Summer @ the Complex

Before Nick and I jump on the plane to the UK and Italy, here is a brief summary of the latest news from Santa Fe. I was there from June 18 to July 5. I got to stay at the casita again thanks to the buon cuore of Dede and Owen... And I got to use a deskspace provided by Steve in the Santa Fe Complex, thanks to his good heart.

Here is a quick list of things that happend while I was there:

1. I just missed Frankencircuit but got to see the show in a private viewing before it got dismantled. It looked great!
2. Steve and I gave a keynote lecture at the UCGIS Summer Assembly, which will be the topic of a separate blog entry. Had a chance to reconnect to Carl Steinitz on the occasion. Long story, but he did change my life, unwittingly...
3. Ilan and Ben worked together symbiotically to produce major progress on the Venice table interactivity. Pair programming is the way to go!
4. Fred Bianchi came to visit from WPI and stirred up our Postmortem projects once again
5. I made major progress on a proposal to the City of Santa Fe to create and Ambient Platform for Urban Planning, Water Conservation and Energy Management
6. I drafted a proposal to WPI's provost for the official establishment of te Santa Fe Project Center, to be phased in over the next two years.
7. I purchased a G1 phone and tasked Simon with the skunking of the Android potential for PixelPost applications, related to our NASA grant. I also got an iPhone for similar reasons (and because there was a deal if I renewed my AT&T subscription).
8. Kyle and I submitted two grants to NSF and one to NASA, all involving Santa Fe: Informal Science Education, Urban Long Term Research Areas-Exploration and Global Climate Change Education, Total requested is 2 million so far. More to come.
9. Skyler and August made progress on the visualization side of the Venice Table and began to coordinate with Ben and Ilan on the communication between the SimTable Operating System and the Venice Traffic Application.
10. Meeting with Luciano (Intel) and Roger (John Deere) it became clear that the Complex could play a formal role as the actual vector for the application of SFI theories to real world problems in the SFI Biz-net community...
11. Got to tailgate in a suit and tie when I went to see the premiere of La Traviata at the opening night of the Santa Fe Opera...
12. Experienced the phenomenal visual experience of Projected Light at the Complex. Fantastic!
13. Overlapped with Andrea Vaccari (recently with MIT Senseable Lab) with whom we are exploring Reality Mining with Nathan Eagle through a massive Rwanda dataset of 1.5 million subscribers' cell calls for the past five years... Something good will come of this, I am sure.

Overall, it was a good Summer @ the Complex!

I will be in close touch with the Santa Fe colleagues as we complete the Venice Table in time for delivery when Steve joins Nick and me in Venice on the 25th of July... More to come.

CitizenPipe

The reason for the recent blogging blackout has been that Kyle and I have gotten busy writing grants, as we had planned when he flew to Venice ahead of me. Now that I am back from Santa Fe and in MA for one more day before taking off across the Atlantic, I figured I would make a quick entry to begin to update everyone as to our progress on our many fronts.

The first grant we applied for is called CitizenPipe and so far we have only submitted a preliminary proposal to the National Science Foundation (NSF) as part of the Informal Science Education program. When we get the thumbs up, we will have until November 19 to complete the full proposal. We have been using Google Docs so extensively that I have almost forgotten how to use Word...

The aim of this project is to produce a coordinated suite of second-generation web-based and mobile tools that will personalize the on-line and in-the-field experiences of citizen scientists, with the ultimate goal of making their contributions simple, fun, rewarding, educational, meaningful and long-lasting. The primary intellectual merit of this proposal lies in reorienting the informal collection of scientific data away from the traditional primacy of the formal citizen science programs (as witnessed by Cornell's Citizen Science Central) and toward a "prosumer" (producer/consumer) focus on the volunteers who are the engines that make the whole world of citizen science possible and constitute the real resource that needs to be fostered, cultivated and rewarded.
The data gathered for free by volunteer citizen scientists constitutes a scarce resource. This project aims at emphasizing the "RE" in "REsource," by ensuring that the data crowdsourced by volunteers is REdistrubuted and REused in a multiplicity of contexts by a variety of organizations, creating a multiplier effect that maximizes the impact of the citizen scientists.

Look for one new grant every week from now on... we're on a roll!

Father of one

Yesterday was not only the solstice, but also Father's Day, and the midsummer night's ruminations I posted are connected in my mind to yet another article on the current Wired, which was extracted from Chris Anderson's newest book and was previously previewed in another issue of my favorite magazine.

Anderson writes about the "new hybrid world we're entering where scarcity and abundance exist side by side". He makes his case by pointing to how the massive availability of near-free storage has made many online activities proliferate abnormously (i.e. abnormally enormously). It is becoming clear to all of us that the Google mentality is the way of the future. Massive data flows are replacing grand theories and models. The truth is in the facts... Let's gather them and then figure out what they mean.

Species have been comparatively wasteful for eons, so this profligate approach has not been invented by Google. They have perfected it, but so have bluefin tuna.

I have no doubt that our future will be more about "thinning out" massive information overloads and relinquishing the ballast that we accumulate through unconscious consumerism. As we enter the era of simplexity, it is (abundantly) clear that we need to master abundance thinking.

When it comes to the perpetuation of our selfish genes, we mammals have a built-in bias toward the specialness of our offsprings. The absolute preciousness of my own progeny cannot be compared to the wasteful way in which other species reproduce by statistical chance. I am proud to be Nick's father and I am really glad that we made our cross-country trek this past spring. He's one of a kind and I love him dearly. I hope he feels the same about me...

A heartfelt Solstice

This morning (at 5:45am UTC), which roughly means yesterday at 10:45pm MST here in Santa Fe) was the 2009 Summer Solstice, vernacularly known as the longest day of the year (in our northern-hemispheric-centered way of thinking)...

