Indoor positioning prototype application

The future of the wifi location tool is looking pretty bright -- we've got a workng data collection and location tool using just indoor wifi!

The above screen shot is of real wifi scan done using the prototype wifi+gps scanning application that Jorge, Jamon and Yura have been working on. The image shows a series of overlapping circles of varying colours that represent three different algorithms used to calculate a current postion. Green is Yura's algorithm, red is Jorge's, and the blue is a combination of the two. The black dots represent past scans of the wireless environment. Already the application has a 5-10 metre degree of relative accuracy on the floorplan and is able to locate a user on a specific floor of a specific building. The most important part? This ability to locate a user within a given area on a floor only uses wifi signals -- the application doesn't rely on GPS or cellular tracking at all.

Looking forward, the next step is to implement a user friendly interface that can be used to allow users to tag or leave notes about specific locations. Other users can then read and respond at a later date with their own tag/comment. This functionality is similar to Mozilla's recently announced Geode project that locates users in a city using wifi and allows tagging locations. Another task is to create a way to inform users that they are indeed on a particular floor without having to run the data collection tool (which is admittedly a little scary ). The Mozilla Geode interface, complete with a W3C Geolocation API might be just the ticket there too. Finally, refining the algorithm that Yura and Jorge have created to achieve a higher degree of precision may allow users to navigate through areas of specific floors, which would be a truly remarkable achievement indeed!

Printed circuit boards anyone?

We would like to extend our appreciation to the Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering at the University of Toronto and Cadence Design Systems since they have made available to us a handful of licenses for industry-quality printed circuit board (PCB) computer-aided design (CAD) software.

The software will be available to UofT students working with SCYP at the ATRC and will be most useful in the completion of our current alternative input projects. Special thanks to Jaro Pristupa for helping us provide the best available resources to our students!

Mobile web best practices

We have compiled a list of resources for web application developers who want to learn about how to make their content mobile device-friendly. The list includes links to the W3C mobile web working group as well as the dev.mobi best practices guides, target device identification APIs, automatic checkers and emulators. The mobile web best practices resource list will be updated frequently so don't forget to check it out every now and then.

SCYP welcomes more students

The begining of the Fall term is near and we are very happy to realize that many eager students wasted no time to express their interest in joining the SCYP team through the work-study program. Even more exciting is the fact that these students come with impressive resumes and loads of motivation. So we would like to welcome them in the hopes that their involvement with SCYP will be exactly what they expect and tons more!

So here is the breakdown of new SCYPers:

Student	Project
Susahosh Rahman	Tactile Feedback for Practical Outdoor Navigation
Yura Zenevich	WiFi Indoor Positioning System

We will also count with the volunteer advice of Raghunath Ramachandra, a Master of Business Administration student at the Rotman School of Management, recently unpacked from India, who has lots of telecom development experience and will be collaborating with us on the Vivid Campus project.

But don't worry, we still have some work-study positions available so, apply now!

Synthetic Imaging is online!

We are very happy to see that the folks at Synthetic Imaging Research Inc. (SIRI) finally have a home on the Internet. They sure made an outstanding effort to create the high-quality site that their visitors, collaborators, members and patrons deserve, so make sure you have a chance to visit them often so you can see what they are up to.

In the meanwhile, the SCYP team certainly looks forward to continue strengthening its collaborations with SIRI for the benefit of all Canadians with visual impairments.

Work-study positions available

We have at least nine work-study positions available for the upcoming 2008-2009 academic year. The work-study program is an excellent way to turn your course work into a money-making venture while contributing to research and development at UofT. You can review the advertised positions in the SCYP Career Opportunities page.

So, if you want to be part of SCYP, send us your resume and cover letter, and remember, even if the posted job descriptions aren't exactly what you are looking for, we may still have a place for you!

SCYP featured in Abilities Magazine

Don't forget to pick up a copy of this summer's issue (issue 75) of Abilities Magazine at your local store. There is an introductory article about SCYP in the Culture and Technology section (page 45). Among other things, the article highlights our commitment to community-based reasearch and development of inclusive mobile technology. I hope you like it!

Indoor positioning is one step closer

We have been recently making some references to the WiFi-based indoor positioning system currently under development by the SCYP team. Over the past few weeks, we have been wrestling with the system's design and tackling some of the initial barriers to the implementation of our very first prototype. But thanks to Renaud, a committed open source advocate, we have just solved a simple but necessary step for the success of this project.

See, a few years ago, Renaud wrote a program that converts CAD files in DWG or DXF format into more standard SVG images. We used Renaud's program and other open source tools to convert all campus blueprints into standard image files so that they are easily accessible. These image files can in turn be used to build a database of associations between campus locations and WiFi scans (i.e. fingerprints). The principle is simple: with blueprint in hand, we can go to every building on campus collecting WiFi fingerprints as we walk around. For each fingerprint collected, there will be a corresponding location in the blueprint. Then, when sufficient associations have been made, and with the help of a very fast and smart algorithm, we should be able to tell the position of a mobile device just by looking at the WiFi fingerprint, and thus, enable indoor positioning just as with GPS!

