Where I've Been

I've been pretty busy these past few months. October was pretty much devoted to travel with trips to Boston (x2), Beijing, Disney World, and London. It was all tons of fun but it was really nice to get back and be able to relax a little. Between all of those trips, I was never home for more than 18 hours which was a bit much, even for me!

The Boston trips were fun and included a Red Sox game with Dawn, a visit to the Media Lab sponsor week, good food at Wagamana and Brown Sugar, and lots of fun visiting friends. Then it was off to Beijing for ACM Multimedia and hanging out with old Yahoo Berkeley friends. It was amazing to see how much the city has changed in the past 4 years. The subway even goes all the way to the Summer Palace now which is amazing considering that there were only three lines last time. It was a great time with a few days of sightseeing and then the conference. I presented our work on TuVista which was a fun talk to give.

From Beijing, I made my way down to FL to run the Tower of Terror 13k race with Alison! I was not feeling well at all and might have been still trying to get over a case of the swine flu, but I felt ok enough to start running and made it all the way through. I have no idea how I found the energy to make it to the finish line, but I did! Maybe it was the thought of MGM staying open until 2am for the runners and running around with Alison riding Star Tours and the Toy Story ride all night that did it :) The Toy Story ride was especially awesome...I really can't wait for the Wii game! The next day we met up with one of Alison's friends and went to Mickey's Not So Scary Halloween Party at the Magic Kingdom. Space Mountain was still closed, but we had a blast! Including getting vegan ice cream from the ice cream parlor on Main St. I love Disney :)

I though I'd be heading home from FL, but instead I ended up going out to London. It was a quick 2 day work trip, but still super exhausting. After the 13 hour ride home from China in Economy, the 9 hours trip to London was really not fun. At least I got a trip to Brick Lane for diner one night!

These past few weeks have been really busy as well with a trip to the opera, a play in the city, and lots of catching up at work. Hopefully things have calmed down a bit and the rest of the year shouldn't be so bad.

All of that is just a bit about why I haven't been writing much on here lately. I hope to have a few posts coming soon including one about some of the awesome things on the new Cliq phone and another on some Arduino programming/building I've been doing lately.

Have a great Thanksgiving everyone!

A Mac User's Guide to the Motorola Cliq

I'll have a post soon where I gush about how amazing the Cliq phone is. But this post is pure utility. If you're a mac user and want to get up and running on a new Cliq, here's what I've found to get all of your data moved over. Note that if you're on a PC, there's a really awesome tool called MediaLink that will get you all synced up.

I'll also state here that I do work for Motorola and that "The postings on this site are my own and do not necessarily represent Motorola's positions, strategies, or opinions." OK, legal stuff out of the way, here goes...

Contacts

So you have your contacts in mac address book, and you need to get them onto your brand new Cliq. There's really no straightforward way to do this since the device doesn't officially sync on the mac. You'll need to export your contacts as a vCard (This is a little trickier than it should be. Go into Address Book, and select all of your contacts, then export as vCard. This will make a single file with all of your contacts). You can then upload this vCard file to whichever service you'll be syncing with your new phone (Google Contacts/Mail, Yahoo Address Book/Mail, an Exchange account, etc.). Then just add that account on the Cliq and all of your contact information will come streaming into your address book. Added bonus: if you modify any of your contacts online, the changes will get synced automatically to the phone, and vice versa.

This isn't particularly mac-related, but once you add a few services on the phone, you might find some contacts that were not automatically merged together. To merge (aka Link) contacts together, go to a contact detail page in the phonebook and press the menu key. One of the options will be to Link, then pick the contact you want to merge with and everything will come together into one. It's really simple, but I didn't think to press the menu key, so I didn't see how to do this right away.

Music and Photos

First, get a bigger Micro SD card. The phone comes with 2GB, but you can pick up a 16GB card from Amazon for $40. Second, the phone doesn't sync directly with iTunes. But your good friend DoubleTwist can save you. It pulls music and playlists out of iTunes and photos out of iPhoto and lets you sync these with a phone (Blackberry, Android, Palm, etc.). It's a nice utility and fairly self explanatory. Make sure you've removed any Apple DRM from older music from the iTunes store. iTunes Plus lets you do this, but I've found doesn't always get you the version of the song you bought in the first place, so be careful with this route.

