Archive for the ‘Projects’ Category

Our SocioPatterns project is covered in an article on ScienceMAG.

Marco Quaggiotto and myself have been preparing an artscience project called Practice Mapping. The first chapter of this project will take place during the Interactivos? Process as Paradigm workshop co-organized by LABoral and Medialab-Prado. You can read more about this project on www.practicemapping.org.

Epidemic Planet poster

I am currently working on the next version of the Epidemic Planet installation, which will be exhibited at the Edinburgh International Science Festival in collaboration with the British Society for Immunology. In this new version, visitors will observe the evolution of the 2009 H1N1 influenza pandemic since its early origin in Mexico, and will discover how the air traffic and commuting flows determined the spreading patterns of the flu worldwide, and how different intervention scenarios could have influenced this spreading. For more information see this post on gleamviz.org.

We just published a new post on sociopatterns.org about our Live Social Semantics experiment. I created the following movie included in this post. It provides an overview of the user-facing functionality involved in the Live Social Semantics project, a collaboration between the SocioPatterns project and the University of Southampton partners in the TAGora project.

The Live Social Semantics project integrates real-time face-to-face social interaction detection using active RFID, with linked data from the semantic web, and data for social networking sites. This system was deployed at two conferences during the spring of 2009. This movie includes excerpts from the real-time visualisation during the Hypertext’09 conference and the online social network browsing tool.

This week’s edition of Science magazine contains this article by John Bohannon about our SocioPatterns experiment at the Infectious exhibition in the Science Gallery in Dublin.

Spreading The Flu, Science Magazine, May 22, 2009

This is another interview with yours truly recorded during the hectic opening of the Infectious exhibition in the Science Gallery in Dublin. This interview is about the Epidemic Planet visualization application I developed in the context of the GLEaMviz project.

This is an interview with Ciro and myself on our deployment of SocioPatterns at the Infectious exhibition at the Science Gallery in Dublin. Notice Ciro’s dramaticity and my overt enthusiasm 😉

Two weeks ago we deployed our most recent SocioPatterns experiment at the Infectious exhibition at the Science Gallery in Dublin. For this particular deployment we added a new feature to the RFID tags’ firmware that enables us to run live simulations on the spreading of infections among the tag wearing visitors of the exhibition.

All visitors are given a SocioPatterns tag.

We were particularly interested in doing so because the nature of the exhibition setting, i.e. new visitors continuously enter, stay a while and then leave the exhibition, is an interesting approximation of the kind of high-flow setting encountered in e.g. train stations and air-ports. It should be clear that it would be extremely difficult to collect the same kind of highly detailed data on the social interactions and infectious spreading in actual train stations or airports.

So far close to ten thousand visitors have visited the exhibition and we have collected detailed data on their social interactions and the spreading of the simulated infection. It goes without saying that we are very exited about this.

Learn more about this deployment on this blog post on SocioPatterns.org.

Another project I have been involved in at ISI is the GLEaMviz project, in which I’m primarily dealing with visualization and dissemination. I have for instance developed the Epidemic Planet visualization currently on display at the Infectious exhibition in the Trinity College Science Gallery in Dublin. You can read a bit more about this exhibit on this blog post. This visualization is a multi-window Adobe Air app. The movies are pre-rended in another Adobe Air app, which is the actual GLEaMviz app.

The GLEaMviz app provides a multi-scale temporal visualization of the data produced by the GLEaM modeling system. The app provides an interactive interfacing mode and can also export frames, one for each timestep, which can then be compiled in a movie. I plan to provide more info, screenshots, and movies, but I’m currently very busy with the Mexican Flu spread projections reporting on gleamviz.org.

Since my move to the ISI Foundation in Torino, I have been busy setting up a couple of exciting projects. One of these projects is SocioPatterns. It involves active RFID tags which we use to sense social interactions, and real-time visualizations that represent those interactions.