Met with Davide to catch up after the holidays. I reminded Davide what we had talked about before, and we decided to go away and do a literature search for related things.
I re-iterated my idea about using prediction to get a message to the next expected meeting point, but if the timing does not overlap, using an unknown proxy at that location to pass the message on.
I have come back from a busy two weeks of selling photographs (oldtowncarnivalweek.co.uk/photos/) and visiting relatives, and I am thoroughly exhausted! And I am happy to say, that I didn’t think about PhD stuff once, which hopefully means, my brain has been processing data in the background. This said, I have forgotten where I was before I left, so I am hoping that all that background processing will mean I have already solved the problems, when I re-discover them.
My plan for the next week or so, it to get back up to speed by re-reading my notes, and starting to test out my/our hypothesis, starting with the suggestions that Davide made in the last meeting.
Paddy has left for Tazmania, and unfortunately, we were unable to meet to talk about funding before he left. This means that I am at a loss as to how to proceed. I have retrospectively applied for half fees, with the knowledge that IRCSET will allow me to carry on using unused funds for my stipend. The only worry I have, is that there will not be enough to cover fees. I may try to apply for 6 month fees, rather than a full 12.Paddy did originally say that he could at least find some money to cover fees.
I have also applied for the CSI research bursary, but I am hoping that Paddy will be able to find extra funding (he previously suggested that he had some LERO grant money left, and an associated project).
I have received an email from IRCSET with regards to Paddy leaving, I am still waiting for advice from Paddy as to how I proceed.
Met with Davide to talk about where I currently am in my research.
I talked him through Ideas about Vector Clocks for Proximity and Location that I had recently transcribed into a document from my notebook, and we came up with some plans for the next few weeks whilst he is away, and agreed to meet when he is back at the end of August.
The following are some notes we made whilst discussing my idea:
Formal notation regarding node location overlaps.
Ovy < Owy → message v,w
When the overlap of the set of locations that v visits in relations to y, is less than the set of locations that w visits in relations to y, then pass the message from v to w.
We discussed security withing DTNs and realised that neither of us has much knowledge of this, so Davide suggested I look up the work of Eiko Yoneki, who may have published in this area, as it is something we will have to consider.
We also discussed how to compare the graph generted from locations, and the graph genereted from proximity, and how we could combine them. Davide suggested looking at the work of Schlomo Havlin.
Finally we talked about where to go from here. I will look at some datasets, including CABSPOTTING, where there is fine grained location data, and try to test the hypothesis that I came up with. for example, look at the overlap of locations for individuals over certain timescales, and produce a probability distribution of overlap. Also, make a new graph whihc is formed by overlaps based on whether a node visits a location (with no ordering), and see whether this has any interesting properties. Overall, try to use the datasets to test out all of the hypothesis.
Talked about the project so far, I said that I had started a workthrough of people’s movement patterns, and had come up with many ideas around it, and said that what I would like to do is present what I had found so far, in terms of node statistics at any given point in time, and some interesting aspects that came out.
I also listed some of the questions I had thought about during this exercsise, as follows:
We agreed that the most interesting part is the forward prediction of location, and Paddy said that if I can do all of this, then it will be my PhD. Paddy also said that I should spend some time understanding the realms of computational complexity, just so I can recognise it when I see it.
Also spoke about funding. Paddy is looking at finaces this week.
I asked about getting a new 2nd supervisor, and Paddy suggested I look for a new primary supervisor, someone who I could knock on the door and ask for help – as he is still a visiting supervisor, he will be here a bit, but not much. I said that I had spoken to Padraig Cunningham, and he suggested I speak to Paddy about path to finishing, and then come and see him. Paddy intimated that he would be a good supervisor, but that I would have to be very concise when discussing PhD stuff with him, as he won’t like waffle!
New tasks:
Existing Tasks:
Project specific tasks
Other tasks
Last week I set the following tasks:
- Continue/Finish worked example of interaction network using vector clocks
- Plan short experiment as above (or at least think about whether it would be useful)
- Get a better understanding of Graph Theory by finishing Barabasi’s book.
- Make some enquiries about datasets
and
- Implement vector clock code in the simulator, based on proximity, and work towards a location based one.
- Read Knox’s thesis.
- Generate a rough outline of chapters for my thesis, and identify the main areas for the background section
- Write down ideas about how to define locations (draft)
- Dig out reviews on DTN’s- especially about patterns and finding important nodes
- Find out about funding from September 2010, (IRCSET, CSI, Lero, more?)
I have got a good way through doing a worked example; I have created 6 characters (based on real people) and have given them home, work, and leisure locations. I have created a notation for recording movement events, and have generated skeleton location graphs for all individuals. I have started to generate the characters daily movements.
