 Hey guys, how's it going? So there's the session title make sure you guys are in the right place. My name is Chris straw. I work at Acquia I'm a project manager Turn program manager there, which is a fancy way of saying that I work with Acquia as big customers on there the big things they want to do in Drupal and mobile has become a relatively hot topic lately inside of the the Drupal Enterprise space and I first became pretty passionate about this topic in 2010 when I was at Oskon and I heard Tim O'Reilly talking about personal sensing technology and at the time I had a very close friend that was really into the idea of personal sensors She was the first person I ever knew with a Fitbit and since I was able to speak with her and get some feedback on this stuff and Hopefully be able to share some interesting knowledge about personal sensing with you guys so How many data points do you collect on a daily basis? There are some things that? You might carry around the collect data for you probably most everyone in here has a phone It's pretty popular also at conferences to take around a pedometer just because people like to brag about how many steps They take in between their sessions You know you guys probably also have an iPad some credit cards in the wallet Maybe you have a metro card or a subway card if you live in a big city all of you probably took airplanes or buses or taxis to get here today and You're probably a member of a social network or three these days and then You've probably used a mapping application And you know Google Maps or Bing or something like that from your cell phone or maybe from a desktop browser in the past week or so All of these things are capturing public data points about you So all of your search histories all of your social network interactions all this stuff has been captured And you're leaving little digital breadcrumbs around the internet about your particular browsing habits And it happens almost unconsciously now We've gotten to the point where we don't necessarily even really think about The fact that every single action that we take online and with our devices that are in our pockets leaves a trace of something that we did So lots of people think of this as mobile spine You know there's a lot of very well-known capabilities I think that people are generally cognizant of most people know their phone has a camera Most people don't realize it never really turns off Most people know that their their cell phone has a microphone on it, which also doesn't ever really turn off Most people know their phone has the internet But they also don't really think about the fact that even when they're not actively using their phone It's sending messages back and forth about what you're doing your habits lots of things about you And then lastly there's there's GPS and other positioning systems within people's phones They're constantly collecting data about Where you are if you're moving if you're stationary You know It's pretty easy to for a GPS to tell if you've just gone on an elevator because it'll have an elevation point for you at the beginning It'll go dark for 30 seconds while you ride the elevator and then pick up your elevation point again at the end There are also some other not so well-known capabilities that Then mobile devices have so also on on that cell phone of yours you have an accelerometer An accelerometer works just like a pedometer and it's going to tell exactly how many steps you're taking It's going to know things about your breathing habits Things about you know you when you're sleeping all these other sorts of things that that accelerometers combined with microphone technology Can pick up and learn about us Most of them have thermometers now there's not a ton of of Mobile weather stations stuff out there yet But that's one of the big ideas behind mobile devices is this idea that we would We would be able to have temperature information about you know how warm or how cold we are or any sort of other Weather-based information about the environment that we're in For the more you have a clock it's pretty basic But the clock is really key to all this because your phone is able to keep track of the length of time that you're doing certain things And that's very important for understanding the action that you're taking at that at that given moment and The compass aspect of it and that's pretty self-explanatory but one thing that has been coming up in in Mobile device land lately is the ability to monitor the power output of your phone So at any given time you have a bunch of different applications that are running on your phone And I was just reading an article on rewrite web the other day about how all of those mobile applications That we all use that are free to download They're constantly sending data back and forth across the internet and that's draining the batteries from our phones and You're actually able to profile The power usage and power consumption on your phone and understand what mobile apps you're running So any application that has access to Monitor the battery life of your phone can also know all the other apps. They're running on it So the point of this is all our phones know more about us than we think Even the most technically savvy among us have probably heard one thing that was surprising that tirade about mobile devices But there's there's more to it than that. There's also digital fingerprints that we leave in in other ways We've lots of application data about us and all of us use mobile apps Most of us use computers iPads that sort of thing Those all through their applications are also collecting information about our habits There's also things that we like to refer as