Monday, June 22. 2009The Tree MuseumNote: This is a guest post by Nicola Twilley.
At the northern end of the Concourse, at 206th St, there's a huge chunk of rock between two buildings; it's like the side of a cliff. I had to give the tree there, No. 95, to Sid Horenstein, a geologist who recently retired from the American Museum of Natural History. He's able to use the rock outcrop to explain the story of what the Concourse lies above—it was built on a ridge and that's one of the main reasons the street was constructed here, because it was elevated and offered spectacular views of the countryside all around. And Tree No. 45, a Little Leaf Linden, has a story told by Patricia Foody, a 95-year-old Bronxite. She remembers her dad bringing her for a walk to the Concourse to visit his brother's tree in just this location—it was one of the original maples, and many of them had plaques for soldiers who had died in World War I. Some of the stories come from people who work with the trees directly: Jennifer Greenfeld, director of Street Tree Planting for the Parks and Recreation department, uses No. 66, a Chinese Elm, to provide an overview of street trees throughout New York City and the policy battles they sometimes cause. Barbara Barnes, a landscape architect also with the Parks department, puts her tree in the context of the historic street tree canopy project she's working on, to replant Joyce Kilmer and Franz Sigel parks as they were originally laid out.
Perhaps more importantly, Holten's Tree Museum (which she describes as "practically invisible—it's part of the urban fabric") demonstrates an intriguing way to re-imagine the landscape: finding ways to make the hidden layers and connections of a street's story visible (or audible) might ultimately be as, if not more, important than installing a new swing set in the park. ----- Via BLDBLOG Personal comment:
Les arbres comme "disque dur" et "capteurs" d'information climatiques. Un des partcipants pour le concours "Climate Clock - San Jose" s'était servi d'arbres en tant que "capteurs durables" (l'installation devant servir une centaine d'années). S'était une approche intéressante. Ici, le mélnage de télécommunications (appeler les arbres), de développement durable, de monitoring et de narration (une histoire par arbre) est également une approche suprenante et intéressante. Cell Phones That Listen and LearnNew software tracks a user's behavior by monitoring everyday sounds.
By Kristina Grifantini
Now a group at Dartmouth College, in Hanover, NH, has created software that uses the microphone on a cell phone to track and interpret a user's situation. The software, called SoundSense, picks up sounds and tries to classify them into certain categories. In contrast to similar software developed previously, SoundSense can be trained by the user to recognize completely unfamiliar sounds, and it also runs entirely on the device. SoundSense automatically classifies sounds as "voice," "music," or "ambient noise." If a sound is repeated often enough or for long enough, SoundSense gives it a high "sound rank" and asks the user to confirm that it is significant and offers the option to label the sound. The Dartmouth team focused on monitoring sound because every phone has a microphone and because GPS doesn't work well indoors, while accelerometers provide only limited information. "When we think about sounds, we don't typically think that they can also represent a location that has a unique signature," says Andrew Campbell, an associate professor of computer science at Dartmouth and a lead researcher on the project. The researchers made sure the program is small, so that it doesn't use too much power. To address privacy concerns, they designed SoundSense so that information is not removed from the device for processing. Additionally, the program itself doesn't store raw audio clips. A user can also tell the software to ignore any sounds deemed off limits. In testing, the SoundSense software was able to correctly determine when the user was in a particular coffee shop, walking outside, brushing her teeth, cycling, and driving in the car. It also picked up the noise of an ATM machine and a fan in a particular room. The results of the experiments will be presented this week at the MobiSys 2009 conference, in Krakow, Poland. "The SoundSense system is our first step in building a system that can learn [user behavior] on the go," says Tanzeem Choudhury, an assistant professor at Dartmouth who was also involved in the project and TR35 winner. Choudhury says that enabling the software to learn to recognize new sounds will be essential for practical applications. "A system that can recognize sounds in a person's life can be used to search for others who have the same preferences," she says. Using sounds to classify events can give users feedback on their daily activities for health or time-management applications, she adds. Kurt Partridge, a researcher at Palo Alto Research Center, who has also created cell-phone software that tracks behavior, believes that the SoundSense project exploits an underused resource. "I don't think the field has really realized both how little power audio-based activity-sensing takes, and how informative it can be," Partridge says. "Audio can distinguish so many more activities [and] adds a social aspect to contextual sensing that's not possible otherwise." Dan Ellis, an associate professor at Columbia University, who has researched the use of continuous audio recordings, says that this type of "life logging" could someday be used as routinely as the outbox in an e-mail application. "Maybe you don't look at your outbox very often, but given the right tools to quickly find what you're looking for, it's very convenient to keep a record of every e-mail you're ever sent," he says. "A near-continuous, audio-based record collected by a personal device could be similarly desirable." Copyright Technology Review 2009. ----- Personal comment: On a déjà posté quelques articles qui touchent au "reality mining" ainsi qu'au monitoring d'informations par les téléphones (notamment pour de meilleurs réveils matin ou pour la santé). Ici aussi un piste de recherche qui poursuit son chemin.
Posted by Patrick Keller
in Science & technology
at
13:24
Defined tags for this entry: mobile, mobility, monitoring, research, science & technology, sound, surveillance
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