PlaceSense: A Tool for Sensing the Community

This paper is motivated from the work of Kindberg et al. [1] and Paulos et al. [2] by their contributions:

1. The pervasive of Bluetooth mobile phone are turned on and appear everywhere. The mobile phones are named by default or intentionally by their owner that reflex the owners’ personality.
2. The re-examine sceenario “Familiar strangers” (Milgram 1970 )using modern technology (Bluetooth). Using bluetooth name discovery , we can found a person appear in  range and can check for re-appear, or even the not re-appear.

By applying these ideas, I would like to investigate further steps to see whether:

• Are there any similar thing happens in Melbourne, Australia? Yes, it is. People turn on their mobile bluetooth name and leave it in discoverable mode.
• The community pattern:  are there any of my friends went to Preston market on Friday afternoon? Some does, some don’t. Furthermore, if I found one, there might be another guy around there, even thought that guy does not have any devices attached to him. Because they are friend of a friend (FOAF), if you want to meet him, just go there on Friday afternoon, you will have a chance
• Size does matter: many devices appear at specific places at specific time of a day. In PlaceSense there are a result of room usage during weekdays. In addition, if a place suddenly have a huge number of devices appear, there must be something happen there. In the real time pilot study, I sense the Flemmington Race course in Melbourne, and discover more than 6000 different mobile phones.  How can I do it ?  For the room monitor is easy, because my office is next to the seminar room. I just put my ubuntu server with a bluetooth dongle to scan every 20 seconds during 3 months. You can imagine the rest.  As a poor man research, I support my self doing research , therefore I cannot afford of $$$  for a ticket to the luxury place in Flemmington Racecourse.  Furthermore, it is not cheap to get a ticket that you can go any reserved marques. Sometimes the research is costly. My solution is apply for a volunteer job on Melbourne Cup day to do the PlaceSense. I did it in 2007, 2008 and repeated in 2009

Event thought the paper has been accepted (2008) and published (late 2008), I still went back to collect more data.  I also found something interesting:

• Are there any person (I mean the devices, because the devices cannot travel by themselves to the race course) went here last year still come this year ? Yes, some people still attend this year. Majority are not (based on the bluetooth data) but may be they change their phone)  May be the owner has upgraded to a new luxury phone?
• There are many discussion about place and location. In some extends, location is not important. Let look at the Melbourne Cup as an example, a place that have thousands of people get together and enjoy the race is more important than a location (Lat X, Lon Y)? Suppose that next year the Melbourne Cup is moved to Caufield racecourse instead of Flemmington racecourse. Thing that happens at place is very important, it involved people, places.
• After this paper had published. Every time I go to a new place, I turn my PlaceSense on, try to discover are there any “invisible devices” around me? Luckily, I always found some ! Refer back to Weiser’s papers “computers have woven themselves into the fabric of everyday life”.  The place now have many things in it: people, devices, social context. It is worth of looking at.
• The outcome of this paper is not only the research data, but also the experiences and relationships that I have. I have a chance to enjoy the Melbourne Cup event (free entrance ticket),  learn new culture, meet different people,  doing a good thing (raising fund for hospitals that I have never been to, touch wood).

Hardware to do this:

• Bluetooth dongle (from ebay): AU$10 ($8+$2shipping cost)
• Nokia N95 (won on Ebay $240+$20shipping cost), Nokia E65, E61 I borrow from my friends. Because doing sensing, the battery will drain out quickly. Furthermore, when there are many devices around you, one phone is not enough.

Software: J2ME Midlet, Jsr 82 (bluetooth), Netbeans, Sun Wireless Toolkit, but put the scanning procedure to thread, if not, it will stall your phone.

That’s it folks, with the minimal cost, big effort, you can do the costly research. One of the interesting aspect of pervasive computing is develop a future with current technology. Therefore we usually see imagined scenarios in many publications in this area.

Thanks for reading this. Any comments would be appreciated.

Selected publications:

[1] T. Kindberg and T. Jones. “merolyn the phone”: A study of bluetooth naming practices (nominated for the best paper award). In J. Krumm, G. D. Abowd, A. Seneviratne, and T. Strang, editors, Ubicomp, volume 4717 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science, pages 318-335. Springer, 2007.

[2] E. Paulos and E. Goodman. The familiar stranger:anxiety, comfort, and play in public places. In CHI ‘04: Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human fac- tors in computing systems, pages 223-230, New York, NY, USA, 2004. ACM.

Published link: http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1671714