proximal data Proximal data is data of the people next to you It does not necessarily matter so much if you forgot your cell phone today But if someone else notices that you're here and tags you or talks about you or checks you in or you know Whatever else what name your you know for square Facebook like application of choice Via proximal data, we can also understand a lot of you usually proximal data is used to collaborate Primary data so data that you're presenting but oftentimes proximal data can be used in place of primary data and Then lastly you have environmental data. So there's there's lots of environmental sensors It's talks not really about these things, but it's important to know that every time you swipe your credit card Most of the time when you're in taxicab You get photographed or you leave little digital fingerprints around via your your wallet and the transactions that happen in your wallet so This is all pretty cool. Actually. I mean we ended up with try quarters I don't know how growing up as a little kid Watching Star Trek with my dad when I was like 10 11 years old that That I saw Spock with that try quarter and I have one of those in my pocket That is so cool The thing that I think that We always thought about for mobile devices We always thought about mobile devices delivering us information We want to know more things about the world around us But it's kind of flip-flopped. Um, these devices now instead of telling us a lot of data, which they do do They're actually used to gather a tremendous amount of information about us And I'm not sure if we ever really thought about it that way until recently and we can gain a lot of insights into human behavior So one of the big shifts in that mentality has been from this idea of active participation versus passive participation So when you're talking about actively sharing something you're making a conscious effort to log on to Facebook and to type something in or to Check in or any of those other things that require an action from you to actually do But now there's a whole lot of passive communication that's happening when all of us, you know download an app from The the iTunes store, you know we all we all look at that license agreement for about a quarter of a second before hit accept and We just gave away All of our data that could be captured by that program So once you opt in you're constantly passively monitored until you opt out again and the point of that is is now that there is is Data being collected about you even when you're not consciously providing that data. It gives us a lot more information to work with So one of the things that I don't want to dive too deeply into here But it's definitely worth mentioning is this is scary for a lot of people because people think about the idea of privacy Especially people that have Things in their private lives or controversial figures or whatnot that they don't necessarily want those things to be public Privacy is a huge concern and we have yet to solve it. There's a lot of bills going on in the European Union right now around Privacy and ownership of personal data The United States is also considering similar things with the Obama administration So there is a there's a whole lot to do here And this is kind of the bike shed of this talk is I don't want to dive too deeply into Privacy implications. I'm sure it'll come up and if any of you have questions about it I understand at least a little bit about it But I really want to try to focus on something different and and what that is is I want to look at How this data can be used within society to collect information about all of us not any one of us So look at some early adopters of this. I don't know if you guys have heard of Hassan alahi He was targeted By the United States government as a watchlist candidate not that long after September 11 He had been traveling around the world and it just got back to the United States and was detained by the FBI for for some time and He is an artist. He travels around and does art installations and what Hassan found out is that You know, he was always in the system from this point on and he was questioned on a weekly or a monthly basis about his activities And so rather than wait for the FBI to come to him He started going to the FBI. He got the card from from one of his agent handlers and said, you know what? I'm just gonna let you know where I'm at and This turned into something over time Hassan had been doing this for a couple of years where he would send, you know Oh, hey, I'm going to Senegal and by the way, here's a picture of me with, you know, a tiger or something like that I don't know a pony But he would start sending the FBI agents his vacation photos And soon it became a lot more than that They were sharing all sorts of personal anecdotes and all sorts of other things and then his FBI handler left And so it was back to that same routine of, you know Get called in every couple of weeks to go get questioned by the FBI And so what he decided to do is he decided to turn into an art project and he he set up a website Which you can view right there and it's literally his entire life where he is at every moment I think it even has the phone calls he makes It's literally everything about that guy in a timeline and over the years He's amassed hundreds of thousands of photos data points everything about his life is tracked on the internet Another person that that is kind of inspirational in this is a guy from Microsoft by the name of Gordon Bell and What Gordon Bell did and this was actually largely controversial at the time is When he became an executive at Microsoft He started carrying around a portable camera around his