We recently held a one day conference here at CASA called Smart Cities. For the conference we built various exhibition pieces and my contribution to the conference was the London Data Table, a projection table the shape of Greater London. The table had various visualisation projected onto the surface; from live aircraft positions, live traffic and bike hire usage to movies of public transport over 24 hours. We got some great feedback from the attendees and I thought I would share my documentation of the whole process of build the table, from start to finish.

Step 1: The Planning

The biggest issue in this project was size. How big do we make the table? Can we find a projector with a short enough throw to project to the table? How were we going to mount the projector. I downloaded the outline of London from OS OpenData (http://os.openstreetmap.org/data/) and created a pdf of the London outline, this would serve as our master vector throughout the process. I’d be lying if I said we knew all the answers the questions at the start of the project but with a few calculations and a lot of paper we mocked up the outline on paper (to scale) and stuck it to the wall of the office.

Planning the project this way allowed us to see that a normal projector would be impractical (due to the distance required to project an image of that size) and that we would have to buy a short throw projector, not ideal. Time was against us so we ordered the projector, took the leap and started to build the table.

Step 2: Building the Table
I wanted this table to become a piece of furniture! There was no point putting in all this effort to build a table which would only last the length of the conference and then started to sag, as MDF eventually does. So after some advice from the staff in the Bartlett workshop I decided to order a 10ft x 5ft (3m x 1.5m) piece of birch plywood. Birch plywood has excellent strength with a beautiful finish but is some what more expensive that MDF.

Here at the Bartlett @ UCL we have an excellent workshop that has a wealth of tools including laser cutters, a full wood and metal workshop, 3D prototyping and a CNC milling machine. This would cut the outline from our sheet. Armed with an Adobe Illustrator file of Greater London, I exported to DXF (a CAD standard file format) and loaded it into the milling machine. Watch the video to see what happened next.

Within 10 minutes we had the outline of London cut out. A quick chisel to remove the frame and we were ready to go into the preparation stage.

Step 3: Preparation
Out of the whole project this was the most boring part. Sanding the table down for preparation then painting a layer, then sanding again. Repeat this 4 times until I got an even finish over the whole surface and the table top was complete. I used a standard white emulation, the same paint you would use for walls with 10% water added to ease application. After a whole day of painting and drying and this was what the table looked like from above.

Step 4: Table Legs and Projector
I had the idea straight from the start that I was going to use a set of legs from Ikea to quickly make a table. A trip to Ikea later we had a set of T-Legs from a Galant desk. Screwed them on and we have an instant table.

Step 5: Align the projector
This was the most time consuming part of the project, aligning the projected image to the table. We mounted the projector on a basketball stand, which was a great idea from George MacKerron, which was custom mount screwed into the projector mounts made of the same birch as the table top and filled the base with water for stability. We created another vector to align the river Thames to the table and adjusted the height of the stand to fit. The results were fantastic!

So there you go, that’s how you build a table the shape of London and create an exciting new exhibit to show off the vast number of open data visualisations we create at CASA. In the next few posts, I’ll go into the in’s and out of the software and how I created the base software and the Aircraft Visualisation that we displayed on the table.

Utilities

• Tiny Expander - Decompresses most archives
• VLC - Great media player – Plays most movies
• GIMP – Photoshop Alternative
• Flow (FTP/SFTP) – $10 – £6.99
• CyberDuck (FTP Free)
• Skype
• Spotify
• Evernote - Store notes across platforms
• Dropbox
• Growl - Notification Manager – £1.99
• Colloquy – (IRC)
• SuperDuper! – Total Backup Solution – $27.95
• TweetDeck

Document Creation 

• Pages - £13.99
• Keynote
• MS Office 2011
• Text Wrangler – (AppStore)
• TeXShop (MacTeX)
• LyX - LaTeX IDE
• Omnigraffle - Drawing Charts and Flow Diagrams – $99

Virtualisation – Run Windows as a Virtual Machine

• VMWare Fusion – £39.99
• Virtual Box (Free Alternative)

Cartographic Software

• QGIS – Free GIS software
• Till Mill  - Create Map Tiles
• Google Earth
• Google Notifier

Development

• GitHub
• iTerm
• Remote Desktop Connection
• Chicken of the VNC
• Sequel Pro
• Versions
• Xcode
• Hex Fiend
• Processing

UCL Specific 

• Cisco VPN
• Sophos Anti Virus

Mango,  Windows 7′s Operating System, visually looks fantastic and has come a long way from the days of the old Window’s OS.  This is down to a lovely UI, Metro, and an animated homescreen which displays information to the user as interactive tiles.

