The 2013 Quantified Self Europe Conference Roundup

Posted on May 16, 2013 by Ernesto Ramirez

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This past weekend we hosted the 2013 Quantified Self Europe Conference. Over 275 self-trackers, toolmakers, scientists, and enthusiasts came together to collaboratively learn about creating “self knowledge through numbers.” It was an amazing conference that featured over 100 different presentations that included insightful show&tell talks, thoughtful breakout discussions, rapid-fire Ignite talks, and inspirational plenary presentations.

We’re currently processing all the videos from the conference and will be posting those soon. Until then we thought it would be nice to highlight all the great posts, videos, and pictures that our community has been putting together to document their QS Europe Conference experience.

Blog Posts:
Don’t Life Log Me: Quantified Self 2013 in Amsterdam by Hans De Zwart.

The Great Memoto Experiment by Kitty Ireland.

The Missing Trackers  & You, Me, Them: Who is the Quantified Self by Whitney Erin Boesel

Quantified Self Europe 2013 by Winslow Strong

The Quantified Self by Joerg Blumtritt

Quantified Self Europe 2013 Amsterdam by Yago Veith

Videos:
In collaboration with Fast Moving Targets a few of our conference attendees were able to share their self-tracking stories and thoughts on Quantified Self:

Mikko Ikola: Soylent is a healthy menu of olive oil, pills and powders

David Reeves (Limeade): Self improvement leads to a happier workforce

Joshua Kauffman on Quantified Self, the movement and the trends

Winslow Strong: You don’t need to rely on a doctor anymore for measuring

David Hume (Discipline X Games): We make weight loss the rock n roll for middle aged men

Fu-Chiek Hsu (TrueSense Kit): Our brain is the most complex thing in the universe

Danielle Roberts: The focus in my art is on creating awareness.

Teemu Arina: Sharing data with a community is very motivating

Gustaf Kranck: I want to solve the mistery of the mind

Oliver Kozak: The joy of Quantified Self is learning about yourself

Giorgo Baresi (In The Flow): Now is the time to make Quantified Self mainstream

Ian Li (Google): Knowing the problem is the first step in fixing a problem

Yuri van Geest: We are at a Gutenberg moment of healthcare

Mark Leavitt: Data has power because it tells you a story

Nell Watson (Poikos): More data means more informed choices

Mark Kramer (Razorfish Healthware): Quantified Self improves communication

Ian Forrester (BBC): We research how personal data and storytelling can be combined

Daniel Gartenberg: 76% of people track something. At the moment I track my mood.

Hind Hobeika (Instabeat):Quantified Self can definitely be for everyone

Stuart Calimport: Aging can be overcome

Memoto logs your life in pictures

Photos:
We had some amazing photographers among our attendees who have graciously placed their beautiful images in the 2013 Quantified Self Europe Flickr Group.

Thanks to everyone who participated, volunteered, spoke, shared, and made our conference an experience to remember. We can’t wait to see you all again!

Header image mashup courtesy of Sara Marie Watson, Yago Veith, Ian Forrester, and Rain Ashford

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Day One at the 2013 Quantified Self European Conference

Posted on May 11, 2013 by Ernesto Ramirez

This weekend we’re hosting over 275 wonderful people at the 2013 Quantified Self European Conference. So far it’s been an amazing gathering chock full on interesting talks, great conversations, and thoughtful discussion. There’s too much happening to properly summarize it all here, but we thought we’ld give you a little tast of what’s going on.

In collaboration with Fast Moving Targets a few of our conference attendees have been able to share their self-tracking stories and why they’re here.

Hans De Zwart has done a great job capturing his experience by somehow finding the time to write up a wonderfully detailed blog post on his first day at the conference. You can read that here.

Make sure to follow along with what’s going on by checking on the very active conference Twitter stream here.

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Announcing the 2013 Quantified Self Europe Conference Program

Posted on May 7, 2013 by Ernesto Ramirez

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We are only a few short days away from the Quantified Self Europe 2013. These past few months have been a whirlwind of planning and organizing for all of us at QS Labs. This conference is programmed as a “carefully curated unconference.” That means that all of our sessions come from the conference attendees. We are happy to announce that we have more than 90 separate talks and discussions planned. This means that more than 30% of the attendees will be presenting in some way!