Now, besides the fact that Renaud's program worked like a charm even a few years after he wrote it, he was also happy to make some minor changes that allowed us to easily extract the dimensions of the original blueprints, which is necessary to define real coordinates from our converted images. So, hats off to you Renaud!

Linessider 0.9 Released!

Linessider, the first application developed by the SCYP team, is now available for download. Linessider is a console utility that can be used to scan and display WiFi access points in range on Windows systems. This tool will be most useful to developers looking for easy access to information about the wireless environment in a particular location. In fact, the SCYP team will be using Linessider to create a backend for location-based services on campus. We will be posting more related news soon!

Nokia opens the door to inclusive design in the mobile space

There is no doubt that personal computing is experiencing a tremendous transformation. In today's context, where mobile devices oversell PCs by a factor of 5, manufactures and software developers evolve quickly and compete fiercely for a place in our pockets.

A few months ago, Google announced its yet-to-be-deployed Android platform, an open-source operating system (OS) for mobile devices that threatened to challenge a market dominated primarily by proprietary code. The hype around the announcement has been since dismissed by companies like Microsoft and Apple who monitor the initiative with little more than cautious skepticism, specially since Android is not yet available commercially.

This context, however, has just been turned completely on its head, following the announcement that Symbian, the OS running on 60% of the smart phones available today, is about to go open source. This is part of an aggressive strategy by Nokia, which invested $410 million in the acquisition of all remaining shares of Symbian, to maintain its leadership in the mobile devices market through an open source development model.

Unlike Google Android, Nokia's Symbian has already millions of users around the world, and, best of all, it has a long history of support for 3rd-party applications, custom development and inclusive technologies. Thus, with this new open source approach, the Symbian platform is about to become a lot more attractive to custom application developers, specially the SCYP team, since there is no doubt that open source software development models effectively accelerate the research, development and deployment of inclusive technologies.

A reader in our pocket

The folks at Synthetic Imaging Inc. have been pretty active these days. Just this week, they received a prototype of the Nokia Navigator 6210 and a sample of the knfb Mobile Reader, a powerful and very portable object character recognition device capable of reading labels, restaurant menus and other printed material to the user. The knfb Mobile Reader runs on a Nokia N82 phone using its 5 Mpixel camera. The N82 also provides WiFi connectivity among many other neat features.

Milton Zysman from Synthetic Imaging and I actually attended a seminar at the Canadian National Institute for the Blind, where the main features of the reader were demonstrated. To say the very least, we were both very impressed with the little gadget, so we were very glad that knfb Reading Technology Inc. agreed to donate a copy of the software for evaluation here at the University of Toronto; and that is exactly what the SCYP team and Synthetic Imaging Inc. will be doing during the next few weeks.

We also hope to make the unit available to students, staff and faculty at the University of Toronto so that interested members of our community can find out for themselves whether the reader fulfills any of their needs. We'll keep you posted!

Linessider realease 0.9 coming soon!

The ATRC-SCYP team is gearing up for the release of Linessider, a Windows, open-source, command-line utility that scans the wireless environment for a list of WiFi access points in range. Although the concept is not new at all, we will use Linessider in our future attempts to enable WiFi-based localization in indoor environments. Thanks to Amy Chu who did a great work transforming Inssider into a command-line application!

Vivid Campus project launched

This past Monday May 26, Faculty of Information students Norman Valdez and Duygu Basmaci launched the Vivid Campus project at the University of Toronto, campus Mississauga. Vivid Campus aims to intersect social networks, online campus services and the mobile space in a web application that promisses to revolutionize the way students, staff and faculty at the University of Toronto interact and communicate with each other.

Synthetic Imaging and the ATRC to evaluate Nokia's Navigator 6210 phone

Nokia will be sending at least one Navigator 6210 unit to Synthetic Imaging and the ATRC for evaluation of the device's current usability features, limitations and potential. This collaboration will certainly strengthen the ties between the leading manufacturer of phones for blind users and the SCYP community.

CNS and SCYP Join Forces

The office of Central Network Services (CNS) at the University of Toronto has agreed to collaborate with the SCYP team for the creation of a WiFi-Based Indoor Positioning System that would work in a way similar to the primarily outdoors Global Positioning System (GPS). This indoor system will allow students to design applications and services that provide members of the University of Toronto community with information relevant to their particular location. For example, a staff member may be able to retrieve the necessary information to determine the location of the nearest accessible washrooms while an ESL student streams real-time captioning data in a given class.

