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.

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 ...

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. ...

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 ...

The web 2.0 mystery: Why what were considered as private data before are now volontary shared

New kind information on internet: user-related data Because of the democratisation of Internet and its new social aspect, the network is becoming less anonymous and the nature of the information has evolved with a new kind of information: people-related data. Compared to the nature of the data at the beginning of internet when it was ...

What attention is not?

When I talk about my researches on the management of the attention, sometimes people misunderstand due maybe to the fuzzy notion of attention. Idem in a project context, sharing common and clear understanding about the key concepts of the project is something very important and avoid some future problems . Indeed if I use wikiepdia ...

interaction overload: your friend the computer as mediator for the communication 2.0

Currently there is a serious trend about new types of collaboration between humans and machines to solve problems. Information overload: before solved 100% by computer, now 80% computer/ 20% human Before a lot of hard problems were solved only by computer. Humans were considered only as end-users. Since the democratisation of Internet and the integration ...

people clould as visualization of your social attention

I decided to begin to publish more articles on my researchs about the atgentive project [1]. I really began in February to collect, read articles or use web2.0 services to better understand several notions about online community, attention , awareness, activity, social network and the cscw field (computer supported collaborative work). There is  delicious account ...

Teamworking Practices using Datamining Technics

Group work is widespread in education. The growing use of online tools supporting group work generates huge amounts of data. We aim to exploit this data to support mirroring: presenting useful high-level views of information about the group, together with desired patterns characterizing the behaviour of strong groups. The goal is to enable the groups ...

Histoire de la Coca

Après avoir vu une émission dans laquelle un des invités disait que le Coca-cola contenait initialement de la cocaine j’ai voulu me renseigner. J’ai donc mené mon enquête en relevant les anecdotes historiques intéressantes de la plante coca. Une plante non nocive et même miracle La cocaïne vient de la feuille d’une plante nommée la ...