ISPR Presence News

Monthly Archives: February 2011

Call: AVSP 2011 – The 11th International Conference on Auditory-Visual Speech Processing

AVSP 2011 The 11th International Conference on Auditory-Visual Speech Processing

August 31 – September 3, 2011
Volterra, Italy

http://www.avsp2011.org/

The 11th international conference on Auditory-Visual Speech Processing (AVSP) will be held from August 31 to September 3, 2011, directly following the INTERSPEECH2011 conference.

AVSP is a uniquely interdisciplinary conference, being focused on synergy effects of auditory and visual speech information on human perception, machine recognition, and human-machine interaction. AVSP conferences have attracted a lot of researchers in various fields, such as psychologists, computer engineers, neuroscientists, linguists, phoneticians, and robot engineers.

The AVSP2011 conference will consist of oral and poster presentations, a demo session and lectures by invited speakers (announced later).

Submission of papers or demo proposals are invited in any areas of auditory-visual speech processing including but not limited to:

  • Audio-visual speech synthesis
  • Audio-visual speech recognition by humans and machines
  • Models of multimodal integration
  • Multimodal processing of spoken events
  • Cross-linguistic studies of audio-visual speech processing
  • Developmental studies of audio-visual speech processing
  • Role of gestures accompanying speech
  • Audio-visual prosody
  • Modeling, animation and recognition of gestures and expressions
  • Neurophysiology and neuropsychology of audition and vision
  • Scene analysis using audio and visual information
  • Novel techniques for animation of talking faces
  • Data collection and corpora for audio-visual speech processing
read more. “Call: AVSP 2011 – The 11th International Conference on Auditory-Visual Speech Processing”
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Why Madame Tussauds remains so popular in the CGI age

[From The Guardian]

[Image: It’s OK to touch … a fan gets close to the Johnny Depp waxwork at Madame Tussauds. Photograph: Susan Swindells (work experience) for the guardian]

What makes Madame Tussauds’ wax work?

It’s been pulling in visitors since 1835, but why does Madame Tussauds remain so popular, even in the CGI age? Patrick Barkham joined the crowds – plus Brad, Jacko, the Queen and all – to find out

Patrick Barkham
The Guardian, Saturday 26 February 2011

Johnny Depp is getting a peck on the cheek. A bloke peers up Marilyn’s billowing skirt. Teenagers jostle a wobbly Russell Brand. A Kuwait scarf is draped around Bollywood star Aishwarya Rai. “Where is Tony Blair?” asks a tourist from Afghanistan. Who does he want a photograph with? “All of these bastards,” he says, making a beeline for George W Bush.… read more. “Why Madame Tussauds remains so popular in the CGI age”

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Call: Audio Mostly 2011 – 6th Conference on Interaction with Sound

Audio Mostly 2011– “A conference on interaction with sound”
in co-operation with ACM – SIGCHI
September, 7 – 9 – Coimbra, Portugal
http://www.audiomostly.com

CALL FOR PAPERS – AUDIO MOSTLY 2011 – 6TH CONFERENCE ON INTERACTION WITH SOUND

Audio in all its forms – music, sound effects, or dialogue – holds tremendous potential to engage, convey narrative, inform, create attention and enthrall. However, in computer-based environments, for example games and virtual environments, the ability to interact through and with sound are still today underused. The Audio Mostly Conference provides a venue to explore and promote this untapped potential of audio by bringing together audio experts, content creators and designers, interaction designers, and behavioral researchers.

The area of interest includes interactivity through sound, tools and methods to support sound design work and evaluation and new and innovative applications of sound. It implies cognitive, psychological and social research studies, as well as applied research and technological innovations in audio analysis, processing and rendering.… read more. “Call: Audio Mostly 2011 – 6th Conference on Interaction with Sound”

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Telepresence market gains momentum; diversifying applications will drive growth

[From ABI Research]

Telepresence Market Gains Momentum; Diversifying Applications Will Drive Growth

NEW YORK – February 16, 2011

Latest global telepresence and videoconferencing equipment market forecasts from ABI Research show that the value of the telepresence, video infrastructure and endpoints market is set to reach $5.5 billion by 2016. In 2010, the market registered greater than 15% year-on-year growth to reach $2.3 billion. During the year, the spotlight shifted to emerging applications such as desktop video, personal telepresence, video integrated within unified communications environments, mobile videoconferencing, and video-over-virtual-desktop infrastructure (VDI).

At the higher end of the telepresence spectrum, the telepresence experience is becoming more immersive with the integration of hologram and 3D technologies. At the lower end, the emergence of personal telepresence products will make adoption more pervasive. Vendors are also taking the telepresence experience to the consumer market with the launch of home telepresence products.… read more. “Telepresence market gains momentum; diversifying applications will drive growth”

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Call: 3rd International Workshop on Intelligent Environments Supporting Healthcare and Well-being (WISHWell’11)

Call for Papers
3rd International Workshop on Intelligent Environments Supporting Healthcare and Well-being (WISHWell’11)
July 25th-26th, 2011
Nottingham, UK

BACKGROUND AND GOALS:

The workshop will bring together researchers from both industry and academia from the various disciplines to contribute to the 3rd year of the International Workshop on Intelligent Environments Supporting Healthcare and Well-Being (WISHWell 2011). Healthcare environments (within the hospital and the home) are extremely complex and challenging to manage from an IT and IS perspective, as they are required to cope with an assortment of patient conditions under various circumstances with a number of resource constraints. Pervasive healthcare technologies seek to respond to a variety of these pressures by integrating them within existing health care services. It is essential that intelligent pervasive healthcare solutions are developed and correctly integrated to assist health care professionals in delivering high levels of patient care.… read more. “Call: 3rd International Workshop on Intelligent Environments Supporting Healthcare and Well-being (WISHWell’11)”

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Fontana’s ‘Castle of Shadows’: 600 year old ancestor of VR

[From BldgBlog]

[Image: Giovanni Fontana’s 15th-century “castle of shadows,” from a paper by Philippe Codognet]

Castle of Shadows

Posted Monday, February 21, 2011

In a book published nearly 600 years ago, in the year 1420, Venetian engineer Giovanni Fontana proposed a mechanical construction called the Castellum Umbrarum, or “castle of shadows.”