Feel free to browse our schedule and breakout sessions  or download a copy of the full program[pdf]. We’ll be posting videos and notes from the conference in the coming weeks so make sure to check back here!

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Fun With Sparktweets

Posted on May 3, 2013 by Ernesto Ramirez

It’s no secret we love data here at Quantified Self, but we also love seeing how people interact with data. We’ve explored many of those interactions here and we’re always on the lookout for new and different ways people communicate their data and the insights therein.  A few weeks ago we wrote up a short “how to” post describing a recent phenomenon on Twitter – sparktweets. It didn’t take too long before we started seeing the Quantified Self community using these new “data words.”

We couldn’t stop thinking about sparktweets. What kind of data could you communicate in 140 characters? What would people do if it was easier to make a sparktweet? So we asked out friend Stan James to help us out and our Sparktweet Tool was born. Since then we’ve seen some great tweets roll though our feed, and we would love to see more. Need some inspiration? Here’s a few we really enjoyed:

What kind of conversation can you start with you data? Head on over to our Sparktweet Tool then make sure to add a link to your tweet in the comments or add to our conversation on the forum.

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European Conference Preview: Breakout Sessions

Posted on April 30, 2013 by Ernesto Ramirez

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At its core, Quantified Self is a community-driven effort to extract personal meaning from personal data. Our conferences reflect that by providing opportunities to learn what others are doing in their Quantified Self practice. Through our Show & Tell presentations you get to see first-hand accounts of how data is being collected and put to use in order to understand and investigate personal phenomena, but that’s not all our conference have to offer. In the spirit of collaborative learning we also schedule “Breakout Sessions” alongside our wonderful Show & Tell talks. These sessions, like all our conference programming, are developed and and facilitated by our wonderful attendees. Here’s a preview of just a few of the many fantastic Breakouts we have scheduled.

Title: The Self in Data
Breakout Leader: Sara Watson
Description: In my research on the QS community, I’ve found that we talk a lot about our technical requirements of data, and about how we want to use data. What we don’t often talk about is what it means to know ourselves through data. This breakout is an opportunity to discuss what data tells us about ourselves and how we relate to our data.

Title: On Sleep Tracking
Breakout Leader: Christel De Maeyer
Description: Does self-monitoring with devices like myZeo, Body Media create enough awareness and persuasion to change behavior and to maintain new habits? We would like to use this session to learn and share our experiences.

Title: Tracking breathing as a Unifying Experience
Breakout Leader: Danielle Roberts
Description: During this session we can exchange experiences on the tracking of respiration and tracking and visualising of life group data in general. You’ll have the opportunity to take part in a demo using custom breath tracking wearables and real time visualisation of breath data.

Title: Activity trackers
Breakout Leader: Michael Kazarnowicz
Description: We’ll take a look at the most common activity trackers on the market today. We will look at the trackers (maybe even play around with them hands-on) and compare the functions and the data you can get from them.

Title: QS as a Catalyst for Learning?
Breakout Leader: Hans de Zwart
Description: In this session we will explore whether quantifying yourself can act as a catalyst for learning. Can it speed up the learning process? Can it help us in achieving the holy grail of learning, a personalized tutor? What perverse effects might it have in the context of learning?

The Quantified Self European Conference will be held in Amsterdam on May 11th & 12th. Registration is now open. As with all our conferences our speakers are members of the community. We hope to see you there!

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What We Are Reading

Posted on April 28, 2013 by Ernesto Ramirez

Here we are again. Another week and another great list of articles, projects, and posts. We hope you find these as interesting as we did.

Data Science of the Facebook World by Stephen Wolfram: “I’ve always been interested in people and the trajectories of their lives. But I’ve never been able to combine that with my interest in science. Until now.” Stephen Wolfram sets his mind and data crunching services and the mounds of data available through the Wolfram|Alpha Personal Analytics service.

There’s an App for That by John-Paul Flintoff:  While many people write about QS, every once in a while a piece stands out as a thoughtful and personal assessment of the meaning of self-tracking. The only major fault with the piece is the accompanying illustration which proclaims that “the overexamined life is not worth living,” a conclusion the article does not actually make.

