Visitors to Scotland will be the first in the world to use technology that guides visitors to tourist attractions by linking their smartphones to the registration numbers on taxis. The innovative project is a first step in what could become an “internet on cars”, with taxis effectively becoming mobile social media sites, accessed by phone via their licence plates.

Call for papers:
Space-time knowledge in social networks: a new paradigm for transport geography?

We would like to encourage submissions to the following Call for Papers for the 2013 RGS conference. This will take place in London from Wednesday 28 to Friday 30 August 2013. Also please note the opportunities for postgraduates.

Best regards,
Janet Dickinson and Chris Speed

Space-time knowledge in social networks: a new paradigm for transport geography?

Rapid developments in mobile technology together with widespread public adoption have brought about new socio-technological practices with implications for transport geography. Much has been said about the decoupling of the links between activity, place and time, and the re-negotiated scheduling of meetings on the go. There have been claims within geography and sociology that this changes everything. However, relatively little work has been conducted in the field of transport geography, yet this is an area possibly most impacted and most subject to change due to new space-time practices that alter our understanding of the movement of people and objects. For example, real-time systems, based around the ubiquity of mobile devices, can visualise the position of users relative to other people in their social network, places, transport resources (buses, cars, cycles) and even the things they need. Ideas around the Internet of things are extending these capabilities beyond people to communication and knowledge generation by moving objects such as cars. Transport geographers are well placed to exploit emergent socio-technological practice to develop solutions to a variety of transport problems, be that access for the ageing population or reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

This session aims to bring together researchers to explore how transport geography might be changing and whether there is a new paradigm. Submissions are invited that address questions related to what has changed, what might change or whether the impact is really minimal. Submissions may address a variety of issues such as: new methodological considerations; practice based research; conceptual or theoretical issues; new solutions to transport problems; interdisciplinary contexts.

While the session seeks contributions in the traditional paper format, it also seeks to encourage other forms of audience engagement such as demos, audience participation activities and discussion.

Please submit a title and abstract of up to 250 words to Janet Dickinson (Bournemouth University, jdickinson@bournemouth.ac.uk) and Chris Speed (Edinburgh University, c.speed@ed.ac.uk ) by 28th January 2013.

Eligible author presenters are encouraged to submit a paper for the Postgraduate Paper Prize, which will be sponsored by Emerald Publishing in 2013. There is a first prize of £100, and a runner-up prize of a book chosen from the Emerald transport titles.

To enter for the prize, a full paper of not more than 6000 words should be submitted to the Secretary of the TGRG (Kate Pangbourne, k.pangbourne@abdn.ac.uk) no later than 5pm on the Friday of the week prior to the conference.

Eligibility for Postgraduate Prize:
Eligibility is restricted to post-graduate students (or those who have had their viva within six months of the date of the conference) presenting their own work. There is a presumption that the papers ought to be sole authored.

Dr Janet Dickinson
School of Tourism
Bournemouth University
Talbot Campus
Poole
BH12 5BB
Tel: +44 (0)1202 965853
www.sixthsensetransport.com

Dr. Chris Speed
Reader in Digital Spaces
Edinburgh College of Art
University of Edinburgh
Lauriston Place
Edinburgh EH39DF
M: 07917 225815
T: 0131 6515747
Twitter: @chrisspeed
W: http://www.chrisspeed.net

These storyboards introduce a creative approach to conceiving cars as data packets through the use of their license registration plate and offering a playful platform that allows users to engage with them as though they were part of social media. The cartoons evoke the concept of the Internet of Things and suggests that a barrier exists that is preventing the general public from conceiving cars as being part of a similar network. The team propose that existing tagging technologies such as barcodes and RFID tags that support objects to be tracked through the internet are not being transferred to cars to offer the same capabilities. The comics present visions for a platform that leverages the unique identifying properties of car registration plates and introduces tourist contexts in which people will be able to ‘play’ with cars as they might data through games, messaging services, and visualisations.

