Cities and Conversations

by Jared Harris and Austin Henderson

Abstract
We explore the role of pervasive computing in the complex interplay between large scale data and
local activities. Existing investigation of urban pervasive computing has largely aggregated
relatively homogenous data about user activity to synthesize large-scale views. These views provide
useful insight into the structure of user activity, but give us little insight into what created and
maintains that structure. In this paper we discuss the sources of structure in mutual adaptation by
users, and explore the interaction of large-scale “outside” views and local user-specific “inside”
views. Pervasive computing is greatly enriching and expanding the middle ground where these
views overlap and modulate each other. The evolution of this middle ground will drive a wide range
of important research opportunities.
Keywords: cities, conversations, pervasive computing, rough convergence

1 Emergence of structure
Any city (or indeed any human group) is a site
of innumerable conflicts, collaborations,
adaptations, negotiations, and so forth. The
structure of a city (or any other community)
arises from, and is stabilized and transformed
by, the collective effects of these interactions.
Structure in the city is generated by persistent
convergence of these interactions on rough,
temporary, local stability. By rough we mean
that convergence between the participants is
never perfect; instead it is only good enough
for the purposes at hand. [1]
Let’s examine two examples of this process of
rough convergence, one with a simple core but
complex ramifications, and one with essentially
unlimited complexity throughout.
1.1 Negotiating trip routes and times
Drivers decide which roads to use and which
to avoid, for which trips at which times. In
doing so they are in effect negotiating with all
the other drivers using the same roads at the
same times. At any given point, more or less
predictable traffic patterns emerge as the rough
convergence of current travelers’ choices.
Under reasonable assumptions, this sort of
adaptation converges on a typical game-
theoretic equilibrium.[4]
While the core negotiation is simple, the
resulting rough convergence ramifies in an
open-ended way, influencing residential
choices, job choices, employment and retail
locations, corporate facilities policies, highway
and public transit policies, etc. etc.
Characteristics of the rough convergence that
are relatively stable and persistent over time
influence on longer-term social choices;
characteristics that tend to vary unpredictably
will typically be ignored or accommodated as
unavoidable variance.
Until recently individuals deciding about trips
had to work with a relatively weak “outside”
view of traffic conditions—their own beliefs,
based on their prior experience and what they

