Log In: Making Sense of Social Networks
Skepsi’s Fourth Annual Multi-disciplinary Conference

University of Kent
Friday, 27 May 2011

At the threshold of the twenty-first century, people all over the world were getting used to the notion of email, which soon came to replace, almost completely, the more traditional pen and paper. At the same time, the virtual spaces of chat rooms and instant messaging applications were establishing themselves as new means of socialisation. Now a decade has passed and email and IM clients are already becoming obsolete, overcome by the spread of social networks. What has the social network come to replace? What would be the real-life equivalent of a social network? In a matter of seconds, with a single click on Facebook, our bewildered faces can reach not just the other side of the world, as was the case with e-mail, but millions of people, all together, all at the same time. On 26 June 2009, the Iranian authorities blocked the international press from operating openly in Iran. The Iranian people relied on Twitter to narrate their struggle to the outside world. Information no longer simply travels quickly; it instantaneously and effortlessly reaches billions of people.

But these situations are, of course, not enough to encompass the totality of the social network phenomenon: along with the massive circulation of information, something else is filtering into the form of social networking. Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games, or MMORPGs, now gather together tens of thousands of people who meet in a virtual environment with their avatars, virtual copies of themselves, not simply to socialise in the strict sense of the term but to create new narratives, build a different world, defeat a lingering evil and abide by new physical and moral rules: all from the safe environment of their own desks.

Although social networks and the Internet have been explored by a variety of disciplines, few in the Humanities have ventured into the virtual world. The international and interdisciplinary conference Log In aspires to make up for this gap, by inviting speakers from all disciplines in the Humanities and Social Sciences to send their proposals investigating any of the following themes (the list is neither prescriptive nor exhaustive): Read more on Call: Log In: Making Sense of Social Networks…

ATA 2011

American Telemedicine Association
16^th Annual International Meeting & Exhibition

May 1-3, 2011
Tampa, Florida

The ATA Annual Meeting is the premier educational and networking event for individuals involved in health technology and remote medical services.  ATA 2011 is a forum for reaching the world’s largest gathering of telehealth professionals–over 4000 researchers, clinicians, administrators, technicians and entrepreneurs, all focused on the development of telemedicine.  It is the single most important telehealth event of the year! Read more on Call: American Telemedicine Association Annual Meeting (ATA 2011)…

PURBA 2011 – CALL FOR PAPERS
The First Workshop on Pervasive Urban Applications (PURBA)
In conjunction with Pervasive 2011
San Francisco | June 12-15, 2011

http://purba.mit.edu/

Submission Deadline: February 4, 2011

Selected extended papers will be considered for possible fast track publication in the PERVASIVE AND MOBILE COMPUTING (PMC) journal published by Elsevier.

The IBM award is given to the best student paper presented at the PURBA 2011 workshop.

Over the past decade, the development of digital networks and operations has produced an unprecedented wealth of information. Handheld electronics, location devices, telecommunications networks, and a wide assortment of tags and sensors are constantly producing a rich stream of data reflecting various aspects of urban life. For urban planners and designers, these accumulations of digital traces are valuable sources of data in capturing the pulse of the city in an astonishing degree of temporal and spatial detail. Yet this condition of the hybrid city – which operates simultaneously in the digital and physical realms – also poses difficult questions about privacy, scale, and design, among many others. These questions must be addressed as we move toward achieving an augmented, fine-grained understanding of how the city functions – socially, economically and yes, even psychologically. This workshop aims to bring together researchers and practitioners to discuss and explore the research challenges and opportunities in applying the pervasive computing paradigm to urban spaces. We are seeking multi-disciplinary contributions that reveal interesting aspects about urban life and exploit the digital traces to create novel urban applications that benefit citizens, urban planners, and policy makers. Read more on The First Workshop on Pervasive Urban Applications (PURBA 2011)…

CALL FOR PAPERS

The social side of gaming: International Conference on the Social Aspects of Digital Gaming

Thursday 21 July to Saturday 23 July 2011

University Hohenheim, Stuttgart, Germany

Topic

In the past decade, digital games have become a widely accepted form of media entertainment, even outside the traditional ‘core gamer’ segment. In tandem with this shift into the mainstream media market, we have seen an increasing interest in ‘social’ multiplayer gaming activities, from both the audience and the gaming industry.

The development of social games is of great academic interest. Wide-ranging studies have been initiated to investigate the sociality of virtual worlds, massively multiplayer role playing games (MMORPGs), multiplayer shooters, e-sports, and cooperation in party-oriented console gaming, yet games research remains a relatively new field. Despite explosive growth in the field over the past decade, many aspects of social gaming still remain largely unexplored.

This international conference, titled The Social Side of Gaming and hosted by the University Hohenheim (Germany), will take a closer look at the various forms of human interaction in digital games. The aim of the conference is to bring together researchers from a variety of disciplines interested in social interaction in games, including (but not limited to) the fields of communication research, media studies, sociology, psychology, education studies, and economics. Read more on Call: International Conference on the Social Aspects of Digital Gaming…

Call For Papers

ASME 2011 World Conference on Innovative Virtual Reality (WINVR2011)

http://www.asmeconferences.org/WINVR2011/CallForPapers.cfm

WINVR (The World Conference on INnovative Virtual Reality) 2011 will bring together international leaders from academia and industry to discuss state of the art research and practice in the use of Virtual Reality to solve industrial problems. The conference builds on the previous success of WinVR09 and WinVR10.

The WIN VR 2011 Scientific Programme Committee invite academics, researchers, engineers and students from around the world to submit Draft Papers for their consideration.

Over 30 conference sessions, including Plenary and Keynote speaker sessions, will be organised into tracks, focusing on innovative trends in Virtual Reality, and the application of Virtual Reality technologies and techniques in a range of situations. Read more on Call: World Conference on Innovative Virtual Reality (WINVR2011)…