To celebrate this midsummer day (I know it's weird to think of this as mid-summer, but in the old days they only had 2 seasons: summer and winter), Simon Mehalek, Shawn Barr and I planned to hike up from the Santa Fe ski basin (10,350 ft = 3,155 m) to the top of Tesuque Peak, which stands at 12,047 feet or 3,672 meters above sea level. Sunrise here was at 5:48am, so we got on our way at 2:30am and began walking up around 3:15am so we could get to the top in time to see the sun rise over the horizon.

Simon led the ascent at a clip that quickly became clearly unsustainable for my unacclimated body. Just as soon as I got him to slow down, Simon had an episode of AVNRT, which is a non-life-threatening, congenital form of Supraventricular Tachycardia from which he (and his siblings) suffer. The stress from the highly successful Frankencircuit show at the Santa Fe Complex had caused another episode earlier in the week, therefore we took this as another sign from Simon's body to "take it eezy" and relax. So, as all good mountaineers are apt to do, we decided to abort our solstice mission and return to base camp. Just as we were doing that, Ben Lichtner, his girlfriend Marie and two friends were coming up the slope. My idea about the solstice sunrise hike had inspired them to join us, so it was good to think that at least one of our SFx teams would make it to the summit (though in the end they didn't either)...

As we came down the mountain and back to civilization I found myself pondering about a recent Wired magazine article entitled "Know thyself", about the personal metrics movement and the "quantified self" or more generally about the "macroscope", whereby we'll be able "to link myriad bits of natural data into a larger, readable pattern". If Simon had been monitoring himself, and sharing his health symptoms on curetogether, while tracking his food intake with tweetwhatyoueat, and recording vital statistics automatically using Nike+ or Fitbit, or manually logging his heart rates and blood pressure on a mobile app, perhaps he could have prevented the (re-)occurrence of his palpitations? I wonder...

Earlier in the evening, we had received an invitation to go to a stargazing party, which we decided to bow out of because of our hike. Once we were on the mountain, we got to see the firmament in its full glory even without the aid of a telescope. It was an awesome reminder of just how small a place we humans occupy in the spatio-temporal vastness of the universe.

At the same time, though, the microscopically aberrant cycles of Simon's heart reminded us of the irreplaceable value of each human being here and now. His continuing life on this mostly harmless and utterly insignificant little blue-green-planet was of paramount importance to Shawn and me and getting him to a place of safety was much more urgent than anything else at that moment. We got back safely, saw the sunrise from town and were no worse off for it.

And yes. Simon is fine, in case you wonder.

Happy solstice to all!

Nubisphere

Check out the new rotating cloud sphere of tags on the right sidebar of my blog. It's a bit overwhelmed by the sheer number of labels (note to self: be selective in your tagging!). But it sure is interesting none the less. Below is a "thinned out" version of the cloud, showing the most frequent tags for your clicking enjoyment!

Blogumus is derived from Roy Tanck by way of Amanda Fazani...

bIGNITE @ the Complex

We are making plans for a bIG NITE at the Santa Fe Complex where we can all share where we're at and what we are thinking about in 5 minutes and then have a party to celebrate each other!

It will be fun and useful.

My presentation is evolving and viewable in google docs.

It will change until the last minute, with an exponential rate of change the closer we get to the time of the presentation.

It's the procrastination derivative... Very steep slope.

July 5th? Potluck food. BYOG.

I'll Bring My Own Grappa...

Party will follow.

Citizen Science 2.0

Citizen Science is the ante litteram crowdsourcing activity. Individuals have collected scientific data for a bigger cause way before crowdsourcing became a widespread buzzword and a long time prior to the existence of Wikipedia and the World Wide Web. The Audubon's Christmas Bird count has been going on since 1900...

In the context of the NASA-funded Digital Earth Watch (DEW) project, we have an opportunity to explore the citizen science universe through the lenses of front line practitioners such as Kitty from the Cornell Ornithology Lab and Kirsten and Sandra from Budburst at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado. Our "models" and inspirations are evoked in the presentation I gave at the DEW workshop in April.

View more OpenOffice presentations from Fabio Carrera.

Our specific contributions to the project are:

1. To investigate a “crowdsourcing” application to collect, organize, analyze and share PicturePost submissions.
2. To explore ways in which users could “design” their own window into the DEW project, by composing their own web pages.
3. To visualize PicturePost data in intriguing and sophisticated ways.
4. To experiment with a set of social networking services that will foster interaction with the global data repository and with other users across the globe.
5. To prototype a series of electronic alert and reminder systems to invite users to collect data at crucial times of the year.
6. To experiment with alternative observation methods that do not require a physical picturepost (the “virtual” picturepost).
7. To allow others to contribute new online analytical or visualization functions and share them with the community.

After the workshop, Steve and I had a chance to brainstorm all the way back to Santa Fe and we came up with a whole new approach to citizen science, centered on the "prosumer", i.e. the volunteer researcher who is willing to collect and submit scientific observations. We are framing our new approach around the 3 tenets I stumbled upon in my early synchronized crowdsourcing experience (make it simple, fun, and rewarding). During the current DEW project, we will experiment with the latest interactive online technologies, such as: tweets, sms, blogs, social networks, location-aware mobile applications and augmented 3D digital photography. It is clear that a full-fledged, self-organizing, emergent Citizen Science 2.0 framework would require a separate research effort with appropriate funding. Preparing an NSF grant proposal for this line of research is going to be the primary task Kyle Miller will tackle when he arrives in Venice later this week for his summer internship...

Look for a "CitizenPipe" entry later.

The best is yet to come...