In this culture of copy and remix, I (very) quickly coded a basic prototype called CopyMeter aims at measuring the originality of a text by using a search engine (Bing) to check each sentence and compute a ‘copy’ score at a sentence and text level. (interesting for scientific papers, or for detecting new content from others sources). Several strategies to query the search engine and to match the original sentence are proposed. Test it yourself at http://copymeter.dev.fabelier.org (note: this prototype is totally scalable because it is a client-side app using only javascript)
Few months ago I was invited by Stephane Degoutin at the ENSAD aka ‘Art Deco’, a design school to co-organize a 1-month workshop with students about experimenting new forms of crowdsourced art using Mechanical Turk, a Amazon labor market service for micro-tasking I used for my own scientific experiments. The goal of the workshop was to raise awareness among students about new modes of production and division of labor in the XXI century, and its potential impact in Art. See some videos and images from the workshop by clicking on the above image.
With the emergence of web 2.0 practices, new participatory approaches in GIS emerged for the last decade. An underlying challenge in crowdsourcing is the strategy used to allocate the volunteers in order to optimize a set of criteria, especially the quality of generated data. In collaboration with UNOSAT analysts, I quickly investigated some participatory methods to analyze satellite imagery for humanitarian purpose. Read the rest of this entry »
I was invited at the Gaity Lyrique to discuss on the fake documentary from Stephan Degoutin and Gwenola Wagon in which I played the role of a researcher from the LOPH research lab. (Lutte contre l’Obsolescence Programmee de l’Homme/fight against planned obsolescence of mankind)
“The film presents the LOPH research lab and its utopian proposals to struggle against the planned obsolescence of mankind. The lab is located in the villa Coignet, rue Charles Michel, Saint-Denis, the first house in the world entirely made out of concrete. Now part of the industrial estate of a multinational corporation in meat and ball meal, it is surrounded by data centers, warehouses and post evangelic cults.” more info in this page
The (45min) documentary explore the surprising links between the first house in the world entirely made out of concrete, a data center,evangelic cults and wikipedia and artificial intelligence.
Contributing to a participatory projects like citizen science projects is somehow about asking volunteers to use one of their available capitals. It could be material e.g. computer/mobilephone (volunteer computing, or participatory sensing), knowledge/expertise (Q&A websites e.g. stackoverflow, quora), financial (crowd funding) or human capital (cultural or creativity). However the use of the social capital of volunteers as contribution has been under-exploited, especially when we know that attracting attention and maintening sustainable contribution is one of the main issues due to the volatility and the continuous partial attention behavior of web users. Read the rest of this entry »
The genesis of the idea comes from Stephan about implementing a kind of “I’m feeling lucky” button on navigation devices. What will happen if the device will guide you not according to a target point but in a serendipity way, without any goal, any target, except the fact to spend time traveling, like surfing on web pages. It is not determining a random target because there is no target. Such behavior is so common on the web: we like spending hours surfing from pages to pages, reading things we didn’t look for at the beginning. Why not reproducing this (bad?) habit in the physical world? Why not implementing such serendipity features in Navigation GPS device: wandering from roads to roads to discover accidentally places.
Can we complement or even replace physical laws by the experience of local people to model environmental phenomena? An article from [1] showed that an air quality map generated by local people could be of a good quality compared to one generated by a physical model? In the context of a participatory and cost-effective process to monitoring natural resources, pollution or other kinds of commons, can we also empower local communities to form an emergent computation model of a local phenomenon using their tacit knowledge coupled with real measurements? Read the rest of this entry »
A common issue in participatory/democratic infrastructures is the problem of aggregating individual preferences into a global one. Voting is often the most public and visible example of mass collective decision-making. Such problem of aggregation occurs in many different disciplines: in decision theory , in social choice theory & welfare economics and in artificial intelligence. In the case of voting systems, the problem is how votes are counted and aggregated to get an acceptable final result, how choosing such aggregation function? Understanding the advantages and drawbacks of each proposed system is thus crucial in democracy and has justified a quantity of theories, called Voting theory, leading to many discovered paradoxes and surprises.
I borrowed a Book “Weird Ideas That Work” from Sutton, Professor of Organizational Behavior at Stanford. As the title mentions, the book is about “weird ideas for Promoting, Managing, and Sustaining Innovation”. This post is a summary taken from the executiveforum.net summary and reworked in ordered and bulleted lists.(NOTE: as the author cautions, believe each of them for twenty seconds or so, and then do the critical evaluation)
The question of who owns the data we generate on Internet is a common and challenging problem (e.g. all privacy issues about Facebook). However, we don’t talk too much about our real life. We also generate digital traces when we interact with more traditional systems like bank, supermarket, or telecommunication providers. Such data are stored, used for marketing purposes and sometime sold by the companies. Just for fun I recently started to think about new ways to capture and own data I generated via these three big industrial sectors. I report here some technics about low-cost instruments to gather and enrich such data.
The wide adoption of sensor-rich mobile phones in combination with the spread of web 2.0 culture recently created the right conditions for a new scope of research referred to as participatory sensing, which comes to complement previous efforts in sensor networks by involving directly the public and enabling new low-cost and large-scale practices of observation. Despite this new sensing capacity , a traditional issue remains: how to process sensor data into actionable knowledge? This asymmetry between this new sensing capacity and the lack of sense-making is not sustainable.. The volume and the numerical nature of data is not suited for easily making sense for the public, new producer and user of data.
Which person had the greater impact in the 20th Century? Hitler, Gandhi, Einstein, etc. According to Nature [1], it is the duo Haber-Brosch because of their invention. Their Haber-Bosch process has often been called the most important invention of the 20th century as it “detonated the population explosion,” driving the world’s population from 1.6 billion in 1900 to 6 billion in 2000.
