Lars Erik to Yahoo! Labs

Finally a public note on some very big news! From January 1, Lars Erik Holmquist is moving to sunny California to set up a group at Yahoo! Labs in Santa Clara. Lots of luck - we're expecting lots of surfin' and sunscreen in your future!
 
In the mean time, Henriette Cramer has taken over as project leader for both Future App Labs projects, Lirec and Mobile 2.0, so direct any questions about the project and collaborations her way.

New master student: Miguel!

He's been here for a while now, so it's time for an announcement: Miguel Pais is our new master student!

Miguel (on the left, hidden behind his laptop) is working with Nao, the robot, within the Lirec project. Together with our project partners at INESD-ID in Portugal Miguel will be exploring how robots' social cues can mediate people's interactions with each other.

Columbus in Personal Ubiquitous Computing

A paper entitled Mobile exploration of geotagged photographs, authored by Mattias Rost, Henriette Cramer, and Lars Erik Holmquist, published in Personal Ubiquitous Computing is now available online through the following SpringerLink.

Abstract:

Columbus is a mobile application that lets users explore their surroundings through geotagged photographs, presented to them at the location they were taken. By moving around the physical world, the user unlocks photographs and gets to see and experience them in unison with their location. During two consecutive field trials, we investigated how the application was used and experienced and how photographs and locations are explored together. We found that previous experience with the surroundings people was exploring affected how they experienced the localized content. We report on the system’s design and implementation, the trials as well as resulting insights that can be used by other developers of locative media applications.

We'll be at MobileHCI 2011 in Stockholm

We will naturally be at MobileHCI 2011 starting in two weeks from now. MobileHCI will be held i Stockholm, Sweden, and is organized by Mobile Life Centre - the very same centre where we are based! We are all thus very involved in the organization, and will personally make sure it will be an outstanding conference for all.

Besides taking part in the organization, we will also be presenting. On wednesday during the first paper session in Riddarsalen, Henriette Cramer will present the paper 'Performing a Check-in: Emerging Practices, Norms and ‘Conflicts’ in Location-sharing Using Foursquare' , by herself, Mattias Rost, and Lars Erik Holmquist.

Another, more unconventional presentation takes place after the conference dinner at Munchenbryggeriet, where Lars Erik will be DJ:ing under his alias Got To Have Pop.

You will also see us throughout the conference during various other things, but do not hesitate say hi!

2nd workshop on Research in the Large at UbiComp'11

We're organizing a 2nd edition of our 'Research in the Large' workshop at UbiComp 2011 on September 18th in Beijing. The workshops will deal with the shared challenges and practical strategies to deal with the challenges inherent to wide deployment and dealing with large-scale data sets. More information at the workshop page.

Organizers: Henriette Cramer, Mattias Rost (Mobile Life/SICS), Frank Bentley (Motorola Research) and David Ayman Shamma (Yahoo!).

SICS Open House

FAL is participating in the SICS open house in Kista. We are showing many demonstrations including Pic-In, SubwayArt, Mobile Mash-ups and the Flower Wall (above). Henriette Cramer talks about studies of emergent location-sharing practices and location mash-ups.

We are in the semi-final of the Ericsson Application Awards

Two applications, developed by Mobile 2.0, were selected for the semi-final of the Ericsson Application Awards (EAA). Both of our submissions are based on recent work on mobile image recognition.

In the EAA student category we entered our application "MobileArt" in the competition. With MobileArt users can receive information about art pieces in the Stockholm subway by just potining the mobile phone camera at them.

The application "Pic-In" entered in the EAA company competition is a tool for users of location-sharing service foursquare. The application can recognize places based on photos. Users can now share a location by - you guessed it - taking a photo of it.

The winners of the semi-final will be announced at May 28th, so stay tuned for further announcements.

If you want to see, how our applications work, just have a look at the videos below.