Quantified Self Fourth Person Perspective and Self 2.0

Quantified self trackers¹ are having an increasingly intimate relationship with technology and data flow in mediating their experience of reality. Technology effectively opens up a new perspective (as vaunted by Nietzsche), a fourth person perspective – a new and objective view of the self, possibly on the road to creating the overself (self 2.0). An important and radical aspect of quantified self (QS) activity is its inherent linkage of the former binary of quantified and qualified in three important ways:

1) The QS Act Itself 
The very act of QS’ing fundamentally includes both the collection of objective metrics data and the subjective experience of the impact of these data

2) QS’ing the Qualitative 
QS methods are now being applied to the tracking of (formerly objectively inaccessible) qualitative phenomena such as mood (e.g.; tracking qualitative word descriptors or mapping subjective experience onto quantitative scales)

3) Quant-Qual are part of a Larger Phenomenon 
To understand QS’ing is to see that it is part of a larger more complex process in which the quantified data collection and the qualitative experience of the data are nodes in feedback loops for behavior change. Data, information, understanding, and action are constituent parts of the looping process

¹Quantified self activity: the self-tracking of any kind of biological, physical, behavioral, or environmental information, often with a proactive stance towards action

Venter's Deep Linkage: Microbiome, Synbio, Genomics, and Computing

As usual, Craig Venter’s remarks on April 16, 2013 at UC Berkeley did not disappoint - they were inspirational, informative, and demonstrative of progress. Of note is the multidisciplinarity amongst different branches of his labs’ work, for example using synthetic DNA to perform genomic error correction in stem cell operations, genome transplantation between yeast and bacterial species, and linking microbiome activities to pathology and synthetic biology/biofuel synthesis. Some key points were:

• Microbiome – YASP (yet another sequencing problem) – While the human genome is currently thought to contain about 42,000 genes, the microbiome has 10 million genes across diverse phyla, taxa, and species 
• Biofuel – to obtain engineered algae with the desired phenotype that would be a viable alternative to oil, 300 parameters must be engineered 
• Gene function – even in the minimal genome for Mycoplasma genitalium, there are 50 genes whose function is unknown 
• New gene discovery – so far in general scientific discovery, 80 million genes have been found, 95% from ocean water sampling; again in these ‘design components for the future,’ function is unknown 
• ‘Digital phenotype’ is needed for health advance and big health data stream integration – an extended EMR with standardized transmittable digital data for all manner of phenotypic data, both phenotype 1.0 (e.g.; health history, prescriptions, lab results, etc.) and phenotype 2.0 (e.g.; digital omics profiles like proteomics and metabolomics).

Human Microbiome: Futurist Augmentation Platform

The human microbiome is essential in working symbiotically with the human (and indeed all animals) for nutrient synthesis and pathology prevention. However, the large numbers of microbial populations are complicated and dynamic which makes it challenging to profile their activity and construct meaningful interventions. The 14th Annual Microbiology Student Symposium, held at UC Berkeley on April13, 2013 addressed some of these issues (conference program). 

There is tremendous microbiomic variation between individuals – a person’s gut microbiomic signature is perhaps as uniquely distinguishable as a fingerprint. There may be variability within the individual too, but there is a strong trend to persistent populations over time. The microbiome adjusts quickly to dietary and environmental change, within a day, and can shift back just as quickly. If certain populations are wiped out, other substitute species within the same taxa or phylum may emerge to (supposedly) fulfill a similar function. Pathology conditions like Crohn’s disease, colitis, and irritable bowel syndrome (IBS, IBD) are likely to mean the dysbiosis (e.g.; microbial imbalance) of the whole biosystem (not just are certain disease-related bacterial populations elevated, but mitigating populations may be much lower. Given the complexity of the microbiome with thousands of species across tax and phyla, machine learning techniques may be useful in combining a series of weak signals into a prognostication as the SLiME Project in the Eric Alm lab at MIT has done, claiming to predict IBD as accurately as other non-invasive methods.

