CURRENT PROJECTS : Glass Bottom Float| Glass Bottom Float ( 2007 - ) together with Joe Atkinson, Mark Shepard and the AILAB Zurich |
| A measure of swimming pleasure evaluated by combined human and machine knowledge |
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The Glass Bottom Float (GBF) is a floating public robot with the mission of making the critical assessment of recreational water quality a transparent and participatory experience W.G Sebald would have appreciated. GBF cruises along a beach shore, and offers itself as a resting spot in places it deems clean enough for swimming. Over time it maps paths of least contamination and highest relative pleasure for fish and people. GBF assesses the current state of the waters with a three-tiered sensing system informed by best practices of recreational water quality assessment science: Established metrics (algae, chlorophyll, dissolved oxygen and others), experimental metrics (near real-time in-situ e-coli, wave motion) and untested metrics (the presence and sounds of fish and crustaceans) are combined and compared with post swimming experience surveys to create a probabilistic, qualitative measure of water quality; the swimming pleasure measure (SPM). This metric combines human and machine experience to a joint "knowing" neither humans nor machines alone can have. The platform is available to the public and to water quality professionals to cross-validate data and opinions. All results are public domain (a beacon blinks a color-coded pleasure measure visible from the shore) and available in full on the Internet. A subset of the data is available for mobile phones to give SPM locative agency, allowing for on-demand inquiry of swimming pleasures, discourse on water quality and our limits of understanding it. UPDATES: GBF phase I launched in July at Woodlawn Beach State Park, NY. We will be back next season. Mobile: Get data from the robot on your phone. Twitter: Follow "g_b_f" for the robot's tweets. Beach: image collection Sound: underwater audio samples |
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