We look forward to working with the CNS and other members of our community in order to create services that respond to the needs of students staff and faculty with and without disabilities at the University of Toronto!

OS/OT Students to Join SCYP

We just learned that three students from the Department of Occupational Science and Occupational Therapy (OS/OT) at the University of Toronto will be joining the SCYP team in the fall to help us tackle some of our key research questions. These students will be exposed to a variety of research techniques that range from the application of ethnographic methods to the design of usability evaluations. This will all be possible thanks to our participation in the OCT 1220Y Graduate Research Project Course, coordinated by Professor Heather Carnahan, which provides MScOT students with practical research experience. We are definitely looking forward to working with Laura, Naomi and Persis!

Here is our preliminary student-project match table:

Student	Project Title
Laura Kaptein	Tactile Feedback for Practical Outdoor Navigation
Naomi Mitchell	GPS-Based Navigation for the Blind: An Evaluation of Everyday Use
Persis Leung	Head Tracking with the Wii Remote: A Comparative Study

SCYP uses The Force

We have received news that Immersion Corporation has accepted our proposal to study the potential use of vibration patterns in combination with GPS data in order to help students with and without disabilities identify nearby buildings and/or provide them with appropriate force-feedback cues as they navigate the University of Toronto St. George Campus.

In order to develop this project, Immersion will be lending us at least one Samsung i718 smart phone as well as a license for their VibeTonz® software developer suite. In addition to the Nokia 6682 phone that Synthetic Imaging recently provided for our Digital Tagging project, the Samsung i718 will become the third target platform available to SCYP developers!

A Dino-Zaurus in SCYP

Last night I was able to get my hands on a great piece of hardware and a first in mobile device history. The Sharp Zaurus SL-5500 (Collie), was the first of the Linux-based Zaurus series to be sold outside Japan, where it was the most popular PDA of the 1990s. This gadget is based on the Intel SA-1110 StrongARM processor running at 206 MHz, has 64 MB of RAM and 16MB Flash, a built-in keyboard, CompactFlash (CF) slot, Secure Digital (SD) slot, and Infrared port.

Besides the fact that the SL-5500 is officially by now a pre-historic device in the IT industry, it is still quite an amazing feat of engineering, and it will definitely be very useful to SCYP.

I have managed to wipe out the original Sharp ROM, and flash the alternative OpenZaurus OS, a Debian-based embedded Linux distribution running OPIE as the GUI. OPIE is actually based on Qt, a mobile software development suite that is getting pretty popular these days, specially since the new version, Qt4, will be compatible with Windows, Windows Mobile and MacOS X. This means we can use the Sharp Zaurus SL-5500 to develop applications that may be easily portable to non-Linux systems (that's a lot of them!). So if any UofT student out there is interested, the PDA is right here in my desk at the ATRC waiting for an eager hacker!

An interface that really gets you...

This past Tuesday David and I attended a seminar entitled "Automatically generating personalized adaptive user interfaces", where Krzysztof Z. Gajos talked about his doctoral research where he focused on creating a tool that changes the properties of graphical user interfaces GUI to adapt them to each user's needs and preferences. But "how does he know what my GUI needs and preferences are?" you may ask... well, in fact, he doesn't know, but he doesn't really have to! It turns out Krzysztof also developed a simple automated computer-based test that learns those needs and preferences in a few minutes as it interacts with you.

One of the slides that made me understand the relevance of Krzysztof's work to SCYP, is one where he showed the way his algorithm is able to re-design and re-organize the widgets in a visual environment as the size of this environment is changed, all in real time! In fact, he even showed how complex desktop-based dialog boxes can be automatically transfered to mobile devices just by updating a set of constraints.

Krzysztof's work actually leads to at least two clear SCYP project ideas:

1. If a guideline like the ISO-24751 standard (which defines a framework for the definition of needs and preferences) could be integrated with Krzysztof work, the process of automatically adapting GUIs would be significantly simplified. Mobile application developers would then have access to a common framework that not only helps them know what their user's needs and preferences are (at run-time) but actually enables them to do something about it. This would of course take someone with an interest in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and brave enough to attempt defining Krzysztof's algorithm in terms of the ISO-24751
   
2. Alternatively, for those of you who can't wait to start coding, we could set you up in the mobile development platform of your choice so you can try implementing Krzysztof's work in say, your own cellphone, and see whether you like it or not.

Other interesting questions are:

1. Say the GUI of a program I am running is adapted to my needs and preferences, but there is this one feature I need someone else to help me with. How do I make sure the person helping me doesn't have to re-learn my GUI?
2. Are there any contexts in which GUI personalization would actually make things worst?

What do you think?

Hello World!

It's about time we started sharing our thoughts and progress with the world. We'll be blogging soon!

Thanks for coming.