Podcasts

The default music player on the Cliq doesn't handle podcasts. So the step with DoubleTwist above will not bring in RSS feeds for podcasts that you want updated. It's ok though. Google has a free app called Listen that you can get from the Android Marketplace. In this app, you can specify all of the podcasts that you want synced to the device. After you've done this, be sure to go into settings and make sure it will automatically download new episodes, and that it will do this over 3G as well as wifi.

I think that's about it. If I think of anything else that I had issues syncing, I'll update this post. And there will definitely be a post coming soon about the awesomeness of the Cliq and MOTOBLUR in general :)

how to watch a cubs game

It just hit me that I have a way to properly watch a cubs game now!

So like any good Chicagoan, I like to watch Cubs games with Pat and Ron on the radio and the TV volume muted. There's always a problem with this as the radio is usually a few seconds ahead of the TV broadcast. So you hear what's about to happen before you see it.

But today I realized that the MLB At Bat app on the iPhone has the radio broadcast too, but it's *delayed* a few seconds. And my tivo can happily handle that with a quick press of pause and play.

So now I've got my phone piping the audio of the game into the speakers next to my TV and the game playing on mute on ESPN with a few second delay. And it's perfect!

If only I could have figured this out in April! :) MLB better port the At Bat app over to Android this winter! That's one app I'd definitely miss!

8 years

Last week was my 8 year service anniversary at Motorola. It's hard to believe it's been that long! (For those of you doing the math and coming up short, they add 12 weeks on to the full-time hire date for each internship)

It's interesting to look at how much has changed and how much has stayed the same in all of that time. A good number of people in the lab are still here, although some of them are in quite different roles now. Some great new people have come (and some of them gone). We've been through four different lab names (Applications Research Lab, User Centered Solutions Lab, Social Media Research Lab, Experiences Research Lab). Three lab managers. Three heads of research. Two big roller coaster rides from long-term research to short-term to long-term and back to short-term. And a few big changes on how we commercialize our ideas.

Over this time, I've been able to work in many different domains. I started by looking into how people use, manage, and find photos and music in their lives. This led to the Metadata Services Engine which we published and commercialized in a bunch of phones through the "Media Finder" application.

Then I moved on to location and context sharing. We recorded people's phone calls to listen to how they talked about location, and built a bunch of prototypes to help understand what people could infer from different types of context and what they did with that information (see the Oct-Dec issue of Pervasive Computing for a nice overview). I was even able to bring in some work from my masters thesis in enhancing awareness around TV viewing. In that same time, I was able to work with startups such as TileFile and came to really understand both what it takes to create a successful startup and a successful service. Taking our Ambient Communications research to product was definitely the most fun and rewarding part of the last 8 years. Working with our design group to create Contacts 3.0, a new phonebook and service centered around integrating all of one's social information was a blast! (I'm working on a case study talking about this whole process) You can see a bunch of our concepts in action on the MotoBlur service debuting our new Android devices.

The services bug stuck with me, and for the the last two years I've been working on creating TuVista, a mobile sports video service that gets multi-angle instant replays to your phone in less than 30 seconds from the play in the game. This has been a whole new set of challenges, from the design of the service itself to understanding media production workflows and the crazy world of content rights. It's been our own little startup in the labs and fun to try to keep pushing Motorola more into services. If I get my way, it looks like my next focus area will be aging and health. For any of you working in the area, I'd love to collaborate!

I've definitely had my ups and downs and times when I was ready to leave at a moment's notice. But I'm glad I've stuck it out and have been able to have so many different experiences all in one place. That's the best part about a corporate research lab in such a large company.

Four days in Europe

Last weekend I was able to spend four wonderful days in Europe! I had to be out in London for Friday and Saturday and decided to spend Sunday and Monday in Paris as I really needed a break and what better place to get away?