neck and he took pictures of everyone he met with every day mundane objects like the food he eats Every single thing every time he interacts with a piece of technology He's filming what he's doing and he's amassed what is considered to be probably the largest online repository of Computing and technology in existence. It's almost like a museum of Technology through this guy's eyes over many many years It's one of those interesting projects to browse. I highly recommend I know most of you don't like to type in a Microsoft comm donating But I highly recommend looking at that site because it's a really really fascinating look at technology so these guys were at the forefront of understanding what mobile sensing really meant and While I said I don't want to focus too much on Individuals I think that it's important to realize that these guys are pioneers in a way of understanding this whole idea of mobile interaction and personal sensing So let's get back to what the meat and potatoes of the talk is if you will Populations of people are always more interesting than individuals The yes, there's privacy concerns associated with individuals. Yes There's individual people that we can look to to try to understand this space But really it's about understanding us as people in a population You know, there's there's a lot of different sizes of population you can talk about But really we want to look at insights into us as humans and to really understand our own behavior So I'm gonna show you guys some examples here in just a second So one of my favorite sayings is a population a statistical population is not just a collection of anecdotal points You have to define a population by a measurable group of people that have common characteristics And that population data should then be able to be sliced and diced based on those characteristics Finally the the size of the population is not really relevant. I mean you can have a population of this room We're all at Drupal con. We're all attending this session So we can be considered a statistical population and we could probably get some interesting stuff from us about our mobile sensors right now But it doesn't necessarily matter if we're kind of talking about all you know However many billion people are on the planet or if we're just talking about the people here so one of the most interesting ways of gathering a true population of mobile sensing Devices is this project right here is sponsored by Nokia. It's the LaSenne data collection campaign What Nokia did is they said well it's it's Really hard for us to get people to opt-in to having their mobile devices monitored by us Moreover, we don't really have an app to sell that provides a tremendous amount of value so we're just going to give 200 people cell phones for free for life and The caveat of that is we have to be able to collect every bit of data about those people and so it started in 2009 and They've been operating since then with these 200 individuals that live in Switzerland, and they're literally tracking everything about their habits at all time and They've got in a tremendous amount of research published around the human behavior habits of all of these people And they're not looking at any one individual. They're looking at the collective habits How they interact with each other how their friendships work like what creates interest among people that will allow them to actually stop And talk to other people and these phones are incredible because they have Bluetooth sensing technology They have the internet they have GPS all the bells and whistles that smartphones have But they also whenever two people that are a part of the project come close to one another they share data and that really enables a really interesting thing because it creates not just this idea of Nokia watching over all of these people, but it creates this network of sharing between all these people so they can all learn about each other and One of the big research projects was was understanding the relationships that they created via this project and I really encourage you guys. I got a link to this up in the upper right corner It's kind of hard to read. I encourage you guys to go look at the research These guys have done because it's really brilliant and amazing stuff So let's think about the size of this data for a second Zenga is you know a popular casual gaming company that has like six of the top ten Facebook games and You know, I'm sure everybody's at least seen words with friends. If not played it themselves If you look at how many people use Zenga 360 million people and the vast majority of them something like 80% of them connect via their mobile devices At that rate that is so much larger than all of those other things like we're talking about you know Way bigger than the entirety of Xbox live way bigger than all of World of Warcraft Way bigger than all of these things that we consider to be really big technology platforms And because the power of casual gaming reaches out to us and provides us with this little bit of entertainment We're willing to give Zenga everything about ourselves in order to play games Furthermore if you look at Facebook Facebook as of you know December, I think Claimed 845 million monthly users And of those about 60% Connected via mobile application. That's not using your mobile device to go to Facebook comm. That's actually using a Facebook mobile app That is really tremendous that 60% of people are using Facebook via app so looking at the population there you have hundreds if not thousands of data points that are collected about people that use those two applications and They do it willingly and freely and almost without thought If any