posts tagged ‘technology trends’

Workshop on Technology-Mediated Social Participation: Reports

12 January 2010 | Sanjay Kairam

PARC recently hosted the first of two co-organized and NSF-funded workshops on Technology-Mediated Social Participation. Workshop reports addressing themes such as integrating theory across levels from the individual to the community; developing new methods of measuring social connections and social capital across networks; and building an infrastructure for reliable and responsible data collection are now available.

The Future of Technology-Mediated Social Participation

7 December 2009 | Pete Pirolli

Who would have thought that simple architectures for participation could rival the scale of results previously achieved only by massive private or public works projects? While we can get excited about the possibilities, we also have to be realistic. Most social technology efforts fail: for every Wikipedia, there are thousands of dead or dying wikis. The Workshop on Technology-Mediated Social Participation at PARC will bring together approximately 30 researchers from industry, academia, and government to draw up a scientific agenda and educational recommendations for a new era of social participation technologies. As individuals, we’re limited by how much we know or think about any of these things, which is why I’m hoping that participants on the panel and in the audience at this week’s PARC Forum can help. We see further when we stand on the shoulders of others.

Fear mobile malware

1 September 2009 | Markus Jakobsson

Online criminals have many tools for committing fraud and theft, including phishing and, increasingly, malware. A more acute problem is mobile malware, which will pose a serious threat to mobile communications as smartphone use explodes. The inherent limitations of smartphones – power, memory, bandwidth – make most anti-virus tools unsuitable once the rate of malware instances reaches a certain threshold, because smartphones can't handle the updates that PCs currently have to. So what happens when malware authors start developing viruses for smartphones at the rate they currently do for personal computers? We may not have to wait long to find out, because mobile platforms are rich with data and are convenient payment platforms ripe for defrauding. We must find better solutions before it's too late. And we can't use current strategies to combat the problem, because the mobile context is so much more vulnerable and resource-constrained.

The slowing growth of Wikipedia (part two): resistance from dominant editors

10 August 2009 | Ed Chi

Part one of this post, which shared findings on the slowing growth of Wikipedia, recently received coverage in the New Scientist, Fast Company, Business Insider/ Silicon Alley Insider, and more... In this second part, we share more details on the plateauing, more-linear-than-exponential growth rate of Wikipedia. In a nutshell: the treatment of edits from different editor classes has been widening steadily over the years -- and not in favor to the less-frequent editors. We consider this disparity as evidence of the dominant Wikipedia community's growing resistance to new content, especially when the edits come from occasional editors.

Making mobile printing easier with QR codes

5 August 2009 | Bo Begole

One of the best features of the new class of U.S. mobile smartphones is that they're finally capable of reading QR (Quick Response) codes. These codes, which already appear all over Japan and Korea, are 2D bar codes typically displayed on something -- such as a poster, webpage, magazine ad, or store window -- and captured by a phone camera. The phone decodes the image and launches the appropriate application to see the text, browse the website, send SMS, or call the number that was contained in the QR code. In all these scenarios, the phone is reading the QR code. But you can also turn this model on its head by having the phone display the code to be read by another device.

Augmented Reality: Increasing collective intelligence

23 July 2009 | Lawrence Lee

Search engines like Google have trained us to believe we can find the answer to any question. Now activity streams from Twitter, Facebook, and others are changing our expectations around information yet again. We now demand information in real-time that’s socially and contextually relevant. Contextual information transforms our interactions within our physical environment... This area of research is called Augmented Reality, and it spans a wide spectrum of applications...