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Location-Aware Services >> Where on Earth...?

2/1/2007

By Charlene O’Hanlon

And at Wake Forest University (NC), Jay Dominick, CIO and assistant VP for information systems, insists students will embrace LAS for learning, because they mimic the more interactive learning style already pervasive in modern society. "Much of our reasoning behind the adoption of location-aware services came from watching the way younger kids interact with their handheld games. In a large sense, those are location-based games," he points out. "Students engage in experiential learning, and this is an extension of that: It forces them to get out of their seats and face a situation where they have to figure out the best solution. It's a new way of learning, and I'm hoping that someone can use location-aware services to implement a better way of visualizing that." WFU is one of about 25 Rave Wireless higher ed customers, and one of "only a handful" thus far using location-aware services, Rishi discloses.

Will Homegrown Take the Lead?

Following in MIT's footsteps, a number of colleges are looking at homegrown location-aware applications, or conducting LAS-based research they hope will someday make its way into the campus infrastructure.

Norman Sadeh, associate professor for the Institute of Software Research International and the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University (PA), has been working on the MyCampus location-aware project for about six years. Collaborating with a student population that spans undergraduates through Ph.D. candidates in the university's Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) program, Sadeh has been looking at the impact of policies on the acceptance of LAS in different scenarios.

"Policies can range from where you are, what time of day it is, what your relationship is to another person, what day of the week it is, and the list can go on." But, "trying to get students to specify a few options is impossible," Sadeh says. "We experimented with different interfaces, put people in different scenarios, and had them create their policies based on those scenarios. What we found was that students were happy with the outcome only 60 percent of the time. If the student was able to modify each policy with each different scenario, his or her satisfaction rate increased only to 70 percent."

What does all of this policy-based investigation reveal? The bottom line, says Sadeh, is that currently there is no single solution that can please everyone, and much more research must be conducted to find an acceptable threshold for common situations. Through a recently awarded National Science Foundation grant, Sadeh and his group hope to discover that threshold.

"In part," he says, "we're trying to learn preferences and then make decisions based on those preferences, without getting to 100 percent accuracy. But is 99 percent enough? I guess it depends on the situation. We're looking at the broader problem of trying to determine how much is enough."

Some of the applications the MyCampus developers have experimented with include "recommendation" systems based on location. They utilize parameters such as time between classes, time of day, weather, student tastes (in the case of restaurant recommendations, for instance), and calendar events. The recommendation application was not very successful in the limited campus environment, but Sadeh believes this is one case where an LAS system would fare better in the general population—if only because there simply are many more opportunities for recommendations.

Interestingly, Sadeh notes that another application, crime alerts, also did not work well. But that was because, in this instance, "We could not come up with the right kind of interface, and the alerts ended up frightening the students more than helping them."

Some of the more successful projects connected to MyCampus: a reminder system that notifies a user of an event or a task, based on current location (a student traversing the campus passes the science building and is alerted about a homework or project assignment in the building that he has yet to pick up), and a "virtual poster" function. "Posters are tacked up everywhere on campus," says Sadeh, "so we looked at whether we could instead put those into an LAS application which allows the posters to be ‘retrieved' based on where the user is on campus."

Privacy: The 800-Pound Gorilla

As with the MIT iFIND services, privacy has been a primary consideration in every MyCampus application. "It's a very important element of our research," says Sadeh. "We've been looking at the spectrum of privacy issues and what people's privacy preferences are, but different people have different preferences, so it's hard to allow just two or three options for everyone."

When it comes to location-aware services, the argument is not that locationaware services are an invasion of privacy; but rather, how much privacy must one give up in order to access such services?

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