Invisible Yet Necessary

by Riad Lemhachheche, staff writer

Global Positioning System technology has become famous for letting hikers and travelers find their location wherever they are.

GPS devices are used in cars to provide driving directions and in airplanes to display the distance to one’s final destination. But GPS is only the tip of a growing industry and academic field known as Geographic Information Systems or GIS.

“GPS is no good unless GIS is doing analysis with that data”, said Dawn Wright, professor in the Department of Geosciences at Oregon State University.

GIS technologies are used for research in forest science or oceanography, as well as being incorporated in products and services used by millions of people every day.

Mapping services like Mapquest, Yahoo Maps or Google Earth rely heavily on GIS to associate topographic data, street and highway layout and traffic information to enable their users to plan their travels.

GIS experts were on the forefront of the emergency response team during the Katrina relief effort. They were able to generate up-to-date maps of transportation systems and locate areas where flooding had the most impact.

OSU is an academic leader in the GIS field, as it is one of the 16 founders of the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research, the major academic consortium in the field, that now counts over 70 members.

Last fall, OSU launched a new program for students and community to provide increased learning opportunities in the field of GIS.

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Wired has 2 stories about RFID this week.
The first one “RFID: To Tag or Not to Tag ” is a good explanation of what RFID is and what it can be used for.

The second one is about e-Plate, a British project to use active RFID tag to track cars.

The British government is preparing to test new high-tech license plates containing microchips capable of transmitting unique vehicle identification numbers and other data to readers more than 300 feet away.

The point of the test is to see whether microchips will make number plates harder to tamper with and clone, said U.K. Department for Transport spokesman Ian Weller-Skitt.

Many commuters use counterfeit plates to avoid the London congestion charge, a fee imposed on passenger vehicles entering central London during busy hours.

This project has similiarities with the ongoing ODOT research project here at OSU, so it will be interesting to compare the results of both experiments. I will need to look at a more detailled description of their system . For example, I didn’t see anything how they plan to manage privacy, like the use of a privacy bit or similar systems

I found a call for participation (PDF) for a special issue of Personal and Ubiquitous Computing Journal.

For this special issue we solicit contributions that map and report on such developments, and highlight the effects of bringing ubiquitous computing to the real world:

• What are the limitations of ubiquitous systems implementation in the real world in terms of economics, regulation, business realities and market situation and can the cost be justified?
• Which systems can work outside the laboratory? Are the available infrastructures able to cater for the massive data flows created by auto-identification for example? What are the actual systems architectures that have been proven to effectively support the required workloads?
• When ubiquitous systems are deployed what are the changes that bring to people’s lives? What changes are effected in people’s private lives at a personal and family level and what are the changes to social etiquette?
• Is the ubiquitous computing world a utopia, which can never be reached because reality is messy? Can the vision of computing for all turn into a nightmare of surveillance and no privacy?
• Can we reverse decades of technology as conqueror to achieve “calm technology”?
• And above all, is the ubiquitous computing world a world which people seem happy to live in?

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Lawrence Lessig decides to use a wiki to update collaboratively his famous 1999 book on privacy “Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace”

Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace v 2