Project strand   – innovating ‘Next Generation’ Walking School Buses
Background to concept

The rise in the number of ‘home to school’ journeys being taken by car is thought to be at least partially attributable to increased parental perception of risks on route (e.g. ONS, 2010). In the UK, 43% of pupils currently travel to primary school by car compared to 38% in 1995/7 (NTS, 2010). This trend is recognised as contributing to school gate congestion, compromised child health (e.g. child pedestrian road casualties; poor air quality outside schools; obesity etc). Crucially, 200 kg carbon per year is estimated for making five trips of 1.2 miles during term time. These factors have prompted efforts to identify safe alternatives.  Although authorities have implemented travel plans in partnership with schools (Baslington, 2008), ‘collective’ modes of active transportation, including walking school buses have received less attention.

UK commute patterns are dominated by single car occupancy and in 2009, 85% of commuter car journeys were single occupancy.  It was estimated that the greenhouse gas footprint for English schools in 2006 was 9.4 million tons of carbon dioxide equivalent and 16% of that came from school transport.  This project investigates how behaviour change in transport practices can be facilitated by the formation of a new transport network based on the principles of social networking.

What is being developed?

An open and secure platform will be created based around the smart phone that will enable people to better visualize the activity of other people and things relative to their own immediate and future movements.  At the University of Salford, Dr Sarah Norgate and Dr Liz Smith are working with partners in education to develop a new generation of ‘Walking School Bus’ (WSB) using the new platform.

What is a ‘Next Generation WSB?

The concept involves using the tracking ability in Smart phones to give the WSB new temporal visibility to users and potential users (parents, children, and walking bus facilitators) to optimise fluidity across scheduling boundaries between the morning school run and morning work start times, reducing the barriers to ‘punctuality’ for school start time reported previously by WSB coordinators and head teachers in traditional style WSB studies. The design and delivery of the concept requires input from feedback from a variety of stakeholders (e.g. walking school bus coordinators, headteachers, road safety teams, school travel planners, etc). The coordinator of the WSB would continually share their position and the 6th Sense platform would allow parents (and involving children where appropriate) to visualise the WSB’s current position and also its predicted arrival time at their pick-up point through their 6^th Sense Transport Smartphone app.

Next steps

The project takes place until January 2014.The decisions around the recruitment of primary schools for the user testing and  intervention trials will be informed partially by congestion and school trends in 5-year carbon reduction data as well as schools identifying their ‘readiness’ for change. Parents’ planning behaviours around decision making on the school run will be related to individual time typologies, further informing the design of the interface. In the future, we hope to explore ways to work with key influencers in the media who have target audiences with children and families to ‘sell’ the concept to the public including tomorrow’s commuters.   The new WSBs will be designed with stakeholders (local authorities, parents, schools etc) and we hope to use social marketing to encourage uptake.

The Tourism case study has three primary areas of interest:

1)    Concepts of time and mobility. We aim to better understand how people perceive time in general and if their perception of time changes when they go on holiday. We will examine how different perceptions of time among travellers relate to travel decisions and how better time predictions may affect routine tourist activities.

2)    Collaboration. We aim to evaluate the current level of collaboration (social assistance) at the campsite and assess the scope for adoption of collaborative travel among visitors. Examples of collaborative practices (activities) include:

• Provision of lifts;
• Cooperative shopping for various items (food, drinks, camping gas);
• Cooperative transportation of equipment (e.g. beach gear, BBQ) for fellow tourists;
• Recommendations about local tourism products and services.

In particular, we seek to understand the barriers to social assistance among tourists and explore solutions which might minimise these barriers thus providing more collaborative opportunities to tourists. We will examine how privacy, safety, security and any other issues affect the willingness of travellers to help or get help from others when on holiday. For example, we aim to better understand what personal information tourists are willing to share and with whom, to provide or accept social assistance from fellow travellers.

