Where Fair (Sponsored by uLocate)

Where Fair projects will be selected from research, academia, and yet-to-be-discovered entrepreneurs. The Where Fair complements the Conference’s Exhibit Hall that showcases state-of-the-art systems, apps, and services in the location space.

Sponsored by uLocate:

WHERE Developer Program
Join us Tuesday at 7.30pm to experience live demonstrations of the winners of our Developer Contest for mobile GPS applications at the O’Reilly Where 2.0 Fair. The WHERE Developer Program from uLocate helps developers to rapidly launch location-based services across operators and handsets worldwide, no mobile experience required. 3 of 4 winners of this year’s NAVTEQ LBS Challenge (Mediated Spaces, AEN, and HeyWhatsThat) were built on WHERE.

Some of this year’s Where Fair participants are:

NYTE: New York Talk Exchange Carlo Ratti, Andrea Vaccari

New York Talk Exchange illustrates the global exchange of information in real time by visualizing volumes of long distance telephone and IP (Internet Protocol) data flowing between New York and cities around the world.

New York Talk Exchange illustrates the global exchange of information in real time by visualizing volumes of long distance telephone and IP (Internet Protocol) data flowing between New York and cities around the world. In an information age, telecommunications such as the Internet and the telephone bind people across space by eviscerating the constraints of distance. To reveal the relationships that New Yorkers have with the rest of the world, New York Talk Exchange asks: How does the city of New York connect to other cities? With which cities does New York have the strongest ties and how do these relationships shift with time? How does the rest of the world reach into the neighborhoods of New York?

Novel Applications based on the Locationware Platform PlaceEngine Atsushi Shionozaki

PlaceEngine enabled demos that provoke user interactions based on location are presented. PlaceEngine is locationware that estimates users’ location via wireless LAN signals and is especially effective indoors. Users can use PlaceEngine enabled Skype and SNS systems at Where2.0 to automatically exchange presense information with location to locate and communicate with friends who are nearyby.

PlaceEngine is a locationware platform that estimates the location of a device using wireless LAN signals. PlaceEngine can be used to augment GPS technology and in addition can be used in indoor and underground situations. PlaceEngine supports a simple API to make any application or web service location-aware with minimal effort. Location-enabled services that filter and display nearby venues, such as restaurants, stores, and train stations are some of the examples released in Japan in cooperation with our business partners. In addition, personal navigation game titles for Sony’s PSP have been released in the Japanese market. Finally, Sony’s DSC-G1, a digital camera equipped with wireless LAN supports a firmware upgrade to automatically geocode JPEG photos with PlaceEngine. At Where2.0, demo applications that fully exploit our locationware platform PlaceEngine will be presented. Extensions to Skype and SNS systems make it possible for users to convey presense information with current location information. Novel ways of conveying this information have been implemented so that users can select privacy settings accordingly.

Mobility Intelligence: From Trace to Profit and Efficiency Liang Liu

The project aims at better understanding about the demand and supply of taxies—to greatly enhance the operation of taxi companies and increase income.

In recent years, the massive use of positioning systems has symbolized the emergence of location-based services. This market success creates the opportunity to learn urban activity patterns in order to improve human’s ability on his move, namely, mobility intelligence. In this demo, we describe our approach to enhance taxi drivers’ intelligence. First, we calculate the spatial-temporal distribution of taxies to infer the demand distribution of the crowd, and we use the data to describe the activity attraction of the determined area, such are CBD, railway station, and night clubs. Second, we classify the taxi drivers by their income and do a further evaluation of seniors and juniors to find out why seniors earn more than juniors. We are also using an ethno-methodological approach to study the different ways taxi drivers operate in the city and analyzing the role of context in this dynamic, namely, where and when a driver operates according to the event lists and the surrounding environment. We are currently collecting data from 3000 taxi drivers’ GPS trace augmented by interview with the managers of taxi companies. The study concentrates on the taxi drivers of the city of Shenzhen, China. This community consists of people from different provinces in China with different educational and cultural backgrounds. As the result, we feed back the analysis output to the taxi companies and the drivers. Revenue survey shows that the suggestion really works. The taxi drivers get more money with less cost.

