Protected: Beyond Borders, Experimenting Random Lunch

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Experimenting High Frequency Trading Principles on Twitter

A common issues is “how to attract people attention to my web page/twitter when I don’t have any reputation?”. Since we live in an attention economy (attention is a scare commodity), why not tackling such question under the prism of finance and applying High-frequency trading technics to gain attention shares. Here is a fun experiment.

DIY in Real Estate: where to live around Paris using your own LivingIndex

I recently started to look for a larger flat around Paris. But where to start? Which district is interesting to investigate since the area is very large? Beyond common information given on an advertising (nb of rooms, square footage,etc) how can I know/ assess the quality of its neighborhood in a more systematic way? Is ...

Crowdsourcing Satellite Imagery (part 2): Iterative vs. parallel human organisations

In Crowdsourcing Satellite Imagery (part 1) I discussed about the use of a parallel model to organise people in the analysis of satellite imagery , its redundancy property and some meritocratic technics to produce quality data. Here I talk about the qualitative and quantitative differences of 2 organisational models: parallel vs iterative models (wikipedia’s style) ...

Mechanical Art

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 ...

Crowdsourcing satellite imagery (part 1): Meritocracy technics

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 ...

Cyborgs in the mist: fight against planned obsolescence of mankind

I was invited at the Gaity Lyrique to discuss on the fake documentary from Stéphane 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 ...

Mapping the visual perception of travelers in a city using google street view as sensor

Have you ever been impressed by the colorfulness of some Tokyo or New york streets during the nights? A traveler wandering in a city got some inner impressions generated by some visual characteristics of the location e.g. its openness, its colorfulness, its visual complexity or even some higher visual features e.g. its architecture style). Can ...

Social capital as contribution in participatory projects

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 ...

Extreme Learning Machine

I read an interesting article “Extreme Learning Machine: A New Learning Scheme of Feedforward Neural Networks” (2004) about a new method of learning for a certain type of neural network. This Learning is applied for networks with a single layer (SNLP). The results According to the article, this method is clearly more effective in generalization ...

Random GPS: Flanerie in the physical network

Baudelaire and the Flanerie at the internet age. The genesis of the idea comes from Stephane Degoutin and Gwenola Wagon 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, ...

Paticipatory modeling: citizens as environmental modelers

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?

The tragedy of democratic voting systems

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 ...

Weird Ideas That Work: 11 1/2 Practices for Promoting, Managing, and Sustaining Innovation

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 ...

DIY: sensing/quantifying your food, money and tv consumption

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, ...

Most influential persons of the 20th century?

Carl Bosch Fritz Haber 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 ...

NoiseTube: Participatory sensing for noise pollution monitoring

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 ...

Augmented Photos integrating Environmental Information

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 ...

PotentialCity: Participatory Augmented Audio Reality

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. ...

Mining for Social Serendipity

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 ...

Social attention analysis and management in online communities

The objective of this research was to investigate the use of Information and Communication Technologies to support people in analyzing and 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 ...

Christmas + Sustainability = no good friends

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.

Attention in economics, sociology, information system, organisation

This short article is about the use of the notion of attention in 4 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 ...

My little experience of the recruitment 2.0 ..or 1.1?

A lot of people think recruitment 2.0 is the use of new tools and notably new media to recruit people (e.g. social network sites). This is certainly true. But the major contribution of the web2.0 phenomena is the democratization of the media: everyone can now express his or her opinion and, the most important, be ...

Human based Computation as a form of Currency to alleviate the world Poverty?

This post is a summary (+ some comments & further references) of a short paper “Secure Distributed Human Computation” in financial cryptography (2005) (the article is a position paper, so no mathematical at all compared to the previous one in machine learning [6]). Here the authors describe a new paradigm that some of you already ...

Managing social interaction overload: new emerging strategies

Internet increases people’s social capital by facilitating connections among people. This social aspect has recently taken off with the web 2.0 phenomena and the proliferation of social networking sites (MySpace, Facebook, Linkedin, …) and virtual communities (Delicious, Youtube, Lastfm, Librarything,Digg).This is also true in the companies. Increasingly, the knowledge workers of today collaborate not only ...

Acoustic Cryptoanalysis

I decided to publish an old post from 2006. Better late than never. – Recently (I don’t remember how) I came accross an article (2004) [1] from Adi Shamir (the inventors of the RSA algorithm) and Eran Tromer about an original attack for encrypted messages based on the study of the sound produced by the ...