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 Cities and Conversations
heard from others, perhaps supplemented with
traffic radio.
Recently, however, through digital networks
and now pervasive computing we’ve gained the
ability to make these choices in the context of a
much stronger set of "outside" perspectives—
for example, maps with traffic on your phone,
and GPS systems that offer alternative routes
to reduce traffic delays. The effect of “outside”
views is a function of the quantity and quality
of the data available to create them, the models
used to derive views relevant to each
individual, and the ways each individual can
connect with those views.
If the current set of choices is already nearly
“optimal”, given the preferences of the
participants and the constraints inherent in the
situation, then no amount of improvement in
the decision context will change the resulting
rough convergence—except perhaps to make it
faster and smoother. If, however, there are
substantial unexplored options which become
accessible due to better information, then the
overall convergence could shift significantly.
1.2 More complex negotiations
A “move” in negotiating about trips is just the
action of taking the trip. Such a simple
“language” doesn't support forming coalitions,
arguing about similarities and differences,
referring to history, and so forth.
At the other extreme is a process such as the
negotiation of property owners, residents,
community organizations, business interests
and administrators regarding zoning and
permissions.
This sort of negotiation generates rough
convergence on specific decisions. Through
repeated persistent convergence this process
"precipitates out" legal rules, development
2!
policy, institutional responsibilities, political
alliances, bribery expectations, and indeed the
built environment of the city itself.
In these negotiations each participant is
working from their inside view, but also in the
context of multiple outside views on many
different scales.
Until recently, these outside views were only
slowly updated, and were often available to
only relatively few people in relatively arcane
precincts, such as law libraries and hearing
rooms. However pervasive computing has
allowed them to be accessed and often updated
quickly, from anywhere, by large numbers of
people simultaneously.
2 Conversations at many scales
As these examples suggest, persistent patterns
are typically generated indirectly, as a side-
effect of activities with more immediate goals.
We’ll use the term conversations for the
processes that aggregate these local activities
into more persistent rough convergence.
Conceptually we are building on the nature of
everyday conversations: open-ended,
negotiated, constantly re-defined and re-
interpreted, and always subject to the purposes
of the participants.
Let’s call everyday conversations (e.g., a pair of
people talking, a group discussion at a meeting)
micro-conversations.
In contrast, really huge conversations also
exist, and in fact are crucial in shaping our
social world. For example, every natural
language is maintained by a conversation
among its speakers. If the conversation splits
or dies, so does the language. The rough
convergence we call “English” is maintained by
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 Cities and Conversations
a conversation among more than a billion
people.[5]
Such large conversations are hard to see as
conversations because of their scale. Let’s call
these larger conversations—too large to
perceive directly—macro-conversations.
Cities are maintained by macro-conversations
of an intermediate size—they involve hundreds
of thousands to millions of people. Other
examples of institutions maintained by
conversations on similar scales include:
! the legal profession in the United States, with
a million or so lawyers, as rough convergence of
practices
! HTML and JavaScript, as rough
convergence between browser developers,
web site developers, service providers, and
language and library developers, and
! Wikipedia, with a half a million or so active
contributors and editors.
3 Making conversations visible
Throughout most of human history, most of the
interactions making up macro-conversations
have been entirely local and ephemeral, and so
the macro-conversations themselves existed
only partially, as snippets, in the inside view of
the participants. There was no persistent
record of the conversation for others to
analyze, summarize, or reflect on, so outside
views were much harder to come by. The practices
of these conversations were hard to critique or
deliberately modify.
However, our media for conducting macro-
conversations have gradually been leaving
more persistent traces, and thus more
conversations have been captured and become
visible. These traces began with clay tablets in
4,000 BC, and have continuing to strengthen
through writing, mail, printing, various forms
of publishing, libraries, email, and now a
3!
torrent of diverse digital media.
Digital media, including those accessible
through pervasive computing, have enabled an
enormous increase in visibility for macro-
conversations. Such conversations using
digital media tend to automatically generate
voluminous persistent traces, such as the cell
phone records that have been used to such
good effect by many in this workshop.
In addition to these traces, the content of many
types of digital media interactions is relatively
structured, persistent, and available for
retrospective investigation. Unfortunately not
every medium lets us capture the content of
macro-conversations. Media such as voice
and texting enable expanded macro-
conversations, and capture traces of the
activity, but typically don’t capture the content
in a persistent form.
Large data sets from macro-conversations (in
both digital and analog media) are being
actively analyzed by other research programs
as well, for example:
! correspondence networks in early modern
Europe.
! citation networks in academic publishing,
! enormous natural language corpuses
harvested from the web and/or digitized text,
and
! Wikipedia editing histories.
Each of these examples analyzes the persistent
records of conversations that were enabled,
and to a significant extent captured, by specific
media.
So far, most of the data sets captured from
pervasive computing don’t preserve much of
the content of interactions. Furthermore, so
far the rough convergence that these data sets
reflect is mostly generated by pre-existing
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 Cities and Conversations
conversations, and is not yet much influenced
by digital media or pervasive computing.
4 Enabling new conversations
In addition to increasing the visibility of
macro-conversations, new media broaden the
range of possible conversations. For example,
printing did not just make written conversation
more persistent, it also enabled the
conversations that led to Protestantism and to
modern science.
Similarly, digital media and pervasive
computing enable a vast range of new and
expanded conversations, and in many cases,
capture a great deal of information about these
conversations.
In many cases, when existing macro-
conversations have shifted from analog to
digital media they have become immensely
more visible, because much of their content has
been captured in public forums. Examples
include:
! organization and publication of encyclopedic
knowledge, transformed by Wikipedia and
other encyclopedic web resources,
! development of software infrastructure,
transformed by open source projects such as
Linux and Mozilla, and
! large popular demonstrations and
insurrections (such as recent events in
Eastern Europe, Iran, and Egypt),
transformed by cell phones, texting, easy
photography and video sharing, Twitter,
social network sites, and so forth.
Macro-conversations via analog media, in the
city and elsewhere, are very difficult to conduct
rapidly and informally: analog media require
that essentially all information filtering,
organizing, searching and distribution be done
by people, and so these processes can easily be
overwhelmed by too much information, too
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many participants, or too rapid change. As a
