It's official: Yahoo! will open a new research lab in partnership with UC Berkeley, just off campus.
Congratulations to Marc Davis, the Berkeley SIMS professor who will head up the lab, and to the other sharp SIMS folks who will work there. I can't wait to see the goodies that will emerge from this.
[ UPDATE: Our launch period at A'Cuppa Tea is over. Keep an eye on placesite.com for news of upcoming launches. ]
We'll launch Project PlaceSite this Tuesday
at A'Cuppa Tea cafe and teahouse in Berkeley.
Full details: PlaceSite.com.
Come out and join in!
Help supercharge wi-fi public places in the San Francisco Bay Area!
For my final Masters project at U.C. Berkeley I'm exploring new ways in which online social interaction can move into the offline ("real") world -- and learning what online services can add to face-to-face conversation.
An important part of our research is to learn how people here interact and use wi-fi (wireless Internet) in public and semi-public places.
If you're 18 or older, live or work in the Bay Area and use wi-fi, you can help us immensely by taking a few minutes to answer the following brief survey. Your responses will be kept completely anonymous.
Here's the survey: http://www.seansavage.com/survey
We need all the responses we can get, so it would be great if you could spread the word by pointing your Bay Area friends to the survey.
This summer we'll post a report about what we learn; I'll link to the report from here when it's available.
Thanks!
Imagine opening your laptop computer in a neighborhood wireless Internet café and firing up a Web browser. Instead of your usual startup page, imagine this on your screen:
That's the core of Project PlaceSite. It introduces a new way of using wireless networks -- to create a local information service by, for and about people who are in the same café together.
We're rolling it out in Berkeley in a few weeks. Details: www.placesite.com.
Please let us know what you think. And come out and take part!
At least 300 people showed up tonight to see David Byrne give a Powerpoint presentation about Powerpoint. [Free video of the talk may be available soon.]
What luck it was to happen upon one of the best seats in the front row. As Byrne was introduced he sat on the stage, about 5 feet away. The only camera I had was the crappy one on my mobile phone but I couldn't resist a few shots.
Along with David Bowie and a few others, Byrne got me through my childhood during the 1980s. As a kid I loved his otherworldly tunes and that deeper, darker, subtler vibe that set him apart from the shrill, candy-colored MTV culture that overtook pop music in those days.
I can't agree with all his Powerpoint points, but it's fascinating to consider how he views this tool. The user interface geek in me is dying to watch him work with it firsthand in his natural habitat.
I wanted to step up and hug him when he said that a Powerpoint presentation is just part of a larger "performance" which includes not just the person speaking but the audience, the room, the surroundings. Software designers, even self-professed user interface and needs analysis experts, can learn a lot from Byrne. The point seems like an obvious one, but we're still stuck in "user-centered" tunnel vision: we design for a prototypical single person staring at a single computer, as if that person and computer operate in a vacuum. This approach can be worse than meaningless if you ignore the surrounding context. This tunnel vision can be downright dangerous as we design software that moves beyond the desktop and into public spaces.
Byrne presented another intriguing argument: that Powerpoint's constraints, particularly its "low resolution," can be a benefit. (He meant "resolution" in the way the Powerpoint-loathing Edward Tufte uses the word: in terms of graphics quality but also in more general terms of how much information standard Powerpoint templates allow you to convey to an audience at a time). Simpler, lower-resolution images force the audience to become involved more in the presentation because they have to actively connect the dots.
This brought to mind a couple of analogies. Think of how books and radio can seem richer than television -- the lack of visuals forces the audience to actively imagine the action, to envision many details that aren't explicitly described.
