Studio resident and founder of mobile and digital media technology consultancy matter 2 media Tim Kindberg told us last Friday about the research he undertook as a visiting professor at the IT University of Copenhagen for six weeks between October and November last year.

Tim taught from the textbook that he co-authored: Distributed Systems - Concepts and Design, whilst creating a brief multi-disciplinary research project that would draw together three key areas of interest for the University: computer games research, the Pervasive IT lab and the work of theoreticians.

With these elements (systems, human experience and theory) in place, Tim looked to current events for inspiration and found it in the form of the Arab Spring and Occupy movements, as well as the Summer riots that took place in the UK. With these news items in mind, he decided to explore the possibilities of creating apps for protesters and the communication systems that would be necessary to accommodate the volatile nature of such social groupings.

Tim told us that the activity of crowds represents the opposite circumstances to the assumptions usually made in the creation of systems, as they are constantly shifting and subject to change. The characteristics that define a crowd include: social-psychological features (such as mood or disposition), spatial relationships (the physical density of crowds or the way they are connected via the internet or collocation), the duration of the crowds occurrence, the way they are organized and the asymmetries of knowledge that exist between individuals within the group. Any systems designed for use by such a mass of people would need to be adaptable to suit varying arrangements of these conditions.

Tim explained that the word "mob" is a shortening of the Latin term mōbile vulgus, which means "the movable common people" and that mobs have, of course, existed for a very long time. He classified the various types of mob, ranging from the traditional physical gathering of people and the consciously synchronised Flash Mobs, to the widespread Machine Mobs of crowd-sourcing and the collectively resourcing Smart Mobs. To this list, Tim introduced the concept of Mesh Mobs, which consist of networks of assembled people using the WiFi networks on their phones to share information.

Setting up networks requires a lot of systems work, as Tim demonstrated by discussing how TCP/IP protocols make use of internetwork layers of hardware and software to transport messages. Tim used the example of routing to show the way a computerized system can work around the relative volatility of a network through the use of algorithms that automatically re-route information in order to maintain continuous connectivity.

However, establishing continuous connectivity is not always a possibility when creating a communication system, as Tim illustrated with the example of sending signals between planets in outer space that would rely upon the proximity of celestial bodies over time to allow transmissions to take place. Dealing with such circumstances by filling the spaces in a network through human agency and serendipitous conjunctions of moving network nodes is known as opportunistic networking and can be seen in practice in disaster situations when people route precious resources such as water by passing it from hand to hand in buckets to put out a fire or when people carry files on hard drives from locations not linked to the internet to an upload point elsewhere.

Opportunistic networking plays a large part in the functioning of Mesh Mobs, as Tim wanted to produce a system that makes it possible for people to consciously pass messages amongst a crowd and out to social networking sites in situations where wide-area networks such as 3G may be unavailable. Mesh Mobs would thus be useful arrangements when such systems are overloaded or shut down for any reason, but may also have applications in games and other crowd-aware apps involving the ferrying of information.

A Mesh Mob makes use of the WiFi Hotspot/Radio ID function of smartphones. Each phone acting as a hotspot creates an SSID (network name) that includes information such as their location in latitude and longitude, their identity and other pertinent information such as the status of their phone's battery, which is scannable locally and thus provides the basis for a map that lets those within the Mob locate each other.

With this map, Mob participants can act as "Ferries", using their phones as "Holds" for information which can be exchanged with other Holds in order to disseminate information through the crowd. However, the need to synchronize the content of Holds that are not within range of each other necessitates the designation of "Syncers" within the Mob, who would act as conscious routing agents, spotting people with Holds and collecting their information to be passed on to another Hold.

The organization of the workload between Holds and Syncers would need to take into consideration the minimization of individual battery use and storage space for each participant and may create a need for extra hardware such as multiple phones, chargers, phone dongles, Bluetooth devices, etc. to be carried.

Another concern would be the way users are provided with feedback to let them know that their messages are reaching others in the crowd or the outside world. Answers to these questions would be known locally by the Holds, who can keep track of how many times a message has been downloaded.

There are also questions of security and identity protection associated with such a network, to which Tim suggested the solution of having a single social networking identity for the Mob, with the details of the network given out in situ from phone to phone in order to maintain its integrity.

There are many more aspects of Mesh Mobs that Tim is looking to develop in greater detail, considering the way participants are recruited and the way tasks are allocated and rewarded, as well as how the system can be adapted for the differing dispositions and densities of crowds. So far he has developed an open source version of the Mesh Mob app and is seeking collaborators to help experiment with and complete it. This can be found online at: https://github.com/matter2media/crowdnet

You can read more about Mesh Mobs at: http://itu.dk/en/Forskning/Technical-Reports/2011/TR-2011-146

For more of Tim's work, please visit: http://matter2media.com/

Lunchtime Talks are an ongoing series of presentations and discussions by Studio residents and associates. They take place at 13:00 on Fridays and are free and open to everybody who’s interested in what we do. For the full programme of talks, please visit: http://www.pmstudio.co.uk/events.