I have given a little more thought about planning the experiment suggested in my previous post, and have identified some participants (the same ones I based the workthrough on), and I believe collecting this information will be useful to get a good idea for people’s real movements.
The following week is a busy one for me, as I have to demonstrate (Monday 3 hours), attend and mark presentations for the HDIP class on Wednesday (all day) and on Friday I am visiting family in the UK (volcanoes permitting). After this I have very few demonstrating responsibilities. So the following is my plan for then next two weeks.
other tasks
In last week’s update I said that I intended to do the following:
- get a better understanding of Graph Theory by finishing the book.
- Implement vector clock code in the simulator, based on proximity, and work towards a location based one.
- Read Knox’s thesis.
- Formalise my thoughts on how to use Vector Clocks of proximity and location, and what metrics can be derived from them
- Generate a rough outline of chapters for my thesis, and identify the main areas for the background section
Since then, I had a quick chat with Paddy, and we discussed simplifying what I should work on, and came up with a plan to create an example work through of interactions and locations.
Before that, I had started a rough plan of network of interactions within a ficticous network, I also continued to work on the simulator software, and had generated latitude longitude pairs for every reading in the database (479,148 in total).
Since our meeting, I concentrated on working up an example workthough, and for this week I plan to continue this.
I also thought about a small and easy experiment to test the validity of what I was generating; ask some volunteers to:
This could conceivably be done very easily in written notebook form, or slightly more challenging – as an online system. This will allow us to get a better idea of what peoples real movements are, and see if it looks like the workthrough we have generated.
My plans for this week are as follows:
(note – Laura is coming home this week)
Other tasks to keep in mind:
Met with Paddy,
Talked about the possibility of needing to get a new supervisor, and Paddy said that IF he does leave to Tazmania, then we will have to think about who could be the best person for the job. We thought that if I do finish up at Christmas 2010, then perhaps I won’t need a new supervisor, as we might be able to sort it out remotely. But we will both think about this.
Also discussed possible funding sources from August onwards, he said that he should be able to fund me for 3 to 6 months using some Lero grant money, but this would have some associated responsibilities. I asked whether I should try to apply to IRCSET for an extension, and said that yes I should, but for the time-being, I should just look into what the formal process is to do that. Also he suggested that come June, I should apply to the school for a demonstratorship, and that he is trying to build a pool of Lero money to top-up stipends to the current level (as the school one is less than the IRCSET one).
Finally discussed research, I said that I didn’t really have alot to talk about, so Paddy suggested that in a week’s time, I present a pitch to him about where I currently am in my research, and where I am going.
Had a discussion with Davide in our cube, about the direction for 2010, he summarised it in an email as follows:
Here are a few ideas which came out in our chat this afternoon…
1. We have to set up a plan for your PhD: it should be something related to mobile phone networks: collecting a rich dataset (looking for what, in particular?), using it (which analysis shall we do on it?), and writing (useful) applications based on that.
2. It would be interesting to study and discover hidden patterns in the phone-mobility network. For example, a person could attend the same locations of somebody else wihtout noticing it, and this could be exploited in finding new friends on FB or new collaborations in a research environment.
3. Mobile phones could be used as probes to collect spatial informations, such as popularity, traffic, access points, temperature, pressure, ecc…
4. An application could be based on finding out a useful spot for installing a power socket, or discovering somebody with a charger when I need it…
5. It would be interesting to check if we can find out “meeting with strangers” in the dataset by Kevin McCarthy, but we still should ask them if they know each other or not.
6. We are going to meet with Kevin McCarthy this month and ask him what they are going to do with their data (and maybe do some work together).
The main points I remember are:
I said that over Christmas I had realised that what we/I am really interested in, is discovering the hidden patterns of life that are around us all the time, but that we cannot see, and in this example, the movement of the inhabitants of a city.
There needs to be some application for this knowledge, for example, Davide suggested a social network application (see above) that detects the presence of other users, and if you are not allready friends on facebook, then maybe you should be if you come into contact with them regularly. He suggested it might be better if we confined it to researchers in a seminar – if you attend the same seminars as others, you should probably be aquainted.
I re-iterated my idea about having a platform upon which many applications could sit, for example the FB app. (above) sits next to other applications that run over the general system, which gives methods and triggers to the application when another user is in proximity (e.g. who is nearby, and methods to communicate with them). This could be implented directly (using bluetooth lookups etc.) or centrally using a combination of location, bluetooth lookups and a shared server.
This platform could be used as a test-bed for researchers too – e.g. researchers could run simple experiments over this network such as testing infection rates in a more realistic environment.
The carrot is the intersting applications that users can use, the reward (for us) is collecting this social interaction data and the stick is having to run the application on the phone.