Work in London went really well which is always exciting. Since we've been doing a lot of trials of our sports system, it's now super-easy to set up and get going so these trips are fairly stress free. After setting up on Friday, I decided to take the tube into the city and walk around a bit since I had some free time and wanted to force myself to stay awake so that I could adjust to the time change. I made my way over to Covent Garden and had a wonderful dinner at Wagamama (I really hope they put more in the states soon!). After dinner I wandered around a bit and found myself down by Picadilly and starting to get tired, so I jumped back on the tube to the hotel.

Saturday was a busy day of work all day. But after work, a coworker and I again took the tube in the city and ended up at Busaba Eathai. It's another restaurant by Yao - the guy behind Hakkasan and Wagamama. I had the most amazing butternut pumpkin curry with coconut rice and some spring rolls. All very amazing as is all of the food he makes. I was sad that there is no dessert menu, but enjoyed the ginger tea. Upon returning to the hotel, I had a fun little statistics problem to help out a friend that I worked on for a bit before bed. I even got to use some skills I had learned in an AI class at MIT years ago which was actually a whole lot of fun! :)

Sunday was a busy day of travel. I made it into the city early to meet up with an old friend from MIT who was coming in on the EuroStar a few hours before I was going out. We took a photo in the train station (as is becoming obligatory when I meet up with MIT people in other countries!) and made our way over to Eat and Two Veg for brunch. I had their big vegan plate which was a full english breakfast vegan style - beans, scrambled tofu, potatoes, toast, etc. Very tasty and also very wonderful to catch up with Carol, even if we only had a short amount of time between trains.

After brunch, I made it back to the train station in time to board the train to Paris. I ended up with a ticket in the business class section of the train. Since I made the plans to go to Paris on fairly short notice, it was only $10 more, and they promised to feed me a vegan meal, so how could I say no!? The meal was the most amazing thing I've eaten on a form of transportation, so I'm really glad I went this way. There was a salad course, and then a wonderful quinoa dish, bread, and to finish it all off an earl gray chocolate!!! Those of you who have had my earl gray chocolate cupcakes know what a fan I am of this combination, so these little chocolates just made my day! The train ride itself was great. It's sort of surreal to pop out of the channel tunnel going 150+ MPH and all of a sudden see everything in French.

Sunday afternoon turned into a lazy day around Paris. After checking in at my hotel, I took the metro down to the Eiffel Tower and just sat around reading a book, glancing up from time to time to marvel at where I was :) As it got later, I hopped on the metro again, this time headed for Montmarte in search of dinner. There's a vegan restaurant right by the Abbesses station that I wanted to try out. It's basically just a woman who has some tables on the first floor of her house and she makes fresh, organic veggie food. Unfortunately, it didn't open until 7:30 and I arrived around 7.

While waiting for the restaurant to open up, I walked down to one of my favorite places in Paris, the Café des Deux Moulins from Amelie. There's nothing like the sight of this place to put a smile on my face. It wasn't very crowded this time, so I found a seat inside and enjoyed a nice beer while taking a bunch of pictures and sending them to people who would appreciate them. They even had the gnome which I don't remember from the last time I was there!

Once the restaurant was open again, I made my way back there and enjoyed a nice dinner of fresh veggies and baked seitan. There was another American in there and we traded tips on good vegan food in Paris. After dinner, I wanted to walk over to the steps by Sacré-Cœur but just as I got there, they were locking up the gates for the night. I managed a few pictures, but then just hopped on the metro back to the hotel.

Monday started with a really wonderful 10k run around the city. I had mapped it out a few days before and it would take me from my hotel near the FDR stop on Champ Elysees (which I was told by a Parisian is never said FDR but always as Franklin Roosevelt) up to the Louvre, then along the river over to the Hôtel de Ville and down to Notre Dame. From there, I turned back on the south side of the river and ran past the Musee d'Orsay and finished running through the park up to the Eiffel Tower. The run was fantastic and exactly what I needed to cheer me up and bring many smiles to my face :) One of the most awesome things was that the very first song that played on my iPod on random was the theme from Amelie! After the run I bought a very overpriced bottle of Vittel from the booth under the tower and made my way back to the hotel for a shower.

