Adam Greenfield vs El Mundo

It's not very common that a personality in the field of Ubiquitous Computing such as Adam Greenfield, that became widely popular with his book "Everyware: the dawning age of ubiquitous computing", appears in a Spanish mass media newspaper such as El Mundo. He was interviewed last Sunday as he took part in the Urban Labs meetings, organized by the citilab of Cornellà (Barcelona, Spain).

The interview from El Mundo quotes Adam saying:

what users ask has nothing to do with what they need

It seems that Adam is not very happy with how the interview got its final form, and has created a blog entry in which completely rejects the result:

A request to my Spanish-speaking readers: please disregard utterly the interview with me that appears in today’s El Mundo of Spain. It’s almost impossible for me to discern anything resembling my own sentiments among its truncations, paraphrases, elisions and outright inventions.

One of the few times, a Spanish newspaper focus on this area and they do it wrongly as to this extent....

Immaterials: the RFID aura

This video and experiment called Immaterials from Timo Arnall has become very popular between the Internet of Things and proximity interaction communities in the last weeks. It tries to decribe the interactive properties of RFID by visualizing the activation area of RFID readers and antennas with long-exposure photographs.

The results are not only aesthetically impressive, but a very good learning material in order to understand how RFID fields work.

First International Workshop on the Web of Things (WoT 2010)

A successful approach to the Internet of Things is the so called Web of Things, a concept promoted by Vlad Trifa and Dominique Guinard that focus on the use of Web technologies, particularly RESTful services and mashups, to build the IoT.

The news is that they are organizing the First International Workshop on the Web of Things that will be held in conjunction with PerCom 2010 in Mannheim (Germany) from March 29th to April 2nd 2010. I guess some nice stuff and an enthusiastic community will come out from this event!

My presentation on the Internet of Things at Tweakfest

Last month I was invited to Tweakfest to share my vision of the Internet of Things. It was a very exciting event with a nice mix of digital artists and technologists. Among the other invited speakers, I liked the presentations by Ian Pearson (futurologist!?) and Nam Do (co-founder of Emotiv Systems), who made a presentation of the EPOC.

For those of you interested, this was my presentation titled "Ambient Intelligence and the Internet of Things":

The Real-Time Web: a new candidate for Web 3.0?

The news website ReadWriteWeb.com is (too) strongly promoting a concept called Real-Time Web as the new "promised land" for all those who still think that there is a Web 3.0 after Web 2.0.

It is funny because I have seen how they have been generating a lot of buzz with this term, and how those news have been consistently linked from other websites. You may want a take a look at these two articles:

• Sorry Google, You Missed the Real-Time Web! (16/01/2009)
• Introduction to the Real-Time Web (12/05/2009)

Now, let's look at this chart:

This is the evolution in terms of Google search of the terms "Internet of Things" (red line) and "Real-Time Web" (blue line) during the last 12 months. Two surprises:

1. "Real-Time Web" started to be relevant at the end of August (about 1 month ago), where previously there was nothing. Probably it is because the promotion the guys from ReadWriteWeb.com are doing, in order to publicize their "ReadWrite Real-Time Web Summit", which brings me to the conclusion that on-line marketing, and the creation of "semi-artificial" concepts is at its best.
2. The increase of the previous term is parallel with the raise of (my beloved) "Internet of Things". To which extent does that correspond to the fact that real world objects may be major actors in the Real-Time Web? (therefore, the term "Internet of Things" has also appeared in "Real-Time Web" articles).

My bet is that this sharp raise corresponds to the First International Workshop on the Web of Things (WoT 2010) to take place in Mannheim (Germany) in March 2010.

Finally, for those of you searching for Web 3.0, you may want to take a look at Web Squared...

One of the best presentations on the Internet of Things/Spimes

Singularity University Spime Design Workshop

View more documents from David Orban.

PhD finished! A thesis on Ambient Intelligence

Note: this entry is not new. It has been imported from my old blog and included here in order to have it as reference.
At last! Almost a month ago, on June 12^th, I received my PhD degree after succesfully passing the PhD exam. The title of my dissertation was "A Reactive Behavioural Model for Context-Aware Semantic Devices".

For those of you interested, this is an excerpt from the abstract:

In this thesis, we propose a model for knowledge sharing between devices and for representing their behaviour in a way that promotes autonomous context-aware reactivity. In our approach, we bring Semantic Web technologies to the Ubiquitous Computing world in order to provide the means for collaboratively transforming data into knowledge and enabling intelligent reasoning mechanisms.

The model leads to a decentralised architecture where devices spontaneously discover each other, share context information, perform reasoning and adapt their behaviour dynamically in order to create a feel for Ambient Intelligence in the environment. In order to validate our approach we have identified some evaluation criteria and developed a number of prototypes that were deployed in experimental scenarios.

The results of our research may contribute to pave the way for a new wave of social digital objects that we denominate semantic devices.

The full version can be downloaded here:

• My PhD Thesis (normal quality)
• My PhD Thesis (high quality)