Call for articles
European Research Consortium for Informatics and Mathematics
ERCIM News No. 86 (July 2011)
Special Theme: “ICT for Cultural Heritage”
(see also http://ercim-news.ercim.eu/call)
DEADLINE FOR CONTRIBUTIONS: Wednesday 18 May 2011
Read more on Call: “ICT for Cultural Heritage” special theme in ERCIM News…
[From here]
[Image: Duplication¡± (2010) by Han Sung-pil is part of his solo show ¡°Dual Realities¡± at Arario Gallery Seoul]
Exhibits designed to trick the mind
“I’ve always been interested in the relationship between reality and illusion.” -Han Sung-pil
April 21, 2011
By Moon So-young
Last week, there was news that the U.S. Postal Service had made a big mistake on a stamp featuring the Statue of Liberty. It turned out that the stamp was not based on a photo of the real statue in New York Harbor but on that of a replica at a Las Vegas casino.
How did officials make such a ridiculous mistake? It was reported that they had selected the wrong image from a stock photo service. This is significant. If they had seen the replica in person – rather than in a photo – they would never have mistaken it for the original.
Photography, which we tend to regard as a faithful representation of reality, frequently deceives us, by blurring the boundary between the original and a replica.
Two exhibitions attempt to address this conundrum by showing that deceptive qualities of photos are sublimated in art. Read more on Photo exhibits designed to trick the mind…
CALL FOR PAPERS – “ARTS and VIRTUAL WORLDS”
Cyberworlds Conference Special Session
2011 International Conference on CyberWorlds
4-6 October 2011, Banff, Alberta, Canada
http://cw2011.cpsc.ucalgary.ca/
SUBMISSION DEADLINE: May 6, 2011
Send your submission and any other request to:
gianluca.mura@polimi.it Chair Dr.Gianluca Mura
In Cooperation with ACM SIGGRAPH and EUROGRAPHICS Association
Endorsed by IEEE VGTC Committee for IEEE technical co-sponsorship
Proceedings will be published by IEEE-CS
Organized by the Department of Computer Science, University of Calgary, with support from Informatics Circle of Research Excellence iCORE and School of Computer Engineering, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. Conference papers will be published in the proceedings printed by IEEE Computer Society. Two special journal issues by Springer: The Visual Computer and Transactions on Computational Science are confirmed. In addition, selected papers with appropriate content will be considered for two Inderscience Journals: International Journal of Arts and Technology and Journal of Biometrics.
The conference runs in-cooperation with ACM SIGGRAPH and EUROGRAPHICS Association and IEEE VGTC Computer Society technical co-sponsorship has been endorsed.
Cyberworlds are information worlds or communities created on cyberspace by collaborating participants either intentionally or spontaneously. As information worlds, they accumulate information regardless whether or not anyone is in, and they can be with or without 2D or 3D visual graphics appearance. The examples of such cyberworlds are communities created in different social networking services, 3D shared virtual environments, and multiplayer online games. Cyberworlds are closely related to the real world and have a serious impact on it. Cyberworlds have been created and applied in such areas as e-business, e-commerce, e-manufacturing, e-learning, e-medicine, and cultural heritage, etc. Cyberworlds augment and sometimes replace the real life and become a significant component of real economy.
The international conferences on Cyberworlds have being organized annually since 2002 with the proceedings published by IEEE Computer Society and special issues published in The Visual Computer and other research journals. 11th in the series, CW2011 will consist of paper sessions, tutorials, industrial seminars, exhibitions and hands-on demonstrations where researchers, artists, and vendors will show the state-of-the-art in the field. Read more on Call: “Arts and Virtual Worlds” at 2011 International Conference on CyberWorlds…
[From 
[Image: InTouchHealth's flat-panel screens, the "heads" of its robots, let off-site professionals see and treat patients. AP]
The Virtual Doctor Is In: Robots In Hospitals
By Paul Korzeniowski, FOR Investor’s Business Daily
Posted 03/29/2011
At Ocean Beach Hospital in Ilwaco, Wash., when arriving patients show signs of a stroke, a key member of their medical team is … a tall flat-panel screen.
Actually, the screen is attached atop a 6-foot device, a robot that functions mostly as a mobile videoconferencing system.
Telemedicine is moving into the telepresence-robot era, with devices that roll on wheels and are controlled remotely, so hospitals can contact stroke, or other, specialists based hundreds or thousands of miles away. Read more on The virtual doctor is in: Robots in hospitals…
Beyond Mobile Context
Workshop on mobile interaction design practice and theory
(+ Keynote by Prof. Paul Rodgers on Creative Practice at the Boundaries of Architecture, Design and Art)
5 July 2011
Northumbria University, Newcastle upon Tyne
Held in conjunction with BHCI 2011 (http://www.hci2011.co.uk/)
For further information please visit http://beyondmobilecontext.wordpress.com/
Important Dates:
General Theme:
We are witnessing a new quality of mobile interactions triggered by emerging new mobile technologies and services ranging from location-based apps and mobile learning services to mobile projectors and wearable computing which in turn is creating new practices of use, new experiences, new places and ways to socialize, etc. This workshop will provide a forum to scrutinize the current understanding of “mobility” in human centred interaction research in order to identify current and future challenges for design and evaluation practices, methodologies and theories. Read more on Call: Beyond Mobile Context – Workshop on mobile interaction design practice and theory…
[From 
This Lady Liberty Is a Las Vegas Teenager
By Kim Severson and Matthew Healey
Published: April 14, 2011
As if further proof were needed that New York is not the center of the universe.