I decided to make it a very low key and relaxing afternoon, so I made my way back to Sacré-Cœur and sat on the steps for a while watching the street performers. There was a guy playing a guitar and singing American country songs and then some puppeteers and a sort of crazy variety show. All in all, fairly entertaining and relaxing. In another strange coincidence, while walking up the steps, I heard a street performer singing "When You Say Nothing At All" which was a song my iPod was playing while running that morning. I read a book under a tree for a bit and then decided to climb the stairs to the top of the basilica since I had never been up there. It was pretty amazing as the pictures can attest to.

On my way back to the hotel, I stopped at BHV which is my favorite store in the world. They sell everything! You enter from the metro into the basement, which is this giant hardware store...basically like a Home Depot with anything you could ever imagine. But then the other floors are typical department store fair...but arranged randomly...like lighting right next to lingerie, or tea next to art supplies (maybe that one makes a bit of sense). Anyway, I left with some of the most amazing tea ever - a green tea with ginger and lemon, a new notebook, and a Paris calendar. I had wanted to stop by the Musee d'Orsay as it's 1) an impressionist art museum and 2) in a train station! What better combination of things could there be!? But sadly, it's closed on Mondays.

That evening, I met up with an old colleague from Motorola who had worked on an earlier version of TuVista with us and had made the journey to Mexico City. While there, he didn't exactly believe me that Paris had amazing vegan food, so we decided that we'd meet up the next time I was in town. We made our way to La Victoire Supreme du Coeur, a vegan restaurant near the Hôtel de Ville (which isn't where it was the last time I was in Paris!). I had an amazing seitan dish with a mushroom sauce and a salad with "veggie poulet" which turned out to be quite good, but not as amazing as Hakkasan's veggie chicken (but really, who can top them!). I learned the French names for a bunch of different fruits while picking sorbet flavors which was fun :) We grabbed a beer in a little alley cafe before I had to make it back to the hotel since I had an early flight the next day.

And that's about it. I made my way to CDG the next morning and was on my way home. It was a very wonderful and relaxing trip. Exactly what I needed.

Microsoft Sync

So my dad got a new car...most specifically, he got a Hybrid Ford Escape. Yay for the Hybrid part, not so yay for the SUV. But he could have done much worse :)

Anyway, the car came with Microsoft Sync installed, which is this voice UI system for controlling your iPod (or Zune as they happily state!) and your mobile phone. Many of you know that I'm not a fan of voice UIs in general, so initially I didn't think I'd be very impressed with this either. A voice UI, in a car, with road and wind noise. How is this ever going to work!?

And initially, we couldn't get it to work. There's this button on the steering wheel with a picture of a face, and I guessed that you were supposed to press that in order to say something. And being a long-time Push To Talk user, of course I assumed that the interface was hold down button, talk, let go of button. I couldn't really imagine it working any other way. So my dad and I sit out in the car for like 20 minutes listening to this thing beep at us and then every time we tried to start talking, it would make these "error" beeps...you know, the down tone ones that tell you that you did something bad. But for the life of me I could not figure out what that wrong thing was. So we gave up and my dad was ready to return the car to get a new voice system :)

We came inside and I read through the manual for it and discovered that it had been designed in a very odd way. Holding the speech button down for > 3 seconds meant to disable the speech recognition function! So every time we tried to talk and heard that "error" beep it was signaling to us that we were turning off voice recognition. Seems like a voice system should be able to speak back to you and at least tell you how you're screwing up :)

Anyway, once we knew that we were just supposed to tap the voice button, then wait until the system asked us what we wanted, then speak, it became really easy. And it was really cool! So much so that I wish I could get it installed in my car! You can tell it to play particular playlists, artists, albums, or genres by name, and my most favorite feature is the "play similar music" command which uses the metadata of the current song to play music that's like what you're playing now. For those who know my research, I've done a lot in this area of similar media, so it was awesome to see a product that is putting some of those ideas in action! You can also ask it "what's playing" and it will tell you the artist and song title of the song that's playing. That one is a little less useful, since the artist and song title are on the screen right at the top of the dashboard :)

So in the end, it was pretty cool and I wish it was something that could be put into any car. For me, a car is a once in 15 years purchase and I'm only 7 years into my current one. It will be interesting to see how things like ipods and phones get integrated in the future and how easy it will be to upgrade these sorts of systems for people who want to drive their cars until they die. And interesting to see how voice makes its way into more products - hopefully in ways that don't require reading the manual!