Philippe Codognet describes the 15th-century machine as “a room with walls made of folded translucent parchments lighted from behind, creating therefore an environment of moving images. Fontana also designed some kind of magic lantern to project on walls life-size images of devils or beasts.” Codognet goes on to suggest that the device is an early ancestor of today’s CAVE systems, or virtual reality rooms—an immersive, candlelit cinema of moving screens and flickering images.… read more. “Fontana’s ‘Castle of Shadows’: 600 year old ancestor of VR”

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Call: ‘Social Computing’ at the International Conference on Computing and Philosophy

Call for Papers
‘Social Computing’ 
at the International Conference on Computing and Philosophy
see http://www.ia-cap.org/IACAP_2011_CFP.pdf
Check also: http://iacap11.wordpress.com/program/track-7-social-computing/

International Association for Computing and Philosophy (IACAP)
First International Conference of IACAP: celebrating 25 years of Computing and Philosophy (CAP) conferences; Conference Theme: “The Computational Turn: Past, Presents, Futures?”
Aarhus University — July 4-6, 2011

Important dates
Feb 28, 2011: Abstract submission deadline
March 30, 2011: Notification of acceptance

NB: Up to six bursaries of $500.00 each will be awarded to authors of the best PhD student or post-doc extended abstract, in support of travel and related costs for attending IACAP?11.

Track Description:

One of the most remarkable recent developments in computing undeniably lies in its social turn. Information and communication technologies (ICT) are increasingly characterized by the interaction between multiple users through those technologies. Widespread examples of social software are blogs, wikis, social bookmarking services, instant messaging services, email and social networking sites such as Facebook, LinkedIn or Academia.edu.… read more. “Call: ‘Social Computing’ at the International Conference on Computing and Philosophy”

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Microsoft is imagining a Natural User Interface future

[From The Official Microsoft Blog; more information is available in a second post here]

[Larger image available here]

Microsoft is Imagining a NUI future

Microsoft blog editor
26 Jan 2011

You don’t have to look very far to realize that technology is becoming more natural and intuitive. In a typical day, many people use touch or speech to interact with technology—on their phones, at the ATM, at the grocery store and in their cars. The learning curve for working with computers is becoming less and less of a barrier thanks to more natural ways to interact.

As Craig Mundie has stated on many occasions, technology is beginning to behave like we do. For Microsoft, natural user interface (NUI) technology is an area we’ve invested in for many years. The fruits of those investments are now being seen across many of our products, including Windows Phone 7, Microsoft Surface 2.0, Bing for Mobile and Office 2010 Mini Translator.… read more. “Microsoft is imagining a Natural User Interface future”

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Call: Embodied and Narrative Practices: Clinical and Practical Applications

Call for Papers
Embodied and Narrative Practices: Clinical and Practical Applications
A two-day conference

11-12 July 2011, De Havilland Campus, University of Hertfordshire

For applied and clinical work in a variety of areas like psychopathology and physiotherapy, as well as in educational and various institutional contexts, it is important to have a good understanding of how embodied and social cognitive processes function to support everyday interpersonal relations and social understanding. Recent research on social cognition that draws from developmental psychology, phenomenology, embodied cognition, and narrative theory has been challenging standard approaches to social cognition taken in psychology, neuroscience, and philosophy.

According to the standard ‘theory of mind’ framework understanding others depends on cognitive inference and/or simulation routines that allow us to ‘mindread’ – that is, to infer or imagine – the other person’s mental states. In contrast, the Embodied and Narrative Practices (E&NP) Framework builds on the idea that embodied practices of social interaction develop our skills for detecting and dealing with the purposeful intentions of others, without having to represent or attribute mental states as such.… read more. “Call: Embodied and Narrative Practices: Clinical and Practical Applications”

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Toyota’s 3-seat VR Baja Simulator delivers experience, distracted driving message

[From Automotive Discovery; more information and a 2:24 minute video are available here]

Toyota Announced New Virtual Reality Simulator at the Daytona 500

Written on February 21, 2011 by Lynn Beverly

Toyota has announced the debut of a multi-sensory experience virtual reality simulator at the Daytona 500.  Developed by Digital Tech Frontier, LLC. (DTF), Toyota’s Baja simulator incorporates actual motion, 3D sight and sound as it delivers experiences and a message about distracted driving as you are behind the wheel of the 2011 Toyota 4Runner.

Premiering at the Daytona 500 Toyota Pit Pass event, Toyota’s Baja simulator is the result of Toyota’s desire to exhibit the power and potential of the Toyota 4Runner.  Participants will have a chance to sit in the three-seat state-of-the-art virtual reality simulator and experience an exhilarating, adventurous, driving experience through the eyes of the driver and helicopters while enduring the 672.85-mile drive down to Baja, Mexico. … read more. “Toyota’s 3-seat VR Baja Simulator delivers experience, distracted driving message”

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