Posts Tagged ‘architecture’

Interfaces to the Subterranean: Paris’ Pneumatic Postal Service - October 31st, 2009

tubes

tubes


Video podcast

This is a video rebroadcast of a talk by Molly Steenson given in the Department of Informatics on 10/15/2009. Molly is a design researcher and architectural historian who studies interactivity and responsiveness in architecture. Molly was an Associate Professor of Connected Communities at the Interaction Design Institute Ivrea in Italy and is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in architecture at Princeton University. In this talk she discusses the original “series of tubes” and buildings that function as computers.

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Posted: 10/31/09 9:05 am UTC by Make the First Comment
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Nomatic*Gaim is now Nomatic (for presence) - April 24th, 2007

Flickr Image
Photo courtesy of shapeshift

Two things have happened recently to the Nomatic*Gaim project. The first is that the architecture of the software has changed to support multiple IM clients besides gaim. The second is that under lawsuit duress, gaim has renamed themselves to pidgin.

As a result, the project formerly known as Nomatic*Gaim is now renamed Nomatic (for presence). The parentheses are to differentiate it from Nomatic*Aid which is also rapidly evolving, but for now retains the same name.

The relevant links are Nomatic (for presence) and Pidgin

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Posted: 4/24/07 11:35 am UTC by Make the First Comment
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An Ethnographic Study of the Social Impacts of Video Blogging - April 19th, 2007

The Informatics Seminar is held on Fridays at 3:00pm in ICS2 136
followed by a social hour at 4:00pm. See you there!

Abstract

In the past decade, digital technology has become widely integrated into
many professional training settings, yet at present we lack a detailed
understanding of how new technology alters networks of social and
technology-mediated interactions present in such environments. I have
been engaged in a multi-year ethnography-for-design study in a dental
hygiene training program in San Diego, CA. During the project, I helped
design a new clinical training laboratory, equipped with embedded
digital media technology, such as flat-panel monitors, computer
workstations and overhead cameras. Here, I detail the ethnographic
motivations for the design of the technology integrated into the
training program.

Decisions about the usefulness of a technology are socially constructed
throughout the entire design and use cycles of a technology by the
various actors who participate in communities of practice. Studying the
cultural processes behind the appropriation of technology can help us
understand how to design technology that is more likely to be
appropriated and used by the community. Distributed cognition theory
posits that cognitive processes extend across the traditional boundaries
of the skin and the skull as various kinds of coordination are
established and maintained between bodily, material, and social
resources. Data from multimodal interaction can provide information
about the underlying cognitive architecture. Moreover, larger patterns,
like social organization and the context of activity may also be viewed
as important parts of the cognitive ecology.

I will present an analysis of how a collaborative video blogging system
(a ‘vlog’), used in an introductory clinical instruction course,
affected the network of social and technology-mediated interactions in
the training clinic. In particular, I examine how interactions with
videos structured the way students and instructors worked with each
other. Additionally, I report how the faculty’s appropriation of the
vlog technology was influenced by the presentation of divergent
methodology in the videos on the vlog.

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Posted: 4/19/07 3:01 pm UTC by Make the First Comment
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Accenture presents IT trends: Prognosis for the next decade - June 12th, 2006

The speakers at this week’s seminar will be Kishore Swaminathan, Director of Research, Accenture Technology Labs. While not strictly a UBICOMP topic, it seems to be relevant to the way future systems in general will be built and may be illuminating for how UBICOMP services will be structured.

Abstract:

“Traditional factors such as cost and quality as well as new factors such as offshore development, platform consolidation, massive data volume, hardware virtualization, increasing cost of managing legacy systems etc. are poised to change the field of Information Technology dramatically in the next decade. In particular, I believe that three major trends will dominate IT over the next several years:

Software will be architected differently: Currently, functional cohesion in complex software is provided by tightly-coupled, monolithic design typified by ERP systems. Service Oriented Architecture or SOA promises to achieve the same through loosely coupled architecture. While SOA can provide significant benefits such as encapsulation, inter-operability, dynamic binding and resistance to change, it also represents a considerably different computational paradigm that will create a number of new technical, research and operational challenges.

Software will be developed differently: Currently, software design and development is essentially a craft practised by craftsmen. But there are technical and economic indicators to suggest that software development will move more and more toward industrialization. On the one hand, mathematical models and metrics will influence the current software development processes; on the other hand, Model Driven Development through Domain-Specific Languages will challenge the current paradigm by separating functional models from computational models, potentially leading to a highly automated process for software development.

Software will be bought and sold differently: New technologies and new business models are beginning to threaten the current economics of software systems and information technology. Software-as-a-service or SaaS (as opposed to software as a product) is gaining traction. Technologies such as RIA (Rich Internet Application) will attempt to create a “network operating system” and make SaaS considerably more appealing to home and business users. Open source – as a social and economic phenomenon – will influence and disrupt the economics of the IT industry.

In this talk, I will touch upon some of these issues and discuss how these factors could affect the IT industry and computer science research.

The Informatics Seminar is held in ICS2 136 at 3pm, followed by a happy hour at 4pm. See you there!

This talk will not be videocaptured.

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Posted: 6/12/06 9:46 am UTC by Add Your Comment
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