Learning Chinese

I've always wanted to learn Mandarin. Back when I was going to Beijing more often, I took a 6 week course that met twice a week to learn the very basics. From that class I remember how to say hello, goodbye, thank you, train, apple, I, you, America, China, and a few other words :) But it taught me the tones, which was the most helpful part, so when I see a word in Pin Yin today, I know how to say it even if I don't know what it means.

Now that I'm headed back to Beijing in October, I thought it was a perfect excuse to try to learn some more and maybe actually be able to speak more than a few simple words while I'm there. So I signed up for the online version of Rosetta Stone which lets you access all 3 course levels of Chinese for 6 months. Since it was about the same price as just the first course on CD, this seemed to be the best deal. And if I felt ambitious, I could really get my money's worth!

I have to admit that initially I was really skeptical to their whole approach. There is no English at all, no instructions, no "lessons" in the sense of being taught something and then repeating it. It's all learn by doing and all based on pattern-matching. The idea being that you learn best when you have to actually make the connection in your brain without being told what you're even looking at.

So they have screens with men and women, girls and boys and you learn all four words just by association. Or a man eating and a woman drinking and you have to figure out which phrase applies to each. At first I just couldn't imagine learning a language without the standard dictionary approach of here's the english and here's the word in the foreign language: now memorize and repeat. So it was weird getting started, but after an hour or two I realized that with all this pattern matching I was really learning. And not just learning the words, but the grammar constructions as well. It was starting to get interesting.

Then today at lunch I started thinking in Chinese when looking at objects around the room and seeing people in line waiting to order. And the words just came to me, even though I hadn't studied them in a traditional sense. And that's when I knew I was really learning things the right way.

So I'm only on Course 1, Lesson 3, but I highly recommend this way of learning! I'm looking forward to putting some of these new language skills to use in China in two months!

Bastille Day 5k

This past Thursday, I ran in the Bastille Day 5k in the West Loop. And yes, it's weird that the Bastille Day race is held a week before the actual day. It was my first race since Shamrock Shuffle back in March, and only the fourth time I had been out running since then. I know, I've been bad this spring/summer! All of the training for the winter marathon just made me not want to run for a while. But that didn't get in the way from it being a really fun race!

I was a bit nervous about the quality of the race after last year (when they put all of our gear check bags in the gutter unattended in the pouring rain in a not-so-great part of the city). This year's packet pickup didn't help much either as it took 4 people working together about 5 minutes just to look up someone's name and get them their bib and shirt (no goodie bag, as they ran out after 1,000 and had 6,000ish signed up).

After last year's gear check issues, I decided to go bagless to this event. I stuffed my ID, train pass, keys, and $20 into the key pocket in my running shorts and jumped on the train into the city. It was nice to show up at the start line and not have to worry about checking anything and waiting in lines. I was able to get a little cup of water and walk around and stretch.

It was fairly warm at the start, about 80 degrees, but it was at 7:30 at night so at least there wasn't a ton of direct sunlight with the buildings catching most of it. The race started right on time and I fell into a pace of about 9 minute miles. That's definitely less than normal for me in a race this distance, but since I hadn't run much lately, it felt like a good pace.

5k sure feels short when the last two races you've run are a marathon and an 8k. I made it around to the halfway point and ran right past the water table. I was feeling great (probably due to the slow pace!). As I made it to the 3 mile marker with 0.1 to go, I was starting to feel the heat and longing for the water at the end. I put in a solid finish and went searching for post-race snacks. My final time was just over 28 minutes, definitely my worst 5k in a long time, but I wasn't doing this one for speed. My one issue with this race is the lack of energy drinks at the end. They just had water. But it was great to have some water, bagels, granola bars, and bananas as I made my way through the finishing chute.