Examples of collaborative activities tourists can get involved in are as follows - Lift-share, Congestion and Shopping:

The following posts are the storyboards that the team have been using to inform user engagement but also technical development.

What has been interesting is the way that the storyboards offer insight into time based experiences – difficult to articulate without a narrative that includes a series of participants and stakeholders. These perspectives allow users and programmers are able understand the situations in which the Apps are used.

Storyboards were presented at the Digital Economy All Hands Conference, Aberdeen, October 2012 during the Shifting Transport Paradigms: Intelligent Transport Systems and Services (ITSS) Challenge Workshop.

During July members of 6th Sense joined Janet on Tom’s Field.

Tom’s Field is a campsite on the Isle of Purbeck, in Swanage, Dorset, and home of the Sixth Sense Toursim case study.

The vision is simple: to understand how new technology might enable better use of travel resources to reduce the carbon footprint of tourism travel.

To do this we are seeking ways to reveal destination based transport opportunities to tourists in the immediate future. The project uses smartphones and will embed users and their vehicles in a social network based around a Dorset campsite (Tom’s Field Camping near Swanage). Based on the social network and travel prediction, the smartphone will reveal problems, such as congestion or lack of car parking, and suggest opportunities to better use the transport resources available.

July’s visit involved scoping the site and introducing campers to the research project. The visit generated a great deal of excitement as people offered to take our iPhones out for the day and begin gathering GPS and sensor data about their day trips.

Early discussions with campers took place regarding the use of people number plates as a gateway to a social media platform as outlined in our paper: Internet of Cars and our presentation in the same month at the RGS with IBG conference. That explored how the capacity of new mobile technologies is mediating the coordination of activities and altering social and spatial practices and challenging our understanding of the transport network. The papre presentation continued to argue that our concept of the transport system that is governed by clock-time, is not catching up with peoples concepts for social networking. For example, despite representing an extraordinary number of nodes within a system, of the 31,035,791 registered cars on UK roads, very few are actually represented in digital networks. In direct contrast is the precedent of 50 million users of mobile social networking worldwide. Not only does this build and reinforce social ties distributed over time and space, it also permits real-time data streams to inform network participants of new recommendations and the scope to establish new network nodes.

The presentation set out the 6ST platform and app innovation concept and explores how this might serve to anticipate opportunities for connections that are otherwise invisible to current users (e.g. a tangible ‘Internet of cars’). This offers users the potential to re-distribute decision-making processes about travel and offers a critical socio/technical substrate around which new transport habits may emerge. If we provide people with a way to visualise and augment the state of the ‘transport network’, then we might be able to realise more opportunistic and collaborative uses for transport resources and reduce carbon emissions.

and posters began appearing across the site.

The US Supreme Court could soon allow  police to monitor the movements of US mobile phone users without a warrant. Now  that most of us carry sophisticated tracking devices in our pockets, how much  privacy do we have a right to expect?

Millions of us happily invade our own privacy every day on Twitter and
Facebook, sharing personal details with the world and broadcasting our location
in a way previous generations would have found bizarre.

Even those who shy away from social media and new technology in general are
not immune. The most basic mobile phones are in constant contact with the
nearest mast, sending information about the whereabouts of their users to phone
companies, who can later hand that data over to the police, if requested.

At the other end of the spectrum, in the world of smartphones, privacy is
becoming an increasingly outdated concept, argues technology writer Sam Biddle.
What might once have been considered “creepy” and invasive is becoming
normal.

“That line of creepiness is there, but it’s eroding quickly because, frankly,
we are just getting used to it,” says Mr Biddle, a staff writer for
Gizmodo.com.

“Something like (smartphone app) Foursquare, something like Find My Friends,
these things all would have sounded like something from 1984. Now they are fun
and free.

“So I think whatever line there once was is receding very quickly.”

He adds: “The excitement and the novelty of it blinds us to the fact that is
a little weird and maybe, in terms of privacy rights, a little ominous.”

