LUCI Blog

Google Transit, the public transportation planning tool, has released coverage of Southern California. This is wonderful for bus aficionados, like me, because the OCTA.net trip planner fails me about 62% of the times I try and use it. Google on the other hand offers, nice iconography, good maps and intelligible time tables. Try it here.

-Don

Brinda Dalal an anthropologist working at Xerox came up with some interesting observations about the changing office in this New York Times article.

"What she has discovered is a notable change in the role of paper in modern offices, where it is increasingly used as a medium of display rather than storage. Documents are stored on central servers and personal computers and printed only as needed; for meetings, editing or reviewing information.

The pieces of paper spewed from copiers frequently end up back in the recycling bin on the same day they are printed, she noted.

Of the 1,200 pages the average office worker prints per month, 44.5 percent are for daily use — assignments, drafts or e-mail. In her research, scouring the waste produced by office workers, she found that 21 percent of black-and-white copier documents were returned to the recycling bin on the same day they were produced.

An interdisciplinary group project of four students from the departments of Informatics and Arts, Computation and Engineering (Marisa Cohn, Silvia Lindtner, Jeff Ridenour, Luv Sharma) from the University of California, Irvine has been selected among a range of submissions for the final screening event of the "Games for 5 joysticks" at the TELIC Arts Exchange. The interactive artistic game will be screened on Friday, December 1, 2006 between 7 and 9pm at TELIC Arts Exchange in Chinatown, Los Angeles.

Congratulations to these Informatics students and faculty for having the following papers accepted for publication:

Dourish, P. and Bell, G. In press. The Infrastructure of Experience and the Experience of Infrastructure: Meaning and Structure in Everyday Encounters with Space. Environment and Planning B: Planning and Design.

The speaker at the next Informatics Seminar (12/1/2006 3:00pm ICS2 136) will be Mark Poster, from the UCI Department of History (and Informatics).

From Digital to Analogue: Copyright and Peer-to-Peer File-sharing

My theoretical standpoint frames the question of copyright in the context of a new relation of humans and machines, and this in a global context. I argue that digital culture involves changes in the binaries of modernity that are due to the new relations of humans to information machines – subject/object; producer/consumer; time/space; etc. As a result there are changes to epistemology – the new epistemology is no longer one of a relation of the individual subject to truth but one of assemblages of humachines and knowledges.

Congratulations to these Informatics students and faculty for having the following papers accepted for publication:

Brewer, J., Williams, A., and Dourish, P. 2007. A Handle on What's Going On: Combining Tangible Interfaces and Ambient Displays for Collaborative Groups. Proc. Tangible and Embodied Interaction '07 (Baton Rouge, LO).

Williams, A. and Dourish, P. 2006. Reimagining the City: The Cultural Dimensions of Urban Computing. IEEE Computer, 39(9), 38-43.

And presentations:

D. J. Patterson, "Involving Intelligent Assistants in Active Human Communication," Tech. Rep. SS-07, American Association for Artificial Intelligence, March 2007.

According to the iTunes Music store the listeners of the LUCI podcast also listen to:

Monday, November 13, 2006

2:00 - 3:30 pm

Location: ICS2 136 (building #304)

Cost: No cost to attend.

ISR Faculty Host: Gloria Mark, gmark@ics.uci.edu

RSVPs requested to: Nancy Myers, nmyers@ics.uci.edu

ABSTRACT
The mission statement of Fuji Xerox states that the company will strive to build an environment for the creation and effective utilization of knowledge. ICT research organizations are expected to propose new work styles and environments based on the deep understanding of humans and organizations. Among these are distance collaboration, multi-tasking support, and analysis on both the individual work and the human social activity. As a research fellow involved with the recent Fuji Xerox research operations in China (and for a long time in Japan), he will explain the activities of the company with respect to these topics. The talk is mainly intended to introduce the activity of Fuji Xerox in general. It does not necessarily include technological topics. However, some experimental results will be explained.

From James Clar & Associates:

"On the night of April 28th, downtown Memphis was turned into a public, interactive lighting installation as 9 buildings were integrated with a system that sampled the activity levels from the inside of the buildings and transferred it to the tops to control a dynamic lighting display. "Inside / Out" brings to focus the information of movement and energy within buildings and makes them visible, so as people walked around the South Main gallery district of Memphis they were able to see each building node and it's activity before you enter them. "

Attached is the video capture of Friday's Informatics Seminar. The original announcement is here. The movie file is here.

The quality is adequate, but not great, especially since a lot of this ended up being a roundtable discussion. We are working on improving our technology to support this.

Have you ever panicked because you have a paper due in four hours and don't know the magic foo to get Latex to do the right thing? Ever wonder what the setting is on your phone to get it to quit asking if it's okay to use the Bluetooth subsystem? Do you suspect that someone else might know, but Googling is failing you?

Bill and I (Don) thought it might be good to have a forum for asking technical questions that other members of our community might be able to answer. Therefore, we've started a new mailing list titled hackers@ics.uci.edu. Feel free to add yourself!

https://mailman.ics.uci.edu/mailman/listinfo/hackers