The race is held in conjunction with a west loop block party, so I walked over there to see what was going on. They had a cover band playing various 80s and 90s songs which was a lot of fun and some French wine to go with the Bastille Day theme. A nice relaxing end to the run for sure. It felt weird walking back to the train without a bag, but nice to not have to search in the gutter for it :)

NYC

Last weekend I was in NYC for the program committee meeting for ACM Multimedia. For those of you not in academia, a program committee is basically the group of people that sit around and figure out which papers go into the proceedings of a conference, in this case one of the big multimedia conferences. I was on a new track this year called Human Centered Multimedia, which was fairly exciting. It's trying to bring more HCI methods into the community and look at multimedia generation and use from a user's point of view (which hasn't always been the case in this community).

I flew on on Saturday afternoon and got to spend a little bit of the day wandering around the city. I made it up to the Hayden Planetarium (of Neil DeGrasse Tyson fame) to see the pluto-less planet exhibit. The Planetarium was really nicely done and really interactive which I enjoyed. They even had a little part of an exhibit on AGN which is what a friend of mine is studying for her PhD!

After the planetarium, I made it over to a vegan restaurant that I've been meaning to try for years: Candle Cafe. It's on the upper east side and has a nicer (and I've been told pricier) cousin Candle 79 on 79th St. Candle Cafe was really nice and the menu had way too many things that looked amazing. I settled on the seitan with gravy and mashed potatoes and was not disappointed! Definitely some of the best seitan I've ever had! I finished it up with a chocolate mousse on top of a cookie and that just hit the spot!


But I did leave room for one of my NYC favorites, curry fries and Yuengling from St. Andrews near Times Sq. I met up with an old work colleague there for some good conversation on the economy, research, and mobile computing! All of the lawn chairs in Times Sq were a bit odd though. I still don't know how I feel about that. At least it makes it easier to cross the street to get to Jamba :)

The PC meeting started bright and early the next day at the Waldorf-Astoria. The Waldorf sort of let me down with long check in lines and way too cold air conditioning (when it was only in the mid 70s outside!). But the meeting went well and we got down to our final paper list with an accept rate of 13.5% (which is crazy low!). I was pretty excited that my paper on TuVista was one of the ones accepted (again for those that don't know, the authors or people affiliated with the authors need to leave the room when your paper is being discussed and you never learn who reviewed your paper). I had a 5, 4, 4, 2 for reviews, which continues my streak of large variance and always having someone who doesn't like my paper :)

Overall, I really liked the set of selected papers we ended up with. In previous years, it's been hard to find enough good ones. I just wish this track had some more submissions that were dead on the description of the track. I want to see more studies of how to produce multimedia that's enjoyable or ways to navigate large databases of multimedia on mobile devices or research methods for the multimedia domain. There were good papers, but I guess since the track is new, it will take a while before people know that it's a place to submit papers like this. I would have had no idea if I wasn't on the program committee.

The PC meeting ended with dinner at the Rock Cafe in the plaza outside 30 Rockefeller Center. Definitely a nice end to the day! The next morning, several members from the PC presented their work in the annual workshop after the PC meeting. I got to see what an old lab-mate of mine under Trevor was up to, so that was fun!

And I couldn't make it out of NYC without stopping for some deep-dish vegan pizza at Cafe Viva on 2nd Ave. Always one of my favorite stops in the city!

All in all, a great trip. And definitely fun to put on my academic hat for a while and really think hard about other peoples' work.

Sartre on the Subway?

From the BBC NewsHour this morning...The Tube in London is now reading quotes from people like Sartre and Gandhi whenever the train has to stop unexpectedly! Much better than Chicago's "We are being delayed waiting for signal clearance. We expect to be moving shortly."

However, I found it sort of amusing that the article I found about it states that the Sartre quotes are designed to "cheer up passengers."