result, analog macro-conversations have tended
to gravitate toward well-defined, entrenched
structures with powerful gatekeepers and
curators and relatively rigid sets of categories
(discussed below as ontologies). Important
roles in conversations have been reserved for
individuals with specific authorization such as
lawyers or architects.
As our examples indicate, digital media let
informal conversations function effectively
over a much wider range. Much of the
required information filtering, organizing,
searching and distribution be done by
machines, and where the process needs human
contributions they can be garnered much more
flexibly from a much broader population. This
allows conversations via digital media to have
broader participation, more flexible access,
enormously quicker coordination, and more
rapid sharing of detailed information, such as
plans, photographs and video.
Furthermore, many digital media capture much
more of the macro-conversation and make it
persistent, so they help generate outside views
and let individuals use them as contexts for
action, within the conversation and outside it.
5 Conversations and ontologies
Rough convergence often generates a rough set
of terms or categories for organizing
perceptions and actions, which we call
ontologies. For example, every discipline
develops “terms of art” that denote phenomena
of special salience to its members, but that are
of little consequence or are hard to
comprehend for those without similar
experience and practices. Ontologies like this
are often essential to the conduct of a
conversation.
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 Cities and Conversations
Often institutions impose a relatively fixed
ontology on aspects of conversations they
control. Areas have to be given a predefined
zoning classification. Books in a library have
to be given a predefined subject code.
These relatively fixed ontologies have
historically been required to coordinate
management of information in analog media.
Historically they have been necessary
whenever the persistent records of an analog
conversation have gotten sufficiently large that
they can’t be managed by a small conversation
among all the interested parties.
However, every conversation continues to
adapt to changing circumstances, so when the
institutional ontology imposed on that
conversation remains static, the increasing
mismatch creates friction and occasionally
catastrophe.
Recent digital media offer a way out of this
dilemma, or at least a way to reduce its bite.
They let participants craft the ontology for the
conversation, as part of, and often at the same time
as, they carry on the conversation itself.
A simple example of a conversational medium
with a craftable ontology is Twitter. Subjects
in Twitter are marked by hashtags (simply
words beginning with “#”, such as “#Egypt”)
embedded anywhere in a tweet. These allow
very rough, quick and flexible crafting of
ontologies within the conversation itself.
Conversations focus around hashtags, are
revised and then dissolve over hours, days,
weeks or sometimes months. Originally hashtags
were invented by users; now Twitter has
searchable,
institutionalized them, making them
clickable, and identifying them as trending
topics.
Ontologies can also be automatically derived
from data. Any clustering technique is
5!
essentially proposing an ontology. For
example, data derived from pervasive
computing has been used to identify spatial
modularity [6] and to track crowds [7].
However these ontologies only gain human
meaning when mapped into categories defined
through conversations (administrative districts,
concerts, demonstrations, and so forth).
Ontologies generated in different ways can
enrich each other. For example, the ontologies
that emerge in rough convergence have
intrinsic semantics but typically (at least with
digital media) lack clear spatial structure or
mapping onto populations. The ontologies that
can be automatically identified in pervasive
computing traces lack semantics. Where
patterns in pervasive computing traces and
conversational ontologies can be correlated,
both may become significantly more useful.
6 Public conversations
The use of information from pervasive
computing always raises reasonable concerns
about privacy. When data from conversations
that are understood by the participants to be
private, such as in telephone calls and tweets, is
captured, that data must be carefully
anonymized to protect that privacy. To make
this worse, pervasive computing is rapidly
becoming more capable and developing new
“senses.” Phones are gaining cameras, GPS
location ability, and even compasses and
inertial navigation.
However focusing on information captured
from public or “opt in” conversations can help
to avoid the problems of protecting privacy.
Many of the examples of digital conversations
we’ve been considering are in fact largely or
completely public. Naturally conversations
that are part of open source development and
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 Cities and Conversations
Wikipedia editing tend to be public. But even
conversations on Twitter, Facebook, and so
forth, which offer various degrees of privacy
controls, are largely public.
7 An example: Remarkable
Images
To explore the implications of these trends
further, let’s imagine a new conversational
medium in the city. We’ll sketch this example
by analogy with existing examples of digital
media conversations.
Suppose someone provides a local site for folk
to take geo-tagged pictures of “remarkable”
things in the city (things worth remarking on,
having conversations about) and to post them
to a common medium, with free-form tags
indicating why they find them remarkable.
This could be very much like popular photo
sharing sites such as Flickr, but would be
distinguished by its focus on encouraging
conversations about shared experiences of the
city.
Concerned citizens might start contributing
photos of un-mended potholes, upheaved
sidewalks, and dangerous intersections.
Admirers of the cityscape might contribute
photos of favorite buildings, farmers markets,
and familiar pan-handlers. The city council
might contribute images of public works
imagined, planned, under construction,
completed, commissioned, and in use.
Everyone can comment on, tag and organize
everything. Some curation would be required
to prevent spam and encourage civility, but the
actions of curators could be fully visible for
those who care and managed as part of the
6!
conversations.
Geo-tags support grouping by location, display
on maps, etc. Free-form citizen-generated tags
support grouping by interests, subjects, etc.
Together, they make correlating semantic and
spatial patterns relatively easy. Rough
ontologies, spatial and semantic, would emerge
and shift. Participants could set up
mechanisms to automatically generate
summaries, notifications, and so forth.
Information provided by outside views would
still provide helpful context. For example, if
we knew how many pedestrians walk over a
given tilted sidewalk or across a given
troublesome intersection we’d be much better
able to judge whether five remarks a day was a
trickle or a flood.
A medium like this would tend to be a breeding
ground for new conversations. Cross-cutting
perspectives would lead to engagement,
negotiation, and conflict. Business and
neighborhood groups would organize, as they
do today. As a result the cost of participating in
the conversation would be lowered This would
encourage interest groups that are more diffuse
to consolidate their positions as well,. This
would be especially so if they become aware of
themselves as members of a group that is either
reflected in an outside view of the
conversation, or as producer of an emergent
ontology within the conversation and the city.
In a large city, a medium like this could
generate large datasets. Because the medium is
opt in, the data generated would be open to
analysis by anyone. This would tend to
empower attempts to create interesting outside
views. Successful attempts could discover
patterns and feed them back into the
conversations. This feedback would not need
February 13, 2011 9:12 PM
 Cities and Conversations