The United States Postal Service has issued a new stamp featuring the Statue of Liberty. Only the statue it features is not the one in the harbor, but the replica at the New York-New York casino in Las Vegas.
You might think that the post office would have just gone with the original, the one off the tip of Lower Manhattan that for 125 years has welcomed millions of New York’s huddled masses yearning to breathe free. Instead, they accidentally used the 14-year-old statue that presides over thousands of weary gamblers a week.
The post office, which had thought the Lady Liberty “forever” stamp featured the real thing, found out otherwise when a clever stamp collector who is also what one might call a superfan of the Statue of Liberty got suspicious and contacted Linn’s Stamp News, the essential read among philatelists. Read more on US Postal Service mistakes hotel’s Statue of Liberty for ‘real’ one…
Modeling, Virtual Environments and Simulations (MOVES) Institute, Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California has two National Research Council (NRC) sponsored postdoctoral positions. Read more on Job: Two postdocs at Modeling, Virtual Environments and Simulations (MOVES) Institute…
[From 
Augmented reality projects transform Boston into a digital cyberland
Monday, 18 April 2011
Areas of Boston will be transformed into interactive digital landscapes as a series of augmented reality artworks come to life during the Boston Cyberarts Festival, which begins April 22.
With an open mind and smartphone in hand, people traveling from one area of the festival to another will look on as aliens invade the public space around them in an art project titled Occupation Forces.
The artwork, created by Mark Skwarek, is made possible through a technology called augmented reality (AR for short).
Geolocation-linked computer-generated graphics are superimposed onto the environment in real time via a specially designed augmented-reality smartphone app. As the participants view the scene on their smartphone it creates an interactive illusion that changes as they navigate through the area.
“Viewers experience an unfolding narrative through time and space, transforming daily real-world existence into something visually stunning and otherworldly. The project encourages people to explore the urban environment, letting them see the world like they never have before,” explains Boston Cyberarts Festival organizers.
An international artists collective called Manifest.AR will create multiple virtual exhibitions in and around Boston’s Institute of Contemporary Art for the Cyberarts Festival too. Read more on Augmented reality projects transform Boston into a digital cyberland…
BCS HCI 2011 Workshop: Supporting Collaboration Through Multimodal and Cross-modal Interfaces
5th July 2011
Northumbria University, Newcastle Upon Tyne, UK
Submission deadline: 1st May 2011
Full details: http://ccmi.eecs.qmul.ac.uk/hciworkshop
Summary:
With growing possibilities of using various modalities in human-computer interaction comes new opportunities for supporting richer, more effective and engaging collaborations. The use of multiple modalities to support collaboration also presents new challenges for the design, implementation and evaluation of collaborative systems. This workshop aims to bring together interested experts to examine and explore the issues associated with these areas of research. We invite two forms of submissions to the workshop:
1. Position papers (maximum 2 pages) detailing participants work in these areas, their perspectives on the challenges, and approaches to overcoming them.
2. Posters and Demos (maximum 1 page) describing participants multimodal and cross-modal systems, techniques, user studies, etc. Read more on Call: BCS HCI 2011 Workshop – Supporting Collaboration Through Multimodal and Cross-modal Interfaces…
[From MIT’s here]
Business
The Struggle to Spread the Minority Report Interface
Economics and user expectations are bigger hurdles than the technology
Friday, April 22, 2011
By Paul Boutin
In the 2002 film Minority Report, Tom Cruise’s cop of the future made use of a mind-blowing computer interface—a holographic wall of images and data floating before him, which Cruise manipulated by donning special gloves and making sweeping gestures to call up, move, zoom, combine, and discard far more information than fits on any PC screen, far more quickly. Few moviegoers realized this wasn’t a special-effects fantasy. It was a working system called gspeak, then under development by MIT Media Lab researcher John Underkoffler. Gspeak is captivating because it departs from the old desktop metaphor and mouse (and the currently hot tap-and-swipe touch screen) to let you handle things on the computer as if they were physical objects.
Public reaction to gspeak was so enthusiastic that Underkoffler was able to fund a company to turn his prototype into a real-world product. A decade later, his Oblong Industries operates out of a converted warehouse in downtown Los Angeles, where it builds high-end systems for deep-pocketed clients. He says he is picky about who he hires, because designing his product requires cross-disciplinary skills. “It works a lot better if instead of an artist and a technologist, you have people who are both,” he says.
Underkoffler says the military and companies wrestling with large-scale interactive data-visualization needs—such as financial institutions and oil and gas hunters—seek Oblong out. The system works—in fact, the next version won’t even require gloves. Read more on The struggle to spread the Minority Report interface…