Disciplinary Power, the Oligopticon and Rhizomatic Surveillance in Elite Sports Academies: Elite athletes and sports programs push Quantified Self tools to their extremes. This article from an academic journal about surveillance discusses the tracking mechanisms employed in elite sports academies that transform performance into a type of numerical language that contributes to new social norms, personas and senses of the self

Refugees of the Modern World by Joseph Stromberg: A common cultural signature in the world of the Quantified Self is the formation of loose-knit groups around common interests and conditions. So it was fascinating to learn of a tight-knit group that has formed around the choice of a common environment in which to live. This is the stort of a self-diagnosed group suffering from “electromagnetic hypersensitivity” who live together in an area of West Virginia in the U.S. National Radio Quiet Zone.

Body 01000010011011110110010001111001 by Stanza: Artists have been playing with connecting #quantifiedself and “smart city” technologies for several years. I think projects like this are useful for opening new channels of thought not yet constrained by utility.

Goggles Can Provide Vital Data and Distraction by Matt Ritchel: Google makers incorporate data streams into heads up displays. But why include text messages? That seems like a mistake.

Thanks  to Joshua Kauffman and Gary Wolf for contributing to this weeks post! If you’ve found something interesting be sure to send it to us and we can post it in the upcoming weeks.

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Cathal Gurrin: Seven Years of Lifelogging

Posted on April 27, 2013 by Ernesto Ramirez

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Lifelogging is somewhat of a hot topic these days. With the soft release of Google Glass, the crowdfunding success of personal logging cameras like Memoto, and the release of numerous technology-enabled auto diaries it should be no surprise that Lifelogging is a one of the core themes of our upcoming Quantified Self Europe Conference. We’re looking forward to collaboratively exploring how lifelogging fits into our personal and social contexts and we’re excited to welcome an excellent group of speakers on this topic.

CathalGCathal Gurrin is a lecturer at the School of Computing, at Dublin City University, Ireland and he is an investigator at the CLARITY Centre for Sensor Web Technologies. Cathal is really a ‘hands-on’ researcher, so since June 2006, he has ‘lived his research’ and worn various sensing devices during waking hours. He has amassed a huge archive of 14 million wearable camera photos, weeks of video, sound samples and various other sensors such as location, movement, and nearby people. His research team is exploring how they can develop quantified self and lifelogging technologies that can have positive benefits in the real-world, with an initial focus on personalised healthcare and digital diaries.

CathalG_Lifelogging

One example of this work is the ‘Colour of Life’ wall. The Colour of Life wall is a touchscreen visualisation that plots a two dimensional view of a person’s life experience, in terms of colours encountered (imagine a 1 pixel camera), on a large video display wall. It is captured by wearable cameras configured to take about 2 photos per minute. The interface allows clustering of life events across weeks, months or even years. The colours displayed have a unique meaning to the camera wearer, for example, at a glance at the wall can show time periods when the wearer spent too long in the office or driving to work.

We’re excited to have Cathal at the conference where he will be sharing what he has learned during the last seven years of his personal lifelogging experiment. He will also show some of the new technologies his team are working on and will share his understanding of the likely potential pathways that this work of lifelogging will need to take in order to reach widespread use.

The Quantified Self European Conference will be held in Amsterdam on May 11th & 12th. Registration is now open. As with all our conferences our speakers are members of the community. We hope to see you there!

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What would you do with a free BodyMedia armband?

Posted on April 25, 2013 by Gary Wolf

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What would you do if you had access to accurate galvanic skin response (GSR), skin temperature, heat flux, and 3-axis accelerometer data, as well as processed data estimating calorie burn, physical activity levels, steps, and sleep? We are holding a contest over in our QS Forum to provoke good questions that can be answered with our data. And there’s a prize.

Why do this? One of the things I’ve learned moderating Quantified Self show&tell talks over the last five years is that the most interesting and inspiring projects depend first on interesting questions. The data, visualization, and analysis is important, of course. But the meaning rests on having a good question, on personal curiosity and interest.

In conjunction with our upcoming QS Europe Conference in Amsterdam on May 11/12, our friends at BodyMedia have agreed to donate a complete personal SenseWear System (retail price $2,500), a state-of-the-art wearable sensor that allows raw data output. That’s going to be our prize. So if you have good questions, we can supply you with a way to collect the data.

