Mobile, location-aware devices raise the potential for fundamentally new information services. However, this potential has not been realized. This is due in part to the absence of a firm conceptual and empirical foundation. This proposal explores one basis for constructing the requisite foundation: socially defined places. How places (such as schools, offices, or theaters) shape behavior has been explored in environmental psychology and architecture, but the notion of 'place' has not been operationalized for use in interactive systems. This project takes on that task. The key hypotheses are that (a) people's information and communication needs are relative to place types, and (b) making 'place' a first-class computational object will increase the effectiveness and usability of location-based systems. This project will test the hypotheses through a combination of ethnographic studies, development of novel algorithms and interfaces, and laboratory and field studies, leading to the following results: 1) additional empirical knowledge about the concept of place and its role in organizing people's activities; 2) a conceptual framework and guidelines useful to designers of location-based systems; 3) a general infrastructure for place-centered community information sharing systems; and 4) field studies and laboratory evaluations that demonstrate the utility and acceptability of such systems.

Principal Investigators

• Quentin Jones    - Lead researcher NJIT team and PI (http://modiin.njit.edu/personal). 
• Loren Terveen   - Lead researcher University of Minnesota team and Co-PI (http://www.cs.umn.edu/faculty/terveen.html).
• Steve Whittaker  - NJIT Research Professor, and Professor and Chair in Information Retrieval, The University of Sheffield (http://www.shef.ac.uk/is/people/whittake.html).

Current Grant Sponsored Research Assistants

• Ph.D. Students - Sukeshini A Grandhi, Samer Karam, Pamela Ludford - http://www-users.cs.umn.edu/~ludford/
• Undergraduate Students - Christopher Gordano, Vladislav Gostomelsky

Other NJIT Participants

Making this research program a reality would not be possible without significant help from others at NJIT under "Project Fusion" which aims to create through the fusing of various information technologies a smart campus. Currently for the NJIT SmartCampus system we are currently prototyping three user applications with more planned for the future:

• SmartCampus Web - A web page that uses contextual information for web information customization.
• NJIT's ActiveCampus Explorer - Based on the UCSD's system, Wi-Fi users are located and then mapped to their location on campus. We are adding various additions to this system such as place zones.
• CampusTalker - A location aware instant messaging system that links into ActiveCampus Explorer, the SmartCampus Web, and the universities LDAP and Calendaring Service.

Year One July 2003-June 2004

Jones Q., Grandhi S.A., Terveen L., and Whittaker S., (Accepted with Revisions to Special Issue on Context Aware Computing). People-To-People-to-Geographical-Places: The P3 Framework for Location-Based Community Systems. Journal of Computer Supported Cooperative Work. Kluwer Academic Publishers.

Grandhi S.A., and Jones, Q., (2004) P3-System Designs: A classification of systems that connect People-To-People-To-Geographical-Places. Americas Conference on Information Systems 2004.

Jones Q., and Grandhi S.A., (2004) Supporting Proximate Communities with P3-Systems: Technology for Connecting People-To-People-To-Geographical-Places. To Appear In: The Interaction Society: Practice, Theories, & Supportive Technologies. Edited by M. Weiberg, Idea Group, Inc. New York.

abstract  

Jones Q.,Grandhi S.A., Terveen L., Whittaker S., and Chivakula K., (2004). Putting Systems into Place: A Qualitative Study of Design Requirements for Location-Aware Community Systems. Proceedings of The ACM's 2004 Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work. New York: ACM Press.

abstract  

The Principal Investigator Quentin Jones was awarded the HP Technology for Teaching grant which provides TabletPC's and a cash grant to further support this research.

We wish to thank William G. Griswold, Department of Computer Science & Engineering University of California, San Diego La Jolla, CA., for is collaborating by enabling us to use and modify for our purposes his ActiveCampus software system.