Ubiquitous Information

Google has made a new "privacy announcement" (outlined here in the Washington Post) stating that users can now expect to have data about their usage of all Google products tracked. Previously, a user's search usage and a user's usage of other Google products would have been tracked separately. Now, Google is stating that the data collected from using the separate Google products (search, GMail, YouTube, ...) will be aggregated to yield a better pool of information. Google is not giving users the ability to opt out of this data collection.

What benefit does this have for Google? What benefit does this have for the user? What drawbacks might it have for both?

Despite sensationalistic articles or headlines, data collection is everywhere; it is ubiquitous. What kind of data might Amazon collect about a user, for instance? When one speaks of ubiquitous computing, though, one usually means the computers and the network being everywhere rather than the data collection. Smart phones are a sign that computers are becoming ubiquitous since one can be online with them almost anywhere or anytime. Another way in which computers can be ubiquitous is in the field of sensor informatics.  Sensors collect data, and when integrated with a computer, they can store this data or transmit it over a network. If sensors are ubiquitous, they will be sensors everywhere. What applications of this can you think of? Using ubiquitous hardware to solve problems with this computing power is informatics--sensor informatics. Wired has one sample application which may be viable soon.

Apple for the Teacher

Last Thursday, Apple announced it was making available new textbook creation and consuming tools called Engage and iBooks 2, respectively. By the next day, the Internet was up in arms about one clause restricting the possible uses of the software. What do we think?

Also, if you look at the Tech Blog at the L.A. Times, you'll note in the article after the one about Apple that online advertising it at an all-time high.

The Web is Turned Off Today

Taking a quick look at Google or Wikipedia shows us that all is not well on the web today. Other key sites and many smaller one are also deliberately disabled or showing a different logo today in protest.

These protests are in response to the proposed Protect Intellectual Property Act (PIPA) and the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) legislation before Congress. Much of the opposition to this legislation centers on the overwhelming amount of control that the acts give to copyright holders and the possibly unpredictable effects this could have on the development of the Internet.

Leaving aside ethics debates for now, what do we do if we need a wikipedia article today? Well, we can just access it by Google or by directly knowing the URL, for instance since Wikipedia doesn't seem to have shut down there entire site. It's also a good time to talk about how informatics systems catalog the web for us. Google maintains cached copies (which is useful for research, but how useful is it for your online privacy?) and there is something called the Wayback Machine whose very purpose is to catalog how websites change over time. In each of these cases, a vast, vast amount of data in a data warehouse is holding this information until we ask for it. It has also processed this information to make searching over it possible in the first place.

Finally, here is an interview with Conrad Wolfram on the Knowledge Economy. Conrad is the brother of Stephen Wolfram, who created the software Mathematica. Wolfram Research, his company, is also the driving force behind the natural search engine Wolfram Alpha. Informatics centers on the interactions between people and technology, and natural search is a way to attempt to enhance these interactions. Another example is through gesture based interfaces which is the subject of a recent LA Times article and something we'll talk more about later this semester. Note the use of the term disruptive innovation.

Welcome to the Spring 2012 Semester of INFO I-101

This blog will serve as our data warehouse for looking at current events and trends in informatics and computing. A good place to start is to look at an article describing what informatics is written for the Association for Computing Machinery magazine: Why an Informatics Degree by D.P. Groth and J.K. MacKie-Mason. This article may be behind a paywall, but it should work on campus.

Informatics is practiced by informaticists or informaticians (it's up to you which one you like best and want to use), and it is the application of computing and information technology for use in other fields such as biology, chemistry, business, sociology, or psychology, to name just a few. Informatics focuses on three things: the people, the technology, and the information involved. To be a successful informaticist, one must bring together skills from many areas.

One example of an informatics system was in the NY Times yesterday: Medical students are using a 3D informatics system to supplement learning of anatomy, which usually involves dissecting cadavers. This would be an example of medical informatics, but most people use medical or "health informatics" most commonly to refer to issues associated with medical record keeping. In that most commonly-used definition, there is a heavy focus on the information associated with patients. In the example here, informatics is being used to hopefully improve a future doctor's training.

Finally, here is one example of a "feud" between Twitter and Google indicating that information is indeed something valuable.