In the longer term, the microbiome could be the perfect platform for many different less-invasive augmentations for the human - bringing on board micro-connectivity, memory, processing, and electronic storage (Google Gut Glass?), with applications such as real-time life-tracking and quantified-self monitoring and intervention.

Identity Authentication and Security Access 2.0

Identity needs to be authenticated in more granular, flexible, real-time ways as digital venues expand and the physical world becomes more digitalized. Technology is now making it possible to rethink and provide a 2.0 update to the whole area of identity authentication and security access services.

The ubiquity of cell phones, and increasingly smartphones, means that many forms of identity authentication can be moved from costly and easy-to-lose physical ID cards to mobile access platforms. QR codes, NFC, and other wireless-based technologies are already starting to be used for security authentication and single-use sign-on for website access.

Work identity badges, hospital access badges, and government and school IDs are examples of physical-world ID cards that can be moved to smartphone ID cards. Likewise many services linking identity authentication to resource-access and mobile payment can be automated, for example, event tickets, work conference room reservation and access, medical equipment and pharmaceutical inventory access, and rental car and hotel check-in and resource access. Digital ID cards can incorporate multi-factor authentication: for example, the visual look, a custom sound or image elicited upon being tapped, or information returned from an external server as the QR code is read.

What's new in AI? Trust, Creativity, and Shikake

The AAAI spring symposia held at Stanford University in March provide a nice look at the potpourri of innovative projects in process around the world by academic researchers in the artificial intelligence field. This year’s eight tracks can be grouped into two overall categories: those that focus on computer-self interaction or computer-computer interaction, and those that focus on human-computer interaction or human sociological phenomena as listed below.

Computer self-interaction or computer-computer interaction (Link to details)

• Designing Intelligent Robots: Reintegrating AI II 
• Lifelong Machine Learning 
• Trust and Autonomous Systems 
• Weakly Supervised Learning from Multimedia

Human-computer interaction or human sociological phenomena (Link to details)

• Analyzing Microtext 
• Creativity and (Early) Cognitive Development 
• Data Driven Wellness: From Self-Tracking to Behavior Change 
• Shikakeology: Designing Triggers for Behavior Change 

This last topic, Shikakeology, is an interesting new category that is completely on-trend with the growing smart matter, Internet-of-things, Quantified Self, Habit Design, and Continuous Monitoring movements. Shikake is a Japanese concept, where physical objects are embedded with sensors to trigger a physical or psychological behavior change. An example would be a trash can playing an appreciative sound to encourage litter to be deposited.

Gaming Apps to Unlock Video Archive Footage

One of the leading digital media foundations in the San Francisco Bay Area, GAFFTA, the Gray Area Foundation for the Arts, held a hackathon for film-makers and developers March 21-23, 2013. The challenge was to come up with new uses for open-source video archive footage (for example from the Internet Archive).

One idea would be to merge mobile gaming, crowdsourcing, and video archives to make the archives a fun and accessible tool for telling new stories. Here are some app ideas:

App: This is not my story!
In this gaming app, person 1 (whose image or profile photo is shown) selects a video micro-clip that he or she feels is ‘not my story.’ Then person 2, matched randomly from the crowd of the app’s community members, adds a short caption to the video as to why the video micro-clip is not that person’s story. Humor would be tantamount. Other community crowd members could validate the caption (e.g.; police spam), and vote on it with ‘likes’ to determine game winners.

App: PostSecret Video
This gaming app is the video version of the successful, strikingly poignant, and deeply human PostSecret project. PostSecret is an ongoing community art project where people mail in their secrets anonymously on one side of a homemade postcard which are then posted on the web and compiled and published as books. Instead of sending anonymous postcards with ‘my secret,’ anonymous participants would find a video micro-clip that corresponds to their secret. Other community members would guess what the secret is from the video micro-clip.