For the smartphone customer “it’s a trade-off, in terms of privacy versus
service,” he says. For the mobile phone company “following you around is just
part of the service”.

Legitimate expectation

There are signs that governments and law enforcement agencies around the
world are taking advantage of this increasingly relaxed attitude towards privacy
to step up surveillance of citizens.

The case currently before the Supreme Court, US vs Jones, hinges on whether
police officers should be allowed to plant GPS tracking devices on suspects’
cars without a warrant.

His legal team argued at a Supreme Court hearing earlier this month that his
Fourth Amendment rights, which are meant to protect US citizens from invasive
searches, were violated.

Lawyers for the Obama administration argued that Jones did not have a
“legitimate expectation of privacy” – the standard legal test in the US for the
past 45 years – because his car was in a public place.

Attaching a tracking device to it was no different to tailing him, which has
always been legal, the government argued.

If the Supreme Court agrees, it could open the door to mass unwarranted
surveillance of suspects using GPS bugs, civil liberties campaigners have
warned.

Open to abuse?

But law enforcement officers no longer have to physically plant a bug on a
suspect’s car or person. In the US, they are increasingly using mobile phone
tracking software.

“Police officers can sit in the comfort of their own stations and use this
technology to watch not just one person, but many people, over long periods of
time,” says Catherine Crump, an attorney for American Civil Liberties Union.

This is far more invasive than traditional surveillance, she argues.

“GPS tracking can actually be quite revealing about who a person is and what
they value. It can show where a person goes to church, whether they are in
therapy, whether they are an outpatient at a medical clinic, whether they go to
a gun range.”

Without police officers being forced to go before a court to obtain a
“probable cause” warrant, the technology is wide open to abuse, the ACLU argues,
and it is hoping that the Supreme Court will ban all warrantless surveillance
when they deliver their verdict in the Jones case.

“I don’t think you have to be a card carrying member of the ACLU to be
concerned about a world in which every citizen of the United States can be
tracked on the whim of a curious police officer, for any reason, or no reason at
all,” says Ms Crump.

But police and prosecutors tend to take a different view.

“If it is a legitimate law enforcement need and there is no time to get a
warrant there should be occasions when you can use a tracking device,” says Ed
Marsico, district attorney for Dauphin County, in Pennsylvania.

Metropolitan police

And the same goes for mobile phone tracking, he says, arguing that there is
little practical difference between a mobile phone company knowing your location
and the local police.

“Most of us have cell phones now. Most of them have some kind of GPS tracking
within them, so Verizon or AT&T already know where you are,” Mr Marsico
tells BBC News.

If the Supreme Court rules against the government it could seriously damage
the ability of police officers to carry out undercover surveillance of suspected
major criminals, he argues.

“Technology has changed. The criminals are using technology to stay one step
ahead of us, so we would like to use some technology to get ahead of them.”

In the UK, the availability of cheap GPS devices, and a mistaken belief that
it was permitted under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act, led to covert
tracking being used by public authorities, including local councils “without
properly considering the application of the legislation,” according
to watchdog the Surveillance Commissioners.

The government issued new guidelines in April 2010, stressing the need to gain permission from senior  officers, who must be convinced it is necessary and proportionate – and not likely to fall foul of Article 8 of the Human Rights Act.

Personal permission from the home secretary is needed to intercept phone
communications. Some 1,682 interception warrants were issued in 2010.

Not the Gestapo

Public authorities can obtain other communications data without the home
secretary’s authority, such as the time, date and location of phone calls. In
2010, 552,550 such requests were made.

The Metropolitan Police has stepped up its surveillance of social media in
recent months, claiming it helped prevent this summer’s riots spreading to
high-profile targets such as the 2012 Olympics site.

But the London force is also reportedly using software that masquerades as a
mobile phone network, allowing it to intercept communications and gather data
about users in a targeted area, such as a demonstration.