I ‘m currently participating in an extension of a artistic project called “Potential City”, initiated by Gwenola Wagon and Stéphane Degoutin, “which aims at increasing the potential of the Forum des Halles in Paris, to put it on scale with the Parisian metropolis.” In the initial version , every participants had a gps mobile phone. According to the location, the mobile launches sounds, voices or texts. “Each soundtrack describes an aspect of the architectural project, associated with a place in the garden: vertical development of space, Savage Mountain, Silence Cabin, Sex Park..”. Such kind of simple augmented audio reality project is not new. The idea I want to push is the democratization of the authoring side, normally restricted to the project initiators. The goal is to let people experiment not only the listening side , absorbing the reality of others, but also reinjecting their own vision by creating or contributing to any virtual reality via their mobile phones or a web interface. See below for further scenarios & screenshots
Issue 1: Pollution assessment:Currently the assessment of population exposure to pollution is a real problem due to the complexity to measure it. For officials, measuring exposure at an individual level for a citywide population is viewed as impractical. Other approaches such as simulation are thus often required, with all their uncertainties. Furthermore real time city monitoring perfomed by environmental sensor networks is currently limited due a very sparsed deployment of (costly) sensors in the city (<10 air quality sensors in Paris).
small idea. Pictures or video are supports to remember, reconstruct our experiences of life and a way to transfert them without spatio-temoral constraints. In regards of the current green trend, can I also add environemtal information to such support of memory to capture also environmental dimensions of my experience? Can I take augmented pictures capturing also environmental elements, so people watching the picture could perceive for instance my exposure to pollution at that time? Read the rest of this entry »
Abstract A common social problem at an event in which people do not personally know all of the other participants is the natural tendency for cliques to form and for discussions to mainly happen between people who already know each other. This limits the possibility for people to make interesting new acquaintances and acts as a retarding force in the creation of new links in the social web. Encouraging users to socialize with people they don’t know by revealing to them hidden surprising links could help to improve the diversity of interactions at an event. Read the rest of this entry »
The objective of this research was to investigate the use of Information and Communication Technologies to support people in managing their attention at a social level. People are being overwhelmed by solicitations and opportunities to engage into a social exchange but they have little means about how to deal effectively with this new level of interaction. I present here few slides corresponding to my research on this topic in the context of an european research project Atgentive (http://www.atgentive.com) at the Institut européen d’administration des affaires (INSEAD).
I now work on problems related to the sustainability and web 2.0. I recently taped different terms related to sustainability on Google Trends service, which is a good indicator of the people’s attention (in our case it’s only for the english speaking people), and fund an interessing thing. Read the rest of this entry »
This short article is about the use of the notion of attention in 3 different cases. The goal is to understand that the notion of attention is a transversal notion, interesting not only for a cognition point of view, at the individual level but also that may have an impact in the design of models in other fields, at the macro level. This post gives very roughly the insight of 3 attention-related papers in 3 different fields: attention in economics, attention in sociology, attention in information system.If you’re interested by the lecture I suggest you to read the original sources. Furthermore this article can be completed with a 4th case in a former post[1] (in French) about an organizational theory-based view of Digg.com, a social news aggregator.
In this culture of copy and remix, I (very) quickly coded a basic prototype called CopyMeter aims at measuring the originality of a text by using a search engine (Bing) to check each sentence and compute a ‘copy’ score at a sentence and text level. (interesting for scientific papers, or for detecting new content from others sources). Several strategies to query the search engine and to match the original sentence are proposed. Test it yourself at http://copymeter.dev.fabelier.org (note: this prototype is totally scalable because it is a client-side app using only javascript)
With the emergence of web 2.0 practices, new participatory approaches in GIS emerged for the last decade. An underlying challenge in crowdsourcing is the strategy used to allocate the volunteers in order to optimize a set of criteria, especially the quality of generated data. In collaboration with 
Contributing to a participatory projects like citizen science projects is somehow about asking volunteers to use one of their available 
The genesis of the idea comes from Stephan about implementing a kind of “I’m feeling lucky” button on navigation devices. What will happen if the device will guide you not according to a target point but in a serendipity way, without any goal, any target, except the fact to spend time traveling, like surfing on web pages. It is not determining a random target because there is no target. Such behavior is so common on the web: we like spending hours surfing from pages to pages, reading things we didn’t look for at the beginning. Why not reproducing this (bad?) habit in the physical world? Why not implementing such 
A common issue in participatory/democratic infrastructures is the problem of aggregating individual preferences into a global one. Voting is often the most public and visible example of mass collective decision-making. Such problem of aggregation occurs in many different disciplines: in decision theory , in social choice theory & welfare economics and in artificial intelligence. In the case of voting systems, the problem is how votes are counted and aggregated to get an acceptable final result, how choosing such aggregation function? Understanding the advantages and drawbacks of each proposed system is thus crucial in democracy and has justified a quantity of theories, called Voting theory, leading to many discovered paradoxes and surprises.
The wide adoption of sensor-rich mobile phones in combination with the spread of web 2.0 culture recently created the right conditions for a new scope of research referred to as participatory sensing, which comes to complement previous efforts in sensor networks by involving directly the public and enabling new low-cost and large-scale practices of observation. Despite this new sensing capacity , a traditional issue remains: how to process sensor data into actionable knowledge? This asymmetry between this new sensing capacity and the lack of sense-making is not sustainable.. The volume and the numerical nature of data is not suited for easily making sense for the public, new producer and user of data. 
I ‘m currently participating in an extension of a artistic project called “Potential City”, initiated by Gwenola Wagon and 