Anyway, back to the BootCamp.  Nokia was kind enough to give us lucky attendees a brand new Nokia Lumina 800 and 20 really lucky attendees the device on the day (which I was one of those 20 developers).  The only condition, well Gentleman’s Agreement of some sorts,  for getting this phone was that you have to publish your app within 30 days! Not long but I’m up for a challenge. I have always said the best way to learn a new skill, language or SDK is to dive right in at the deep end and this seems like a great way to do it, plus I got the phone as an incentive.  I paid my £65 subscription to App Hub, Microsoft’s Xbox and Phone Marketplace this afternoon and made the leap.

I’ve decided to blog about my experiences for the next 30 days with WP7 in a mini-series I like to call App in 30 days.

I plan to go from nothing to App in 30 days, idea to UI mockups to implementation to Marketplace all in my spare time at night and weekends.  By March 6th 2012 I will have my first app in the Marketplace and a better understanding of the native framework.

Better get some sleep as it all kicks off tomorrow. This should be exciting.

The first award, which I won this week, was the UCL Provost’s Award for Public Engagement 2012.

This award was really unexpected and I still can’t quite believe I’ve won it. The Award panel said:

“The selection panel was impressed with Steve’s leadership of, and commitment to, several really innovative projects. It was clear that Steve’s understanding of the needs of people outside UCL, not to mention his own high standards of work, are central to the success of the projects he has been involved in, and that he has been a fantastic example to colleagues at UCL.”

Wow what a write up! I need to say thanks to a few people who have encouraged me through theses projects. Firstly I need to say thanks to my supervisor and boss, Andy Hudson-Smith (@digitalurban) who has given me the encouragement I needed to do yet another cool project. Thanks to Martin Zaltz Austwick for being an ace co-presenter on the awesome Global Lab Podcast and finally to my girlfriend Helen who has had to put up with my geeky chat and late night coding sessions.

The second award is the JISC Geo-developers of the Year 2012 for GEMMA (Geospatial Engine for Mass Mapping Applications).

In 6 months we developed a mapping platform, iPhone application and Chrome plugin which opens up  a small subset of the complex world of geovisualisation to everyone through a little gerbil named Gemma. JISC were impressed with amount of code that made GEMMA so simple to use and transparent. Even though we didn’t take home the best project award, which went to Nature Locator incidentally, I feel that this was the best award to take away on the night.

So what’s in store for the next 11 months? Well hopefully more of the same. Development of BigDataToolkit has started and should have its first application by the end of February and we will have some more cool projects lined up in 6 months so stayed tuned.

London 2012 is only 1 year away! This is an exciting time for London and the UK in general. The new stadiums are nearly complete and most of the tickets for the events have already been sold. Hopefully if you applied for a ticket you got one!

Behind the scenes here at BigDataToolKit and at CASA, I have been busy building different systems that will allow anyone to collect and analyse big, actually massive, data sets. One of the first proofs of concepts was the ability to collect real time live data from Twitter, which resulted in the fantastic Tweet-o-Meter. The meters have been running non-stop for the last 18 months now and are still as popular as the day we launched them. The obvious next stage was to create another exciting live visualisation that shows the data on a map.

To celebrate, I’m collecting Tweets that contain the hashtag #1yeartogo since today just so happens to coincide with 366 days until the Olympic torch is lit in the capital. You can view the 2 live heat maps here:

http://bigdata.casa.ucl.ac.uk/2012/

The first map shows a worldwide heat map of all tweets containing the #1yeartogo hashtag and the other shows the tweets within a 50km radius of the center of London. In the first 3 hours of collection there were over 5,000 geo-located tweets in the database! The official launch of the hashtag #1yeartogo is still another 18 hours away! Explore the 2 maps and see which areas are tweeting the most! Each map automatically updates every 5 minutes.

These visualisations show the first live test of our new heat map visualisation that will be made available to the general public in the next few weeks on MapTube. Many thanks go to Richard Milton who has been working hard over the past few months on these upgrades.

In the next few months I’ll be adding to the Toolkit and cleaning up the source code as well as throwing in some more exciting visuals. The official date I start working full time on the Toolkit is November 2011. Very soon after that you’ll be able to grab a copy of the toolkit and start creating your own collections to share with everyone around the world. As always your comments are important so have your say and let me know what you think!