Most civil liberties campaigners do not want the police banned from using new
technology and accept that telecoms companies are “not the Gestapo”, as
Catherine Crump puts it.

But, argues the ACLU lawyer: “People should not have to choose between using
new technology, which is becoming increasingly commonplace and hard to live
without, and giving up their privacy.”

Some believe the moment when that choice has to be made has arrived.

Watershed moment

Earlier this month, a US Federal Court in Virginia ordered Twitter to grant
the Justice Department access to private data from the accounts of three
suspected Wikileaks supporters, ruling that they had a “lessened expectation” of
privacy after signing up to the micro blogging site.

Al Girardi, a defence attorney who specialises in internet and telecoms
privacy, sees this, along with the Jones case, as a “watershed” moment.

“You have some very serious decisions happening which basically define you as
having no expectation of privacy with your online provider and yet nobody seems
to be concerned about it,” he says.

“I don’t know if it’s just the Facebook generation but it’s a surprise to me
that there isn’t more resistance.”

Without a major public outcry, or some kind of “scandal” to focus the minds
of politicians and telecoms executives, the erosion of privacy is likely
continue unabated, argues Sam Biddle.

“Barring some kind of very radical, strong legislation, it wouldn’t surprise
me if in 10 years, I know where everyone I know is at all times, in real time,
constantly.

“I think it won’t even be an issue then. It will just be the status quo.”

Original article from the BBC News Magazine by Brian Wheeler (BBC News, Washington) 22/11/11. Available at: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-15730499

Plug-in hybrids that can run on electric motors or internal combustion engines may soon be able to pick and predict their powertrain use depending on location and past driving habits.

It’s part of a collaboration between Ford, with their years of driver behavior research, and Google Prediction API, which can make useful predictions in real-time using that historical data.

Ford first announced that collaboration at Google I/O back in May. Today, the automaker will demonstrate the technology publicly for the first time, showing off a cloud-connected prototype Escape plug-in hybrid at the World Congress on Intelligent Transport Systems in Orlando. With no driver input, the Escape can automatically turn its gas engine on and off depending on whether it’s entering a dense urban zone where only EVs are allowed. Such “exclusion zones” are common in Europe, where Ford debuted their new, highly-connected Evos concept  earlier this year.

Most cars equipped with navigation can already let drivers know where burning fossil fuel is verboten, but the prototype Escape goes one step further, using historical data to predict whether a driver is going to be traveling though an exclusion zone and adjusting the powertrain accordingly. That way, the driver won’t run out of juice in EV-only mode. Similarly, the car may be able to optimize its hybrid drivetrain for the highway and back road portions of a commute, or keep the battery topped off in anticipation of a stop-and-go slog.

Ford vehicles equipped with Sync are already cloud-connected. But the use of such technology for purposes other than driver convenience is a departure, and foreshadows a world of vehicles that connect with one another in addition to their drivers.

“Those services thus far have been used for infotainment, navigation and real-time traffic purposes to empower the driver,” said Ford Vehicle Controls Architecture and Algorithm Design technical expert Ryan McGee. “This technology has the potential to empower our vehicles to anticipate a driver’s needs for various reasons, such as optimizing a vehicle’s powertrain efficiency.”

Back at Google I/O, Ford gave a rundown of how the technology could work. Each driver would have to opt in to an encrypted usage profile that securely collected data about driver behavior and habits. When the driver got into the car, the vehicle would access that data to predict where the car was about to be driven and optimize the powertrain accordingly. If the car had any questions along the way, it could ask the driver.

“Once the destination is confirmed, the vehicle would have instant access to a variety of real-time information so it can optimize its performance, even against factors that the driver may not be aware of, such as an EV-only zone,” McGee said.

 Article by Keith Barry, Wired, October 20th 2011 (http://www.wired.com/autopia/2011/10/cloud-connectivity-turns-cars-into-chameleons/)