of you I mean I'm sure some of you guys use both Facebook and a Zenga game There are literally thousands of data points about you because of your use of those applications But what is really interesting is that you're able to cross-reference all of these between Associates, so you know you play words with friends against other people You also have other sensors, so Facebook for example is able to tap into a lot of hardware features your of your phone around location And and non-personal sensors So when you report that you're at Drupal con that is in and of itself a data point even though It's not directly related to the device that you're working on and Then there's also loads of information that is unrelated to that application that is collected I know that that my phone collects information about my music habits and that is often shared on Facebook if I'm playing Spotify on my phone So every Spotify song I listen to on my cell phone gets linked back to Facebook and other people get to look at what I'm looking at All of those things are again these little digital breadcrumbs that we leave about our behavior and habits So seriously Think about the amount of data that we're talking about here We're talking about hundreds of millions of people collecting thousands of data points every month That is a tremendous information repository just in two applications that is Could provide an incredible insight into our human lives and our behavior And again not any one person's behavior But think about the ability to track things like the spread of a disease Because people are posting about it on Facebook Tracking political trends tracking any of these other things that that you could look at by looking at you know a billion points of data about human beings and These are some of the types of questions that you could ask a data set like that Where were people when they were playing words with friends? I mean were they sitting on the toilet were they You know riding a bicycle that would be really hard. Hopefully they weren't driving You know how long did they use them What was the length of time that people interacted with these sorts of things and what does that mean about our behavior? You know, are you are you trying to close down Facebook real quick while you're at work because your boss might be looking over your shoulder? And then what actions did you take and that's really where the the key is is understanding the actions So again just sort of reiterating what I just said You're probably bored if you're playing Zenga Or you're listening to me present at Drew Baccon But anyway, the idea is is that you're able to model Pieces of human behavior based on our use of these applications So this does a lot of interesting things The implications for healthcare are huge if any of you have a Fitbit You guys can know relative to other people that have Fitbits what your exercise level is We could also like I said track the the spread of contagions Zombie outbreaks for example There's a lot going on in the protest space about this I mean the protester was a big topic this year. They're this past year rather and in protests you're seeing applications like Ushahidi and other push-based data applications out there that are really aggregating a lot of information about Protesters and it's on both sides You also saw a lot of things with Not necessarily protests related stuff, but natural disasters the earthquake in Haiti is a great example of that Because of our ability to collect information about mobile data we through Ushahidi people were able to see Which roads were open where security centers were where hospitals were still open all based on the aggregation of this mobile data And then other things where it could be interesting is I mentioned the mobile weather stations earlier But the cartel project from MIT is all about collecting information about the speed at which you're traveling Based on the GPS in your cell phone And if you're in your car it'll know you're in your car and it'll be able to figure out where traffic is blocked And you know any of you that That have been in Boston and driven, you know any of the highways in the middle of town Can understand why the folks at MIT would be interested in something like that Aqua is based in Boston and it sometimes takes you know 40 minutes to get to the office from downtown So those sorts of things allow us to have an unprecedented window Into all the different facets of our lives that could benefit from understanding more about how other people are experiencing the same thing So here's a few projects. I wanted to point you guys to I Mentioned the LDCC earlier on a previous slide, but there it is again The open geocoder project is really fascinating It's a mobile device app for mapping where it takes map points and tracks your your GPS coordinates and provides sort of a quasi Open-layer like overlay where you can present. Hey, I want to know For example, I live in Portland, Oregon I want to know that I'm walking around in the Pearl neighborhood in Portland, Oregon And so that open open geocoder allows you to say I'm in Portland, I know that by my GPS coordinates other people have tagged where I am standing as the pearl So I am actually in the pearl Open sense which is Interesting project Not to be confused with HTC's opening of their sense UI that's different Open sense is all about again a mapping application around personal data and sensor data It's probably the most developed API I've seen around Being able to collect sensor information. So any of you that are more into the development side of things I really encourage checking that out. They're actually some companies They're starting to do some