Cameraphone Workshop at Ubicomp

We had a very successful workshop on Pervasive Image Capture and Sharing (PICS) at Ubicomp 2006. Cameraphone-related research from around the world.

In addition to talking about our work, we did a field trip at Fashion Island Mall in Newport Beach with ZoneTag-enabled cameraphones. Pictures are on Flickr — we had 5 groups with Flickr userids pics2006a through e. I liked ZoneTags, but I quickly got frustrated with the tagging — although ZoneTags makes it fast by suggesting tags, it’s still slow, working through the different screens and checking/unchecking tags. I quickly stopped tagging and just hit “upload.” However, this wasn’t always a good idea. Tags and title persist across images, which is both good and bad — it saves work if you are re-using tags, but it led us to mis-tag and mis-title images when we just hit “upload” and didn’t go back through the tags.

Service Trips

On my old blog I posted a query about some companies I had run across that organized service trips overseas –doing volunteer work of various kinds. Someone who found that post asked me what I had learned, because she was considering a trip with one of the companies I listed — but I had heard nothing. So she stayed in touch and just emailed me about her trip with Global Volunteers. She was very enthusiastic about the experience (she went to rural China to teach English) and the organization.