Several Place Lab applications and user studies have already been initiated. The following is a sampling of those activities:
UbiComp 2003: At the Fifth International Conference on Ubiquitous Computing, October 12-15, 2003, in Seattle, Intel Research in collaboration with UC San Diego demonstrated Place Lab version 1 and launched the community development effort. Conference participants downloaded stand-alone software that provided position sensing for a location-enhanced conference guide. Users interacted with the conference guide through a map of the conference hotel and surrounding area. Drilling down from the top-level guide reveals images and interesting facts and opinions relevant to the user's location.
Edinburgh International Festival 2004: Intel Research scientists are planning a field study for the massive cultural festival in Scotland, August 15 to September 5. Before the event, several dozen participants will develop their own "rules" to manage the disclosure of their location information. The participants will then be provided with PDAs that periodically ask the users questions such as "If your boss asked you for your location right now, how would you answer? Your spouse?" This in situ approach--known as the experience sampling method (ESM)--allows the participant to answer questions about location in the actual location, not days later when recall is often cloudy. A similar "everyday life" study is planned in the United States to compare with the results from the constrained environment of the Edinburgh International Festival, where the location-enhanced experience has a set end time. The aim is to discover where rules are useful tools for managing privacy and where they are not.
Ambush: Rather than develop location-enhanced applications that skirt privacy issues, Intel Research scientists have designed Ambush, a social application that is engaging yet presents significant privacy risks. One feature of Ambush is the ability for the user to define a geographic region--a public park, for example--and ask to be notified anytime a particular person enters that region. For instance, you might like to know when your spouse reaches the subway station so you can meet him or her there. Ambush has great potential for nefarious uses as well, hence its name. The hope is that test deployments will lead to technical strategies for dealing with these risks.
Location-Aware Computing course at the University of Washington: Professor Gaetano Borriello, former director of Intel Research Seattle, teaches a graduate level seminar where students prototype their own location-aware computing applications using Place Lab. For example, one team developed a location-aware To-Do List while two other students investigated ways to increase Place Lab's accuracy in estimating indoor location.
Hermes: Professor Siobhán Clarke at Trinity College Dublin is collaborating with Intel Research on Hermes, a software framework for mobile, context-aware "trails." A trail can be thought of as a collection of locations, information and activities related to those locations, and a recommended visiting order that's dynamically reconfigurable. Hermes facilitates the development of trail applications such as location-aware tour guides, basic route planners, courier support systems, and treasure hunt games. The first implementation of the Hermes framework is a test application to guide new Trinity College Dublin students through activities like registration and campus tours.
Place Lab: Location, Location, Location
Imagine strolling through New York's SoHo District when your mobile phone beeps. Glancing at your "buddy list," you see that the friend you've been playing phone tag with for weeks happens to be sitting in a cafe down the block. The fact that your phone notified you of your friend's nearness means that he's seeking company, in the same way your instant messaging program lets you know when friends are available to chat.
Or perhaps you're a factory technician contracted to bring an old manufacturing facility up to spec. As you walk through the unfamiliar production floor, the screen of your PDA lights up with manuals and notes from previous technicians about the idiosyncrasies of the various machines you pass. Think of it as a FAQ for the factory floor.
The old adage "location, location, location" has taken on an entirely new meaning. Smart personal devices that know their place within our world are a giant leap toward "proactive computing." In the proactive computing paradigm, computers anticipate human needs and, if necessary, act on our behalf. Instead of shuttling data between our environment and the machines, the human is above this constant interaction, maintaining control at a high level. Proactive Computing has the potential to improve our productivity and enhance communication, safety, and awareness at the societal scale.
First though, location-enhanced computing must move out of the laboratory and into the real world. For this to happen, the infrastructure for location-enhanced computing must be so inexpensive that even low-to-medium value applications become worthwhile to a large number of users. That way, a significantly sized leading-edge user community will form, spurring developers and content producers to accelerate innovation and introduce higher-value applications.
Place Lab
Towards this end, Intel Research Seattle has launched the Place Lab initiative, a collaborative effort between industry and academia to build a privacy-observant, low-cost, easy-to-use positioning system. Place Lab will enable developers and researchers from across industry and academia to design, deploy, and study ubiquitous computing applications in the large and in the wild. While Place Lab is just one of Intel's location-enhanced computing projects, it addresses head-on the key research challenges faced in the development of computers with a sense of place.