Wi-Fi Geographies Paul Torrens

Despite their potential to revolutionize urban geography, the space-time properties of Wi-Fi-enabled urban infrastructure and the ubiquitous ambient network infrastructure of urban data clouds it supports have been given only cursory attention. This presentation will present a scheme for mining Wi-Fi clouds and analyzing and visualizing their geographies.

Analog wireless data have coursed through our cities for almost 100 years. In recent decades, digital data have also hitched a ride on the airwaves, blanketing our cities in an urban data cloud. The clouds of wireless data that envelop our cities have taken on a newly disruptive relevance, however, as new technologies based on Wi-Fi infiltrated the airwaves, untethering internet users from their wired desktop machines and delivering network resources to moving vehicles, cell phones, and handheld game consoles. Newly ubiquitous urban sensor webs rely on Wi-Fi as ambient network infrastructure. We have, simultaneously, entered into a brave new world where identity thieves can pluck data from your home network from a mile away, where the business model for mobile telephony is being challenged by VoIP on impromptu networks, and where computer viruses that spread through the air like influenza are no longer the domain of science fiction. The geography of Wi-Fi networks is of growing significance. Yet, examination of the space of Wi-Fi poses problems as wireless data traffic is invisible to the eye and its underlying apparatus is largely unregulated, open source, and cheap to deploy, and sits hidden behind closed doors, veiled to traditional geographic inquiry. This presentation will introduce a scheme for detecting, analyzing, and visualizing Wi-Fi infrastructure and transmissions, focusing on Wi-Fi signals, spectrum-space, and security, commercial penetration and public use, access point location and crowding, relationships between Wi-Fi and urban design, the digital divide, and last-mile issues.

Inclusive Development Wendy Brawer, Thomas Turnbull

Are the tools we are creating helping humanity see itself as part of the web of life, or isolating us at a time when each person needs to be involved in assuring a more sustainable future? How do we include the marginalized, the elders, the one laptop kids, in our collaborations? We’ll use the experience behind the Green Map movement as a jumping off point for this discussion.

Now in over 50 countries, Green Map System’s evolution since 1995 includes development of a universal iconography for maps and erring on the simpler side to keep everything accessible and adaptable for local communities as they chart the full range of green living, nature, social, and cultural sites on hundreds of locally published Green Maps. Encouraging diverse participation that counters climate change, supports vibrant biodiversity, and addresses local social and cultural challenges, each Green Map is a guide and inventory, an authentic expression of community character/change and a perception-changing landscape of hope. Moving from tool and exchange development to creating one Global Green Map that merges these local sites, routes and resources for sustainable living with those researched and contributed by the public and content partners in 2008 changes our dynamic. How can Where 2.0 impact this multilingual, multiformat locative guide/archive’s development and usefulness in all parts of the world? What can new collaborations learn from our history? And how can all our work contribute to a healthier, more vibrant future for all, forever?

HyperCities: Building the First Web 3.0 Learning Platform Yoh Kawano

HyperCities are content rich, GIS-based social-educational platforms for time-traveling to the great cities of the world. Using KML with an innovative interface and database that allows users to drill down, mark up, search, and network through time and space, HyperCities make the past and the future come alive.

Built out of and on top of real cities, “HyperCities” is a revolutionary learning platform that augments the space and time of the physical world with the information web and renders the experience of the World Wide Web geographic and temporal. A HyperCity is a real city overlaid with its geo-temporal information, ranging from its architectural and urban history to family genealogies and the stories of the people and diverse communities who live and lived there. Our first HyperCities are Los Angeles, Berlin, Lima, and Rome. As a platform that reaches deeply into archival collections and aggregates content across the Web, HyperCities not only transforms how information is produced, stored, retrieved, shared, repurposed, and experienced but also transforms how human beings interact with information and one another in space and time. The project asks some of the most fundamental learning questions: Where are you from? What used to be here? What happened here in the past? Born out of Web 2.0 social technologies, HyperCities represents a radically new educational environment that links generations and knowledge communities, mobilizing an array of new technologies (from GPS-enabled cell phones to GIS mapping tools and geo-temporal databases) to pioneer a truly participatory, open-ended learning ecology grounded in the space and time of the real world. By connecting digital information with the physical world, HyperCities aims to become the first learning platform for supporting the revolution of Web 3.0, the birth of the geo-temporal human Web. At the Where Fair, we will showcase the Web 3.0 urban planning behind the newest HyperCities. Users will navigate through monstrously large geo-temporal oral histories and photographic archives of Los Angeles, join a three-dimensional archaeological expedition in Ancient Rome, explore the cartographic layering of geo-referenced maps in Berlin, and choose between alternate architectural futures in Lima.