Scott McCloud pointed out in his book Understanding Comics that many protagonists in popular comics are drawn in a simpler, less detailed style than other characters and their surroundings. Think of Tintin or Orphan Annie. McCloud theorizes that readers can more easily sympathize with minimally-drawn heroes because they can more easily project themselves into those characters. The more details you give a character, the less that character shares in common with a given reader. On the other hand, the story can be more compelling if faraway lands that the character visits, and other characters that the character encounters, especially bad guys, are drawn in a detailed manner -- because intricate detail in itself can make those thing seem more foreign, interesting or even frightening.
Does this apply to Powerpoint? I don't think so... I still hate Powerpoint and the agonizingly dull, ubiquitously unimaginative corporate communication style that its use has embodied and encouraged since Microsoft purchased the software and took over its development and marketing. The world needs more elegant and customizable presentation tools, which can be made just as easy to use for non-techies as Powerpoint. Constraints can be a blessing, but the wrong sorts of constraints can be a curse.
Anyway, it's fun to watch Byrne turn the Powerpoint tradition on its head.
The richest man on Earth visited Berkeley Friday October 1 -- on the 40th anniversary of the free speech movement's birth here on campus.
Bill Gates' reception was a stark reminder of how the concept of free speech here has changed since 1964, when thousands of students and sympathizers revolted against attacks on their First Amendment rights, forcing the university administration to permit free speech on campus. This Free Speech Movement spread quickly to universities around the world. The movement played a pivotal role in the fight for civil rights and in the withdrawal of American troops from Vietnam.
Nowadays Berkeley is a very different place. Walk around town and you'll see some street merchants and homeless people and older residents making their voices heard with placards and posters and t-shirts and an occasional megaphone. Not so with the students. Most of the students are silent, unquestioning, complacent consumers.
On campus, huge corporations enjoy much more free speech than the students. Some administrators nurture and enforce this state of affairs.
Consider Bill Gates' recent visit. During the question and answer session at the end of Gates' speech, most students who asked questions carefully avoided all the obvious but uncomfortable issues regarding Gates and Microsoft: the firm's extremely anticompetitive business practices, the glaring security holes that plague Microsoft software, and so on.
The questions that were asked could have been written for a Microsoft television commercial -- with one exception.
A student named Ka-Ping Yee broke from the flock to attempt real dialogue.
Yee remembered what happened at his alma mater, the University of Waterloo, when it accepted a $2 million "gift" from Microsoft. Long sticky strings were attached to this "gift." The school sacrificed its integrity, downgraded the value of its diplomas and transformed itself into a Microsoft marketing machine, for only $2 million. University of Waterloo changed its curriculum to serve Microsoft at students' expense. It stopped teaching engineering students the industry-standard C++ programming language and forced them to learn Microsoft's new, proprietary C# language instead.
Yee is a Berkeley student now. After the sugar-coated lecture, Yee began to ask Gates real questions about Microsoft's darker business practices. His questions were thoughful and civil and well-phrased. But in his questions, Yee didn't blindly bow to Gates and his money, as did the other students, and as did A. Richard Newton, Dean of Berkeley's College of Engineering.
Yee didn't pander to Gates. So the Dean cut him off.
Dean Newton simply talked over Yee, interrupting his questions. Twice. (For a word-for-word account of this episode, see the section beginning "You mentioned earlier," in Microsoft's transcript of the event.)
(By the way, Ka-Ping Yee followed this up with another act of bravery -- on his weblog, he called out the damaging and factually incorrect statement that Gates made about open-source software licensing. Open-source licensing forms one of the most potent barriers to Microsoft power. But Yee wasn't given the chance to challenge Gates' claim during the question and answer session.)
But let's not single out Newton and Microsoft. What other huge corporations enjoy more freedom of speech at Berkeley than the students? Here are just a few:
Don't get me wrong; I know there's an important place for corporations in society, and even in public universities.
But things have fallen far out of balance.
Plenty of stories last week in the Berkeley press touched on the Free Speech Movement anniversary. But hardly any mention was made of the megacorporate shadow on freedom of speech. Hardly a word was heard about the mushrooming corporate entanglements with public education.