"Context is really important to ubiquitous computing. And one of the key pieces of context is location. But very few real location-enhanced applications have been deployed on a large scale. It's one thing to run an application in a 10,000 square foot research laboratory; it's something entirely different to take it to Madison Square Garden or a packed shopping center. Place Lab is a way for us to test the location component of ubiquitous computing in the real world using today's hardware." Anthony LaMarca
Intel Research Seattle (interview)
In order to provide planetary-scale user positioning at very low cost, the initial Place Lab infrastructure leverages the widespread proliferation of wireless networking access points (APs) based on the IEEE 802.11 standard, commonly-known as WiFi. From cafes to college campuses, corporate hallways to hotels, WiFi networks empower users in every city around the world with untethered Internet access on their PDAs, notebook computers, and various other mobile devices.
Combining novel machine learning techniques with a distributed Global WiFi Positioning Database of wireless access points, also known as hotspots, Place Lab software gives client devices the ability to passively listen for nearby access points and compute their own position. This latitude and longitude can inform myriad mobile applications and services, from "friend finders" to virtual tour guides to location-enhanced mobile commerce.
Place and Privacy
Of course, positioning systems pose non-trivial questions about privacy. Indeed, Place Lab is a powerful research tool for unraveling these thorny issues because at its foundation is a standalone positioning technique that reveals no information to potentially untrusted network providers. However, the value of many location-enhanced applications may count on the people disclosing varying degrees of detail about their location to institutions or other users. Myriad factors-from the person's current activity to who is asking, and why-interact in complex ways that affect how likely someone is to share their location.
"People need to stay in control of their location information. The challenge then is providing that control in a way they can understand and utilize effectively. It's very clear that people want to share their location information in some cases. 'Where are you?' is the first question anyone asks on a cell phone." Ian Smith
Intel Research Seattle (interview)
People and Places
Intel Research and its collaborators are developing sample applications and conducting multidisciplinary user studies to gain a deep understanding of the balance between privacy and value of wireless location services. (Sidebar) Place Lab's passive architecture presents the opportunity to develop applications that don't disclose any information without the user's permission. Still, designing a "privacy knob" that addresses all privacy concerns--and ensuring that users understand how to tweak that knob--remains a grand challenge of ubiquitous computing research. Real-world user studies and the deployment of prototype applications are the only way researchers can truly come to grips with the social and psychological nuances of location-enhanced computing.
"We're trying to understand what kinds of information people are interested in. It's formative work to inform the design of applications. Also, location-enhanced computing raises big social issues. And we don't know the social norms for a location-aware society." Sunny Consolvo
Intel Research Seattle (interview)
Only through extensive fieldwork and experimentation can we hope to build new ways for users to comfortably protect their privacy while still reaping the benefits of location-enhanced applications.
Bootstrapping Place Lab
To promote the design of location-enhanced applications and Web pages, the Place Lab developer's toolkit is freely available online. The Place Lab homepage also offers the Global WiFi Positioning Database for download and provides directions to individuals and groups on the process for submitting hotspot information to the database. At the center of this growing virtual community is an electronic mailing list for discussion of all topics relevant to Place Lab. Intel Research is also hosting Place Lab "boot camps" for potential academic and industry collaborators.
Through open source software and community building, Place Lab will bring ubiquitous computing out of the laboratory and into the real world, moving us closer towards realizing Intel's vision of proactive computing.
More Info:
Place Lab: (WMV file, 22.9 MB) Video features Anthony LaMarca, Yatin Chawathe and Prof. David McDonald, University of Washington. Overview of location enhanced computing.
UbiComp 2003: At the Fifth International Conference on Ubiquitous Computing, October 12-15, 2003, in Seattle, Intel Research in collaboration with UC San Diego demonstrated Place Lab version 1 and launched the community development effort. Conference participants downloaded stand-alone software that provided position sensing for a location-enhanced conference guide. Users interacted with the conference guide through a map of the conference hotel and surrounding area. Drilling down from the top-level guide reveals images and interesting facts and opinions relevant to the user's location.