App: Exquisite Video Corpse Again taking advantage of the community to create crowd art, this gaming app uses the exquisite corpse technique invented by the surrealists. In a group story telling exercise, the first person selects a video micro-clip. The second selects a second video micro-clip that is the next few frames of the story. The third selects the third, and so on. Each new person selecting can only see the story 1-2 nodes back. Again the crowd could vote on newly created video stories.

Omnivorous Learning

The Learning Mode: Critical Issues in Online Education at UC Berkeley March 15-16, 2013 squarely addressed the future of learning. Most obvious from this examination of the future of learning is that the same transition is underway that has happened in many other industries such as music, publishing, and personal communications, and is still wanting in public health. The effect of technology on the industry is to enable more categories of participation to be defined and a wider spectrum of outcomes to be achieved. Overall this points to an inherently democratizing and empowering influence of technology.

Another theme (as discussed in the book Why School?) is that education systems were developed in a different era when teachers, knowledge, and information were scarce, and that is no longer the case. There are many more choices for self, expert-based, and peer-based learning, in real-time on-demand and time-shifted venues. MOOC (massive open online course) platforms like Coursera, Udacity, edX, and Class Central (a MOOC aggregator) have been growing and adding credentialing and course curation functionality. Other learning tools include podcasts, Khan Academy and YouTube videos, and Lumosity’s cognitive performance brain trainer.

A third theme is that the value chain for learning is becoming more granularly stratified. Learners are of all ages and backgrounds and have diverse educational objectives with are being supported with a variety of in-person, online, and mobile instruction tools.

What are the Next Media for Art?

Any prominent societal ‘currency’ is taken up by artists (and technologists and engineers) as an experimental medium. "Every culture will use the maximum level of technology available to it to make art" - Scott Draves, Generative Artist.

Recent societal currencies of prominence and dominance have included technology, information, biology, and raw data. All have been taken up by artists, scientists, laypersons, and other practitioners through the ease of widely available Internet-based tools (Examples in Figure 1).

Figure 1: Digital Art, InfoViz, BioArt, DataArt

The question would obviously arise as to ‘What are the next media for art?’ (e.g.; the continually new New Media). One way to answer is to prognosticate upcoming societal currencies. Some advancing societal currencies could be 3D printing feedstock (already starting to be exploited as an artistic medium), and pink goo – having more granularity and diversity of categories in synthetic biology.

I want my wearables!

The layer of quantified self (QS) gadgetry starting to surround us (but not encircle us in the Heideggerian sense) is driving both the mindset shift (e.g.; disruption in the notion of the identity of the individual) and technical practicalities (e.g.; new health informatics business models and technology tools) required for a next generation of health science and technology innovation.

The adoption of the current cell phone-based QS applications and level-one QS devices (e.g.; Fitbit pedometers, myZeo sleep trackers, and Nike+ and Jawbone UP fitness trackers) could give way to the potentially rapidly arriving era of wearable computing. Mobile phones have been one of the fastest adopted technology platform to date, and the wearable computing platform could have even faster adoption and allow for even more self-quantification.

Big Data Era: Not just More Data but New Kinds of Data

One aspect of 21st century data literacy is realizing that there is not just more data, but also that there are new kinds of data.

There is a significant shift from the model where ‘all data is salient,’ for example, each entry on a calendar is a relevant appointment, to a model of being able to recognize different kinds of data and appropriate actions related to specific data types. The focus level upshifts to the correlation, trend, and anomaly level of big data abstractions rather than on the unitary level of the data flows themselves.

Daily quantified self-tracking data for example may be useful from a longitudinal perspective and might not need to be reviewed unless there is an anomaly. Another example is that the relevant action might be looking for correlations across multiple data streams. There could be potential linkage between coffee consumption, social interaction, and mood per as this Sen.se multiviz project investigates, finding some correlation between social interaction and mood. 

Discussed at greater length in: Swan, M. Sensor Mania! The Internet of Things, Wearable Computing, Objective Metrics, and the Quantified Self 2.0. J Sens Actuator Netw 2012, 1(3), 217-253.