Many consider Berkeley one of the top public universities on the planet, and our lead is followed by other institutions. The precedents we set ripple throughout society. Students and faculty should remember Berkeley's reputation for pointing out and fighting social injustices. Let's not remain silent in the face of outrageous corporate encroachments.
Road Sage, a project at Berkeley for which I led the user interface and interaction design, won second place among 18 contenders in my department's final project competition. (Second-year students in my program must build and present a substantial final project before they graduate. At the end of each year two panels of outside judges select the best projects.)
Essentially, Road Sage is Mapquest on steroids: it takes live and historical traffic data into account in choosing and presenting routes, and in estimating travel times. It uses data logged from highway sensors operated by California's Department of Transportation to forecast traffic between any given starting and ending points, and to suggest the best route at a given time in the future. It also shows live traffic along a given route, among other things.
Mikhail Avrekh, John Han and Lauren Wilkinson (all now graduated) came up with the idea and worked hard for much of the past year to build it out. Bravo team! (Sorry Bay Area drivers, but don't get too excited. We don't have a robust multi-user version of Road Sage so it's not ready for public use. But if Mikhail and friends can track down funding, who knows.)
Imagine weighting the historic traffic data with historic weather records and with the latest weather forecasts -- in this way we could more accurately predict future traffic and provide more accurate route suggestions. For regions that include sports stadiums, imagine weighting the traffic data on game days based on past traffic changes that occured on previous game days. Plenty more can be done here to provide ever-more-accurate traffic forecasts and route recommendations, all of which can be built on top of the Road Sage foundation.
No joke. And this follows last year's 30 percent tuition increase. My degree's getting more expensive by the minute.
And its value might be shrinking. This $372 million cut faced by the University of California system, following on the heels of similar cuts each year for the past four years, has the preseident of the UC system "deeply concerned" about the quality of education that UC can provide. Many people consider Berkeley the best public university on the planet, but how long can that reputation be maintained without funding?
Below I've posted a map and a list of cafes near the University of California, Berkeley campus that offer free wireless Internet access. If you have a laptop or other device with a Wi-Fi (802.11b) card, turn it on in one of these places to enjoy a free high-speed connection.
I'm surprised that so few free wi-fi cafes exist in Berkeley, considering that more than 70 such cafes thrive in San Francisco. Do you know of any free wi-fi cafes near the UC Berkeley campus that I'm missing? If so, please let me know: sean[at]cheesebikini.com.
Help expand this list: next time you pass one of those big cafes near campus that charge exorbitant usage fees, go in and tell the manager that she's losing business to the dozens of Bay Area cafes that provide free wi-fi access.
UPDATE 6/26/05: If you use Windows and you're interested in seeing who's in cafes and at other hotspots nearby, check out Meetro. It's not available for Macs so I haven't been able to try it out but it looks like fun. -Sean
1 Berkeley Espresso: 1900 Shattuck Avenue, at Hearst Avenue. The staff here can be a tad gruff, but this is a decent place to get work done. There are plenty of tables and the management provides more than the usual number of power outlets; the coffee's not bad and they stay open til 11 pm weeknights. Added 9/7/03. map2 Fertile Grounds: 1796 Shattuck Avenue, at Delaware Street. The staff here is much more friendly than the overworked folks at Berkeley Espresso, and I think the coffee's better. But they close much earlier than Berkeley Espresso. (I'll find out the precise closing time and post it here soon.) Added 9/7/03. map