This is a presentation I gave at the UCL Public Engagement Symposium on the QRator project, 22nd June 2011. Presentation was in the style of ‘ignite’ – 20 slides, 20 seconds each slide, and in that vain, the slides are purposely image heavy and text light.

Harvesting the crowd is such a large and complex process but we can learn some interesting events happening just from looking at Geo-located Tweets. This seminar concentrates on what we sense we can make from the collective tweets of a city.

Slides from seminar given to Oxford DTC e-Research Center, Oxford University,
Jun 2011

Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference is underway and with that comes Steve Jobs famous keynote address and Apple’s lastest tech.  This year saw Jobs announce iOS 5, MacOS Lion, but more importantly Apple’s MobileMe replacement, iCloud.

iCloud is Apple’s offering into the cloud computing infrastructure that Google and Amazon have dominated over the past few years.  Instead of offering processing infrastructure, iCloud is positioned as a service that backups your contacts, apps, documents, photos, everything you can imagine sharing between your iOS devices.  So what’s new? Nothing really!

Google has provided these features for the past 3 years through services such as Docs, Contacts, Calendar, Sync, Picasa and Mail.  Their Android platform consumes these services into a seamless experience for your phone out of the box.  Apple for once is playing catchup.

Don’t get me wrong, I like Apple’s products. I’ve been using a Mac since the LCII was released in 1992 but today for me iCloud was nothing special.  Apple’s marketing department have been hard at work again making features that Apple’s competitors already have seem like something new and great. They have taken existing cloud based technologies and wrapped it up in some glossy interfaces, in my opinion what Apple does best, and made it “just work” for the ordinary user. Brilliant. I’m all for user experience! Just don’t pretend though that this new and the best thing since sliced bread.

One thing that really bothers me is that iCloud seems locked down only for iOS users.  True they will sync your photos to Windows but you need an iDevice to get the full experience.  I understand that running a data center is expensive and that Apple was always going to augment the Mac experience with iCloud but give other platforms access to at least some of the data. If I upload my data to the cloud on my iDevice, I want to have access to it with all my Android devices.  Having 2 sets of contacts of 2 different clouds is not an option. Even Google gave iOS users a way of syncing contacts and calendars to other mobile devices.

The other worry I have with iCloud is the cell networks.  When the iPhone was released the cell networks in the UK gave unlimited data plans which were redacted due to capacity issues.  A new iPhone today will typically come with 500MB of data per month.  With iCloud uploading your photos to the cloud in full 5 mega-pixel glory, iPhones will put extra strain on these networks and customers wallets.  Especially in countries like South Africa and Australia where data transfer is expensive.  iCloud is an excuse for the networks to charge a higher premium to iPhone users.

To be fair though, iTunes Match is a stroke if genius on Apples part. No longer will you need to upload your own ‘ripped’ music from your machine to the cloud to listen to your music. For $24.95 (USD) a year you can have access to all your music at any time from either you iPod, iPhone, iPad or Web. This is due to Apple’s existing relationship with the music labels which blows both Amazon’s and Google’s services out of the water. Add to that iMessage and the new Notification center, the iPhone is now an attractive option as my everyday phone, solving all the issues I had with the device when opting for my Android device.

We will have to wait and see what iCloud brings and how the networks cope with the extra strain of data being upload to Apple’s new data center.  With the release of iCloud and Google’s Chromebooks later this month, 2011 will be the year that users will start living there digital life in the cloud away from their home entertainment hub.

(iCloud icon © Apple 2011, Cloud Background: CC SixRevisions)

Google added to the Facebook and Twitter button wars yesterday (1st June 2011) by introducing the +1 button to the web. +1 allows users to add a small button that allows users to add a recommendation to a page. What makes this button different to Facebook‘s like button or Twitter’s Tweet button is that Google uses these recommendations to filter out search results based on your friends recommendations of pages as well as pages that have a high number of +1′s.

On the back of this I have created a plugin for WordPress called Plus1 which will add the +1 button to the end of all the pages and the posts automatically. All you have to do is install and enable the plugin and it will add a +1 button to every post and page on your WordPress blog.

If you want to override the +1 with a different style [small | medium or Tall] you can use the short-code:

You can download the Plus1 WordPress Plugin here or on the WordPress Plugin page. Any feedback or feature requests would be much appreciated.