Location-based Learning: the city as your playground Ronald Lenz

How can a city be transformed into a learning environment? How can the cities rich culture and history be combined with mobile media, narrative structures and game-play into an educational location-based experience? In search for answers foundation Waag Society, a Dutch medialab, develops new ways for students to create their own forms of urban play.

Mapping Philadelphia History: How geographic technologies enhance access to digitized archival collections Robert Cheetham, Megan Heckert

PhillyHistory.org is a web-based system for geographic search, display and management of historic photos from Philadelphia’s City Archives. The unique combination of digital asset management with conventional GIS software, RSS, GeoRSS, KML, e-commerce capabilities, and mobile access make PhillyHistory a unique and valuable tool for connecting Philadelphia’s past and present through geography.

Augmented Reality Helicopter Demo Tom Churchill

The Earthscape Augmented Reality System (ARS) is a product for aerial first responders and military tactical control officers that dramatically improves situational awareness. With the touch of a button, live Forward Looking Infrared (FLIR) video can be overlaid with computer-generated mapping data—showing street names, parcel address and ownership information, and flight hazards such as radio towers. With a touch of another button, the operators can view a synthetically generated image using satellite or aerial imagery for instances in which the on-board camera isn’t adequate.

Path Intelligence Crowd Visualization Toby Oliver, Sharon Biggar

Path Intelligence has developed the first system ever for monitoring foot traffic in public places by observing anonymous transmissions from cell phones. Path Intelligence’s first product – FootPath - allows retail stores, mall managers/owners, airport and railway station managers, exhibition centres, art galleries and museums to understand the way that their customers or passengers flow through their centre. Future developments are in progress to allow Path Intelligence to provide another level of information for Location Based Services.

Sparky 2.0 Marque Cornblatt

Sparky was originally made from materials found while dumpster diving and at garage sales. Sparky 2.0 uses the MAKE controller board and Skype’s free video chat and is completely controllable via computer anywhere in the world. Autonomous Telepresence (or AT) is a term coined to describe the emerging field of research that combines remote sensing and telepresence, social networking, and human interaction. These elements together enable an entirely new and unique form of human/machine hybrid –- the video chat rover. Over the past few years, AT has emerged as a useful method for human interaction, and is already beginning to help connect people in hospitals, museums, corporations, and distance learning environments. Marque Cornblatt - The Sparky Project

OpenGeo Stack Demos: GeoServer, GeoWebCache and OpenLayers in action Chris Holmes

The OpenGeo.org crew will show off a few different demos highlighting various aspects of the best open source standards-based software stack. At the center is GeoServer, GeoWebCache, and OpenLayers, demoing bleeding edge features like wiki-map editing, crawlability by Google’s Geo Search, easy, high performance overlays of your data on commercial providers, and more.

Celestia: Mapping the Universe in Four Dimensions Chris Laurel

Celestia is an open source application for visualizing the universe across scales ranging from human-sized to galactic. Users can smoothly zoom out from the Earth’s surface to distant galaxies and set the simulation time to observe the universe in the past, present or future. Since the project began in 2001, contributors have continued to adapt more and more data to include in Celestia’s model of the universe. Celestia has gained popularity among educators, who use it to demonstrate a variety of astronomical phenomena and convey a sense of humanity’s place in the universe. The program is accurate enough that it is also used within space agencies for mission visualization.