to be exact or reliable, just good enough to References

further enhance the conversation. Of course
the conversation should also feed back into the
generation of these outside views, reshaping its
focus and ontology to suit the needs of the
conversation. If participants in the
conversation have access to the necessary data
and tools, they themselves may tend to take on
the task of shaping overviews that are “good
enough”.
media like this will emerge as
It is very likely that
pervasive computing continues to become more
capable. They will make the conversations of
the city far more visible, analyzable, and
capable of self-reflection.
8 Research agenda
The perspective that we are advocating focuses
on the middle ground where the outside view
and the inside view overlap and interact. Some
questions that arise in this middle ground:
! How can information derived from large
1.! Henderson, Austin and Harris, Jared: Conversational
Alignment. interactions 17, 3 (May 2011), in press.
2.! Shoham, Yoav; Leyton-Brown, Kevin: Computational
approximation of multi-agent game equilibria” (2009), in
Multiagent Systems: Algorithmic, Game-Theoretic, and
Logical Foundations (Cambridge University Press).
3.! Young, H. Peyton: Individual Strategy and Social Structure:
An Evolutionary Theory of Institutions (Princeton University
Press, 1998)
4.! Foster, Dean P., Young, H. Peyton: Regret Testing: learning to
play Nash equilibrium without knowing you have an
opponent, Theoretical Economics 1 (2006), 341-367.
5.! Steels, Luc: Grounding Symbols through Evolutionary
Language Games in Simulating the Evolution of Language,
Cangelosi A. and Parisi D. (Eds.) (Springer, 2001).
6.! Ratti, Carlo, Sobolevsky, Stanislav, Calabrese, Francesco,
Andris, Clio, Reades, Jonathan, Martino, Mauro, Claxton,
Rob, Strogatz, Steven H.: Redrawing the Map of Great
Britain from a Network of Human Interactions, PLoS One
December 2010, Volume 5, Issue 12.
7.! Aguiton, Christophe, Cardon, Dominique, & Smoreda,
Zbigniew: Living Maps: New data, new uses, new problems

scale use of pervasive computing provide

useful context for conversations in the city?
! As conversations via pervasive computing

become common, and make large amounts of

conversational content available, what new
modes of analysis will be most fruitful?
! What aspects of current research activity can

be delegated to participants in the

conversation, either in collaboration with
researchers or entirely?
! Conversely, what roles will need to be filled

by academic researches to generate the most

value from conversations in the city?

7! February 13, 2011 9:12 PM