To be clear: we care about your question, not your technical skills. I know that getting this much data about yourself can be intimidating. But data analysis and visualization skills are very high in the QS Community, and we can help you find technical support.

So if you have an interesting question or project that you would like to pursue, please describe it in this thread on the QS Forum. The winning idea will be chosen by QS Labs based on its ability to inspire others in the QS community. We will be having a breakout session at the upcoming conference where we discuss the projects posted to the thread.

Go here to post your proposal:

QS FORUM - What would you do with a free Bodymedia Sensewear Armband?

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Self Expression From Performance Data

Posted on April 23, 2013 by Ernesto Ramirez

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Typically when we think about Quantified Self and the associated collection and visualization of personal data we’re left struggling in the world of charts, graphs, and other well-worn visualizations. That’s not to disparage those of you who love spending some time tinkering in Excel. Those are valuable tools for understanding and there is a good reason we rely on them to tell us the stories of our data. It’s important to realize that those stories rooted in data aren’t always just about finding trends, searching for correlations, or teasing out significant changes. Sometimes data can represent something more visceral and organic – the expression of a unique experience.

Vincent Boyce is a an artist and designer who spends his free time riding on asphalt and water. Those experiences on his longboard and surfboard led him to starting thinking about how his rides, his performances, could be used as inputs for generating art and “exposing the hidden narrative.” After some tinkering with hardware and software Rideware Labs was born. Vincent has designed and built a prototype sensor pack and custom interface that ingests data from his riding and outputs unique visual representations. As you can see above, these aren’t your typical bar charts.

In his great talk filmed at the New York QS Meetup Vincent describes his motivation behind building his prototype system and his goals for future versions.

This is a great first step in turning data rooted in performance into artistic representations of self-expression. What do you think? What kind of data would you like to see hanging on your wall as works of art? Let us know in the comments!

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Ellis Bartholomeas: This Is What I Ate

Posted on April 22, 2013 by Ernesto Ramirez

ConferencePreviewFood. It’s a wonderful social glue that binds people and cultures together in common practices of preparation, presentation, and consumption. It also happens to be a behavior perfectly positioned for self-tracking. Have I ate too much? Did I get enough vitamins? Am I drinking enough water? Am I drinking too much beer? These introspections can go on almost indefinitely. It should come as no surprise that food tracking is somewhat of a hot topic in the Quantified Self community. We’ve seen many different presentations about how to use simple tools or apps for food tracking over the years. One of the reoccurring themes in many of the experiences we’ve learned about is the simple power of tracking food with pictures.

EllisBEllis Bartholomeus is a game and design consultant who became interested in tracking her food consumption after her friends asked her about he eating patterns. Being the curious type she embarked on a self-tracking project that involved taking a picture of everything she ate and drank. She’s detailed some of her findings in this wonderful blog post. We’re excited to learn more about this ongoing project at our upcoming QS Europe Conference where Ellis will be taking part in our Show & Tell presentations track. Until then, here’s a peek into her what is sure to be an interesting talk.

Ellis began by taking a picture of her food and also informing her friends through Facebook of her intentions. The social pact and the positive reactions of her friends helped to give her that extra motivations boost to keep the poject going. She also mentioned that the simple act of taking a picture provided here with that little extra push to pay attention to her food preparation and not miss too many meals during her busy schedule.

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What Ellis Ate in February

Interestingly, Ellis mentions that the act of photographing her food led her to be more mindful and thoughtful not just about her meals, but also about her day-to-day experiences:

It became a great way to remember how I spent my days, where I was, with whom, very clear reference these pictures, work like very clear anchors in my memory, very joyful to browse through the month foodwise since dinner, breakfast is so often a social occassion, and I was reminded on great conversations and situation while looking at the picture.

We are really excited to have Ellis presenting as part of our Show & Tell track. Make sure to check out our previous conference preview posts as well to get a taste of our amazing community of speakers.

The Quantified Self European Conference will be held in Amsterdam on May 11th & 12th. Registration is now open. As with all our conferences our speakers are members of the community. We hope to see you there!

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