really interesting things based on the open sense ideas And then I mentioned cartel with the the folks at MIT monitoring traffic patterns So eventually this all has to come back to triple, right? We are at Drupal con and as much as I love to sit and talk about mobile sensing technology. There is really a point to all of this You know the important thing in Drupal is is Drupal is really known well for its data model and There should be ways for us to look at this mobile sensing information and be able to aggregate that data and store it in Drupal Maybe not to the multi hundred billion Data point model, but being able to store Aggregate data that has been pre-mined or pre-filtered and then visualize that data So Drupal on the the end of this can work in mobile applications as that content store as The collection of the mobile data and as the visualization of that data And that's a really powerful combination and I think that there is a lot of interesting stuff to be done in Drupal around these projects and You can see one of them there maps.ed.gov has a broadband penetration map that is a visualization of Broadband data now they don't store their data in Drupal the map is pre-rendered Except you can still browse it and see it in a way that is really interesting using Drupal So those are some ways that we as a community can look at how we can interact with this this new idea of mobile sensing technology and Hopefully jump on top of it and do some really interesting things So that's it if anybody has any questions would be happy to take them They said to go up to the microphone if you had a question or if you are too shy you can shout it at me And I'll repeat it for you So the question is let me see if this works In the ideas of responsive design We want to be able to create better UX via responsive design for mobile devices Is there any way to tap into personal sensing technology to enable that to happen? Is that a fair statement? So the idea behind responsive design we don't get to know a lot in the web app space yet about devices But it's coming and right now we get sometimes things like orientation. So a website will change when you turn an iPad sideways We get geolocated data often But there's not really you know access to the thermometer or something like that on your cell phone I think that HTML5 is enabling a lot of that to start to happen where we're we're figuring out how to get at the sensing portion of the device easier and in terms of the responsive design idea, I think that it especially related to aggregate populations It would be interesting to be able to do ad hoc mobile usability testing over a population of people so you have a Mobile website that is out there and via some sort of data collection system on a sensor You're able to see how people are using that site when they're using that site and and understand when people want to visit your site and How they're using it when they're there on a mobile device and what's working? What is it? I think if that's where this is really enabling that sort of thing I mean the responsive idea has a lot and I'm not really as versed on How that might interact with sensing technology other than some of the stuff we get in HTML5 right now Um for like all these data points. Is there anyone that's really processing the this vast amount of information? like Like on a broad scale like say the entire Verizon network or something like that Well Verizon is probably doing it You know one of the one of the good ones that I should have mentioned, but I didn't Twitter is archiving all of its tweets in the National Archive and so That right there is a vast amount of people's public opinion And I mean it's probably a lot of like snooki references and cat pictures But at the same time like there's probably valuable things about election data and about You know Arab Spring how a lot of that happened on Twitter a lot of the organization of that And so that data is out there and the US government is using it through a lot of open data projects And then moreover Twitter is using it to to continue to Have a basis of understanding public opinion. You also see a lot of things in like the ratings folks the the people that do like the Nielsen ratings and all that sort of stuff where You know you'll look at at policy perceptions So a lot of perception sensing across these big amounts of data but a lot of it is really holed up right now in an individual company and A lot of it is like, you know the guys that own the apps, right? So Zenga probably has a tremendous amount of data about everybody plays words with friends Or Scrabble or what's the scramble that scrambles the new one or and then You also have places like Google where Google has a Tremendous amount of data housed within it and it allows us to window into some of it But not all of it because they see that data as as their leverage and what they're selling All right, cool Great presentation. Thank you. Thanks for Drupal today What is the best tools to start aggregating and capturing this data on our sites right now? so Again, I mentioned HTML5 and the ability to capture especially like geo located data a lot of it has to do with integrations So using things like services and feeds and pulling in data from other areas and then like I said, I mean Drupal can scale pretty well, but having billions of data points is is pretty tough to just all fit in anything more than a table And so I think that that where Drupal is going to really shine is if you're able to have some sort of of mobile data Aggregation service and then pulling that aggregated data into visualizations That's where it becomes really interesting for Drupal right because now all of a