in these experiments are multi-materials embedded in a 3D structure. One material acts as a rigid core and the expanding (state-changing) material is positioned in such a way that when it expands it deforms the rigid sections. They refer to this as a Digital Material [http://www.stratasys.com/materials/polyjet/digital-materials] – a material that can be adjusted digitally (in terms of physical structure).

INTELLIGENT ENVIRONMENTS (lecture notes)
“The most profound technologies are those that disappear. They weave themselves into the fabric of everyday life until they are indistinguishable from it.”
— Mark Weiser’s “The Computer for the Twenty-First Century” (Scientific American, 1991, pp. 66–75)

Intelligent Environments Manifesto – ref Augusto, Callaghan 2013 — in manifesto – one point says “to work under the principal that the user is in command” – WHY? Do we not need to relinquish control? How can we possibly command of something that we don’t know about? Yes these sensors can oversimplify reality but they bring to our attention more that we would OVERTLY think about usually… this is more complex?

ETHICAL ISSUES in (PRODUCT) DESIGN
NMR – what are the ethical issues to consider – can an object move in a subliminal way that make you feel awkward or at ease or stressed? How can these behaviours be recognised? Do we need to control for this if we are assuming the object is just communicating for it’s source. How far do we go in censoring the data? What are the ethical issues of data manipulation from a real-time stream of life data?

Body Language of Objects:
Great chat with Geraint about positioning the thesis around this title and concept.
Found some refs, but these both looking at different things. I’m interested in the actual body language of the object via data-driven movement:
http://www.chrisnatt.com/project/bodylanguage/
https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=iQnfJHjcVQ8C&pg=PA56&lpg=PA56&dq=%22body+language+of+objects%22&source=bl&ots=rnfcGKr0gJ&sig=h0qW13Mmh-LiO-8ufGDDsdOGVgc&hl=en&sa=X&ei=XwPhVMGwFIrfaK71gHg&ved=0CCwQ6AEwAg#v=onepage&q=%22body%20language%20of%20objects%22&f=false

GS: Cortexual not contextual.

Stats assignment 01 (mostly fiction):
Julie_Freeman_POLM036_20150213

this helps with choice of variable and tests: http://www.statsdirect.com/help/default.htm#methods/relationship_two_variables_measured_on_same_group.htm

My notes:
The null hypothesis is that there is NO association between the two variables. (i.e. women are not more likely to vote left than men)

We want to measure the significance of the association between varX and varY – do this using chi-squared test).
The closer to 1 means the LESS significant the relationship. Use for for category variables — i,e, gender vs the scale
In SPSS, the column marked Asymp. Sig. (2-sided) is the P value

P (probability) value breakdown:

P > 0.10 No evidence against the null hypothesis. The data appear to be consistent with the null hypothesis.
0.05 < P < 0.10 Weak evidence against the null hypothesis in favor of the alternative. 0.01 < P < 0.05 Moderate evidence against the null hypothesis in favor of the alternative. 0.001 < P < 0.01 Strong evidence against the null hypothesis in favor of the alternative. P < 0.001 Very strong evidence against the null hypothesis in favor of the alternative. We want to measure the strength and direction of the relationship using correlation coefficients direction can be positive or negative (tendency) strength is (i think ) the outcome of the Pearson or Spearman or other test:

• Pearson’s R – interval (scale) variables [use this for age vs L-R scale, do not use with gender]
• Spearman’s Rank – ordinal (ordered) variables

correlations: -1, 0, +1 (towards either end of scale (closer to 1/-1) = stronger relationship, signs indicate the direction NOT the strength)

Discovered paper of RFID tracking NMR, asked them to help explain the tech set-up. Paper not actually very insightful.

Kinetic Objects:
Think about how to collaborate with MIT on the programmable materials work – data-driving the materials from NMRs. With Skylar Tibbets
http://www.selfassemblylab.net/ProgrammableMaterials.php
http://www.nature.com/srep/2014/141211/srep07422/full/srep07422.html

Statistics:
Reading books on stats methods etc for SPSS

Ontologies:

Linked Open Vocabularies – http://lov.okfn.org/dataset/lov/ a collection of ontologies about all sorts. Godo reference point for linked data bits. The ‘thing’ that I develop needs to be linked and in a correct format (RDF?) so it is machine as well as human usable.

http://www.w3.org/ns/ma-ont is a media ontology but does not cover the data as a material description that I am after.

The dublin core metadata terms has a great range of terms to be used: http://dublincore.org/documents/2012/06/14/dcmi-terms/ I think that the data art set should use terms from this but in an easy to use list with vocabularies. This could be in the same format as the Getty stuff perhaps.

The key issue is that there are many many ontologies, taxonomies and vocabularies to use, and as data sits behind all of the areas at some point, it is hard to choose a labelling standard. The data art model is a suggestion for ensuring that some basic data properties are captured and noted at the delivery of the work.

Do I make a small ontology just specifically for use with Data as an Art Material? Or will a simple table suffice? Do the relationships matter? And how would an artist then use the ontology? How to get the artists and the cataloguer to use the same things – does it matter? is it the artists job, or would the curator/classifier do this?

Reading – taxonomoy and classification stuff:
http://dublincore.org/metadata-basics/
Data Mining: Concepts and Techniques (Jiawei Han, Micheline Kamber, Jian Pei.) (Chapter 2)
CDWA (Categories for Describing Works of Art http://www.getty.edu/research/publications/electronic_publications/cdwa/moreinfo.html
CDWALite http://www.getty.edu/research/publications/electronic_publications/cdwa/cdwalite.html
COO (Cataloging Cultural Objects) http://cco.vrafoundation.org/
Data and Metadata: An Interview with Murtha Baca and Erin Coburn (Cabinet Magazine) http://cabinetmagazine.org/issues/13/meltzer_meltzer.php

GETTY The Art & Architecture Thesaurus: http://datahub.io/dataset/getty-aat (links through to all sorts, inc SPARQL endpoint)

Interesting things:
Yahoo’s search engine experiment that uses linked data
https://developer.yahoo.com/searchmonkey/siteowner.html

Artworks:
http://www.floodtide.eu/ by John Eacott. Very much about the live data used by sculptures, musicians, singers and web instruments to play the tidal activity as a score.
Interview him about connectedness to nature and the importance of liveness?

Thesis:
LaTeX training https://www.overleaf.com/help/28-im-new-to-latex-how-do-i-use-it#.VNIQoGSsVho
Finalise thesis template, Data Model paper template and work out referencing horrors.

(2/3 Feb 15)

Meetings:
Madi Solomon https://www.linkedin.com/in/madisolomon
Supervisor meeting (MS)

Thesis:
Prepared LaTeX template on overleaf.com – woohoo

Reading to do:
the Data Revolution (book by Kitchin)
couple of taxonomy papers

Taxonomy:
Sent pre-pilot trial to students to request data descriptions.
Updated questions and continued mapping tax to data concepts.

NMR:
Spoke to Ho regarding spec for building the tracking system. He’s going to give feedback.

Artist:
http://www.zimoun.net/- not data but kinetic objects and audio