CURRENT PROJECTS : Glass Bottom Float| Glass Bottom Float ( 2007 - )
together with Joe Atkinson and the AILAB Zurich
additional assistance from: Mark Shepard, Rebecca Gadzuk, Julia Foy and Stephen Arlington |
| A measure of swimming pleasure through human intuition and machine intelligence |
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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 might 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 qualitative measure of water quality; the swimming pleasure measure (SPM). The platform is available to the public and to water quality professionals. All results are public domain. 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: Canada: International Conference on Intelligent Agent Technology 2010, Toronto, Canada China: Jiao Tong University 2009, Shanghai, China USA: ETECH 2009, San Jose, USA Swimming: GBF phase II launched in July at Beaver Island State Park, NY, in 2009. Mobile: Get data from the robot on your phone. Twitter: Follow "g_b_f" for the robot's tweets. Images: image collection Sounds: underwater audio samples |
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