3 Free Speech Movement Cafe: Moffitt Library, First Floor, University Drive at Sather Road on the UC Berkeley Campus. The cafe provides wi-fi coverage via AirBears, but to use it you'll need a Berkeley student or staff ID number to use it. It's a great, lively space decked out with memorabilia celebrating the 1964 Berkeley student protests. But there's a chilling item in the corner: a large television set displays CNN all day long; a sign warns patrons that the TV's for viewing CNN, and that "the channel and volume controls are fixed and cannot be manually adjusted." So in Berkeley's Free Speech Movement Cafe, CNN has a lot more freedom of speech than anyone else. The cafe is open til 2 am Sunday through Thursday; they close at 10 pm Fridays and Saturdays. This cafe is very popular with Berkeley undergrads; don't count on getting a table during peak times. Tip: sometimes the classroom next to the cafe is left unlocked when it's empty; it's within range of the cafe wi-fi router, and if you can sneak in it's a great quiet place to get some work done. Added 9/7/03. map | site
4 The Bear's Lair: First floor of the student union, 2475 Bancroft Way, between Telegraph Avenue and Dana Street on the UC Berkeley Campus. You'll find a big cafe and food court here, as well as an adjoining bar with fairly cheap beer. The entire complex has wi-fi coverage via AirBears, but you'll need a Berkeley student or staff ID number to use it. Added 9/7/03. map | site
5 International House: 2299 Piedmont Avenue, at Bancroft. The cafe provides wi-fi coverage via AirBears, but to use it you'll need a Berkeley student or staff ID number to use it. Thanks to Andria for the tip. Added 10/25/04. map | site6 Addison Annex Cafe: 2107 Addison Street, at Shattuck Avenue. Added 11/7/03. map
7 Le Bateau Ivre: 2629 Telegraph Avenue, at Carleton Street. Added 11/7/03. map
8 Brewed Awakening: 1807 Euclid Avenue, at Ridge Road. WARNING: Don't be tricked into paying for access that has already been paid for! This cafe does offer free wi-fi, but the access is through Sip and Surf, a service provider that forces you to submit a credit card number before you can register for free access. Your credit card won't be charged, IF you choose the free-access option when submitting your credit card. Jeff Wolf warns that the design of the sign-up process is very unclear and he inadvertently and unnecessarily signed up for a paid account. So be sure to pay attention during the sign-up process so you're not misled into paying. Thanks to Jeff Wolf for the tip. Added 6/13/04. map | site
9 Yali's Cafe: 1920 Oxford Street, at Berkeley Way. Thanks to John Landahl for the tip. Added 10/25/04. map
If I missed a cafe, or if one of these cafes closes or begins charging for Wi-Fi use, drop me a line and I'll update the list: sean[at]cheesebikini.com. (Remember this is a list of free Wi-Fi cafes, so please don't contact me about cafes that charge a fee for Wi-Fi usage.)
The folks at Beast Blog are putting together a list of free wi-fi locations throughout the East Bay.
Here's a list of free Wi-Fi hot spots throughout the world: wififreespot.com.
And here's a list of open wireless nodes that Bay Area people have set up, mostly in their homes.
Join the free networks movement! Details: freenetworks.org, and the Bay Area Wireless Users' Group.
What if dolphins communicate by sending and receiving images? What if humans can learn to do the same, on the fly, via computer mediation?
I know what you're thinking: this guy's been in California far too long. You're probably right.
But bear with me on this.
As a kid growing up by the sea in Florida I was obsessed with bottlenose dolphins. I read everything I could find about them. When I was 13 I borrowed a fancy underwater microphone from an oceanographer and used it to record dolphin sounds at Ocean World, the local marine theme park. I played back the recordings into another dolphin tank. But I didn't get much of a reaction at all. After gathering around this strange noise-making machine for a few minutes, the dolphins quickly grew bored and ignored the tape recorder. They were far more interested in my cheap watch. And dead fish.
Plenty of more serious research (and writing and movie-making) was devoted to the prospect that dolphins' clicks and whistles might be a language. Scientists showed that dolphins convey instructions to one another, but still nobody has proven whether a high-level dolphin language exists.
This week I read a paper by Berkeley's Professor Marc Davis that dramatically changed my thinking about this by pointing out that a dolphin language might not be based on words. Most linguistic dolphin research I've seen seeks dolphin sounds strung together as words, and I always unconsciously assumed that any high-level language must be based on words.
