Augmented Reality Meetup Videos

Chris Grayson (@chrisgrayson) set up ARMeetup.org, which is a video hub for Augmented Reality Meetup Groups. The video for the February 17th Augmented Reality New York (#arny) meetup is up and the demo line-up follows:

• Ori Inbar of Ogmento and gamesalfresco.com  demos the best and worst AR apps for the iPhone (and his rig for showing apps live on a mobile)
• Mike Kelly of Hudson Union - demos 3D object movies controlled by an AR marker to integrate high resolution print ads into a AR environment
• Chris Grayson of GigantiCo presented on the use of virtual mirrors in retail ecommerce to enhance user experience at point of sale.

Video below and checkout the twitter stream for #arny

Dell Mini 9 OSX: How To Install Silverlight

On occasion I feel a need to checkout some web application written in Silverlight.  I usually do this on my MacBook Pro but I wanted to be able to do this on the Dell Mini with out seeing this:

The Silverlight installer incorrectly identifies the Intel N270 Atom as a PowerPC chip. Fortunately there is a work around described in the howto below:

1. Download Silverlight.
2. Open the Silverlight.dmg file and copy Silverlight.3.0.pkg to another directory such as ~/Downloads
3. Using terminal remove the InstallationCheck: 

sudo rm ~/Downloads/Silverlight.3.0.pkg/Contents/Resources/InstallationCheck

After that, double click on the SilverLight.3.0.pkg and follow the installation instructions as usual.

Dell Mini 9 OSX: Improve Performance by Blocking Flash

I'll keep it simple. Turn off Flash in your browser to prevent high CPU usage and browser crashes.

Howto:

• Safari: ClickToFlash
• FireFox: Flashblock
• Chrome: FlashBlock (requires version that supports extensions)

Unhappy people at GetSatisfaction and the conflicting statements from Kevin Lynch and Emmy Huang of Adobe about problems with flash.

Mission 4636 and improving the Mechanical Turk

During the days after the earthquake in Haiti, I was traveling and was not able to participate with the ongoing mapping efforts at CrisisCamp.  However, I am reasonably fluent in Haitian Creole/Kreyol so I volunteered to translate.  I was very happy to discover that Ushahidi had set up a SMS translation service called Mission 4636.

Mission 4636 is the ongoing effort to collect and translate SMS messages from Haitians and route their requests to responders on the ground. Mission 4636 started at Ushahidi and moved to CrowdFlower with Samasource for long term support. At this time, Mission 4636 relies on volunteers to provide the translation and geolocation services.  Samasource provides the following graphic describing Mission 4636:

source: (Samasource: http://www.samasource.org/haiti/)

The system is essentially a mechanical turk with volunteers performing the translation and extracting coordinate information based on references to addresses or more general locations in the text of the message.  Volunteers at CrisisCamps quickly mapped Haiti in OpenStreet Map and and other contributers created the Haiti Crisis Map which is helpful for finding the coordinates of locations in latitude and longitude. 

While tools such as the Haiti Crisis Map are important, it is the volunteer translators that make the system work.  For example, I translated a text with the address of Ri 3, Fre Rigo Okay to Rue 3, Freres Rigaud, Les Cayes, which is the French label on the map.  Haitian Kreyol is more of a spoken language with a loose orthography and has a tendency towards being a phonetic language.  Having lived near Les Cayes, I knew that it was called Okay in Kreyol, which was helpful for knowing where to look in the first place.  Similarly, there were many requests from Delmas, an area in Port-au-Prince, that required local knowledge to find the precise location of the person sending the SMS.  Finding the coordinates of these locations to accurately direct responders on the ground depends heavily on local knowledge that can not be derived from the map.  

Ushahidi created a chatroom for volunteers which was instrumental for tapping into and sharing local knowledge.  Having a place to interactively discuss location and provide assistance for translating the SMS greatly improved the translations and the accuracy of the location coordinates.  Being able to work collaboratively with others made the information in the SMS actionable and facilitate the work being done in country.

The importance of collaboration is highlighted in a recent article in the New York Review of Books by the chess grand master Gary Kasparov.  In the article, he describes a free style chess tournament where players could compete in teams and use computers.  Chess playing computers essentially brute force solutions to win, but typically they cannot defeat a strong human player.  It was expected that a strong human player (professional) with a powerful computer would be the logical winner of the tournament.  The winner(s) were a pair  of amateur players that collaborated using three consumer grade computers.  Kasparov describes the outcome as surprising:

"The surprise came at the conclusion of the event. The winner was revealed to be not a grandmaster with a state-of-the-art PC but a pair of amateur American chess players using three computers at the same time. Their skill at manipulating and "coaching" their computers to look very deeply into positions effectively counteracted the superior chess understanding of their grandmaster opponents and the greater computational power of other participants. Weak human + machine + better process was superior to a strong computer alone and, more remarkably, superior to a strong human + machine + inferior process."

My experience with Mission 4636 validates that a combination of humans of varying skill levels + machine mediated interaction and tools + better process produces better results than having volunteers simply performing translations without the benefit of a collaborative approach.  While a mechanical turk system can harness the efforts of volunteers distributed globally, the addition of an adhoc method of collaboration greatly increased the efficacy of the system.


Ushahidi continues to host the chatroom which is the touchpoint for 4636 volunteers.  I hope that Crowdflower and Samasource will eventually add a chatroom to supplant the one at Ushahidi and continue to foster the collaborative environment.  Volunteers are still needed at Mission 4636. If you are a Francophone or Kreyol speaker, or if you just want to help, you can register at Samasource.