sudden I can see traffic patterns From the cartel system overlaid on a local map And I know that that's kind of been done, but There are a lot of interesting things especially in in the the disaster recovery and relief space Restore the golf is a great example of that where they're using a lot of open-layer stuff to to visualize The impact of the whole deep water horizon thing So that's where Drupal really shines right now It's not necessarily in the the collection of that data, but really in the aggregation visualization of it. Okay. Thank you I guess this is sort of along the same lines of like implementation like with Drupal's back end being By default my sequel. Do you think they'll need to switch that out for another database system? To take full advantage or are you just using this as purely visualization? Well, you can do that. So, I mean we have the ability to have a different database in the back end of Drupal And so, you know, you might store your visual visualizations in Mongo because you don't want to build the visualization every time You might want to have I don't know. So here's another dirty word oracle As the the main store for all of these data points and then interface with that I mean all of those things are capable in Drupal Which is is great and you know again that speaks to the integration side of things too, right? I mean if we ever really need to have that massive data capture somewhere It's very easy to integrate Drupal into that data system and and use the the tools available to us to collect that data And then visualize it yeah, there's there so the question was about the the Nokia funded research project in in Switzerland and a gentleman was asking if There's any known effects to their behavior based upon the research that's being being performed with that population Yes, absolutely. There is it's one of the things that they tout as an interesting result of the project that People's ability to identify others that are in this same program has actually led to more interconnectedness between members Then would have existed normally And it goes on to explain a lot about that and in a lot of very in-depth research e organizational behavior e sort of ways but the interesting part is the ability for people to connect better between themselves and To understand more about common and shared interests The research is there on the site. You can actually read the paper. It's really good really fascinating anybody else That's actually that's a fascinating question actually so the question is you know, what about the idea of of Using Drupal to facilitate an understanding of the data that we're collecting and Trying to build tools that more than just visualization collect perception of the data itself And I think that that is a really interesting space for Drupal Because we have great community features because we have collaborative environment because we are an open-source project And we're built by a lot of different people understanding perceptions and attitudes like that I Think that that would be a really interesting way to explore how we could do this in Drupal and how we could really make something interesting So you talked a lot about the sensors and the data that you collect from cell phones But I just wanted to mention something that I had actually been involved in a little bit Which is other kinds of sensor mobile sensor Collection through devices that you actually want to carry specifically for that purpose. So the Fitbit is kind of like that but More on the open-source Side of the ecology. There's a website called Pactube P a c h t u b e And it's designed for the collection of sensor data from any kind of device that you can attach to the web Basically, so a lot of people are using Small hardware devices like arduinos and things like that and sensors in their gardens on their rooftops And and that they carry around with them or put in cars And building sort of virtual networks of people collecting similar kinds of information and then displaying it through Pactube Which is also an open-source project. So something else to look into so with Pactube wasn't that the the one where the grant proposal went Out to do mobile weather stations And it was it was with the US government where we were talking about Aggregate collection of mobile weather information based on individuals That was the genesis of the project and it's since expanded to basically collecting any kind of sensor information about anything And you can sort of generate your own Pactube profile and then say I'm gonna be collecting data about Soil moisture and temperature in the Pacific Northwest or something. Yeah, yeah so I went to Washington State University where We care a lot about farmland because that's all that's really there and so we had a lot of this this Pactube stuff with Soil moisture and rainfall Because the water table and Pullman is really really high and we have a lot of our t-jun wells and stuff like that And people wanted to be able to forecast Like crop planning and stuff based on soil moisture and it was all this whole mobile sensor idea I mean not related to a person but you'd weatherize one of those things and stick it out in a field one of the One of the things that I like most about that Model of doing it is that the data that they collect is open So if you wanted to build a Drupal site to do analysis and aggregation of a specific sort of topic You could go out and find other people who were storing Data points on Pactube and bring that data into a Drupal site for analysis or Or representation somehow. So yeah, thanks for bringing that up. That's a great point anyone else Thanks a lot for listening to me guys appreciate it