But Davis points out in his paper that some written human languages don't use words at all but instead directly represent meaning visually. The image to the right is a message written in such a language, by a member of the Yukaghir tribe in Siberia. (See Davis' paper for more details and a translation of the letter.)
Like bats, dolphins use echolocation. They emit waves of sound and use the resulting echoes to pinpoint locations, sizes, shapes, densities, and even internal states and structures of animals and objects, with astounding precision and accuracy. If dolphins use their own sounds so skillfully to probe their environments and to "see" what's around them, can they also use sound to create artificial imagery that's "visible" to other dolphins?
Dolphins exhibit a superhuman ability to convey spatial instructions to one another. Nobody's sure how exactly they work this out, but if you watch a group of dolphins carrying out tasks in which they have to quickly synchronize very complicated sets of movements -- during a theme-park performance, for example, or during hunts in which they round up thousands of fish into dense schools -- you'll be amazed at their powers of spatial coordination.
Can you imagine dolphins sending each other visual cues mapped to real-world environments -- or even sending entire artificial "video" scenes showing planned activities -- on the fly?
This may be a stretch; it's probably fiction and so far it's not backed by much science. But it's a very powerful idea that we can use. Even if dolphins cannot communicate this way, perhaps we will be able to, with the help of computers.
Davis and his Garage Cinema Research group at Berkeley are working on it. They're designing systems that they hope will allow regular people to easily and quickly build video compositions, without putting forth the tremendous amount of time, expense and technical knowledge necessary for today's film production. Thanks to smart systems that can recognize media assets and automate much of the video capture, editing and production process, Davis hopes to allow us all to "write" video as often and as easily as we "read" video today. The promise lies not just in replacing the current wasteful and corporate-dominated system of creating polished high-end feature films, but in providing humanity with a new, more powerful form of everyday communication.
Mein Gott, has it really been more than five weeks since my last entry?
It's been a crazy, hectic, life-altering month. The top headlines:
The grad school decision: My quest for a Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) Master's degree continues. I was accepted by four great Information Management & Systems schools: Berkeley, The University of Michigan, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and The University of Washington. For reasons I won't go into, this was an unbelievably difficult decision, but after talking to and exchanging e-mails with more than 25 professors, students, and people in the industry, and after spending countless hours reading related Web sites, papers, etc., I chose Berkeley. I'm glad the agonizing decision's over and I can't wait to get started in the Fall.
CHI 2003: I gathered a lot of this knowledge during the CHI 2003 conference, which was held in my hometown of Ft. Lauderdale, Florida (!). How strange it was to see all these brilliant people discussing HCI less than five miles from where I was born and raised, in a region where you normally never meet anyone remotely interested in product development or software development, much less in HCI. I was just a bit overwhelmed while trying to learn as much as I could about the schools I was considering, working as a student volunteer, showing people around town, taking in presentations, tutorials and demos, seeking out my heroes in the field, and just finding my way around my first academic conference. It was an exhilarating experience and a lot of fun.
The new gig: Last month I started my new full-time job at Stanford University's Department of Dermatology. Among other duties, I'll help to manage the input, cataloguing, storage, and retrieval the thousands of digital images that the department creates every month, as well as the associated medical records. It’s great fun so far; I'm the only computer person in the department, but the doctors and staff are super-smart and they seem much more open to change and to new technology than the users I worked with during two other medical gigs. I hope to pool efforts with people elsewhere on campus working on cool medical informatics projects like the Stanford MediaServer but there's not much time until the Fall semester begins and I leave Stanford to start classes at Berkeley. I wish I had started this job a year ago...
Life should be a tad saner now, but now much. Among other things, I have to begin a Java class and possibly a data structures and algorithms class in preparation for Berkeley. These are busy days. But I’m lovin’ it all.