ISPR Presence News

Monthly Archives: February 2015

Call: Cognitive Models and Emotions Detection for Ambient Intelligence (COMEDAI 2015)

CALL FOR PAPERS

Cognitive Models and Emotions Detection for Ambient Intelligence (COMEDAI 2015)
Special Session of the 9th International Symposium on Intelligent Distributed Computing
(http://islab.di.uminho.pt/idc2015/)
7th-9th October 2015, Guimarães, Portugal

http://islab.di.uminho.pt/comedai2015/

The detection and recognition of human emotions and social signals is a key issue in the development of socially intelligent systems. This interdisciplinary field has been lastly provided some applications including marketing, autism therapy for children and at-home medical care and assistance. Given the tendency of the worldwide society, the step further would be to design Ambient Intelligence systems able to take care of elderly and disabled people. That is, the combination of Ambient Intelligence (AmI), a paradigm emerging from Artificial Intelligence (AI), that responds to the actions of human beings and objects within an environment, adapting it to their needs; with emotions computing, the study and development of systems aimed at detecting, modelling and recognizing human emotions and showing empathy with people.… read more. “Call: Cognitive Models and Emotions Detection for Ambient Intelligence (COMEDAI 2015)”

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Dolby dives into virtual reality with Atmos surround sound for VR

[This story from The Verge includes some interesting impressions comparing standard and Dolby Atmos audio for different VR content; only a step forward, but it’s (exciting) early days. –Matthew ]

Dolby Atmos graphic

Dolby dives into virtual reality with Atmos surround sound for VR

By Bryan Bishop
on February 26, 2015

As the momentum behind virtual reality slowly continues to build we’re seeing more traditional movie companies dip their toes into the medium. Today Dolby is announcing a partnership with Jaunt that will bring its Atmos surround sound technology to the world of VR — and it may turn out that virtual reality is even a better fit for the technology than the movie theaters it was originally designed for.… read more. “Dolby dives into virtual reality with Atmos surround sound for VR”

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Call: UCDAS 2015 – 2nd IEEE Workshop on User-Centered Design and Adaptive Systems

Call For Papers

IEEE COMPSAC 2015: UCDAS: 2nd Workshop on User-Centered Design and Adaptive Systems
Taichung, Taiwan – July 1-5, 2015

Submission deadline: March 18, 2015

The 2nd IEEE International Workshop on User Centered Design and Adaptive Systems, UCDAS 2015, is co-located with COMPSAC 2015, http://www.computer.org/portal/web/COMPSAC/home. The aim of this Workshop is to introduce the combination of different disciplines to build adaptive systems. Also, to discuss this approach and the state-of-the-art advances in research and development of the construction of user-centered adaptive systems. This Workshop is addressed to researchers from different disciplines in academia and industry, as well as practitioners, who share interests in adaptive systems design and development. The focus will be on the processes and methodologies combining techniques from these disciplines and the experiences drawn from adaptive system design practice, as well as on emergent topics.

UCDAS 2015 THEME

An adaptive system changes to improve its performance by adjusting its operation to the feedback from the users.… read more. “Call: UCDAS 2015 – 2nd IEEE Workshop on User-Centered Design and Adaptive Systems”

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Using VR to alter experience of neck pain

[I wonder how this will change physical rehabilitation in the future – manipulating perceptions of a person’s body movement can affect, and logically could be used to treat, their experience of pain; this is the press release from the University of South Australia. –Matthew ]

Woman massaging her neck

Neck pain can be changed through altered visual feedback

February 23 2015

Using virtual reality to misrepresent how far the neck is turned can actually change pain experiences in individuals who suffer from chronic neck pain, according to research published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.

It may seem like our experiences of pain stem from some objective, physiological source, but research has shown that many factors — including sensory, cognitive, and emotional cues – can have a significant influence on if, when, and how we feel pain.… read more. “Using VR to alter experience of neck pain”

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Call: “I”Robot? Rethinking the I-You Relation through Dialogical Philosophy in the Ethics of AI and Robotics (AI & Society special issue)

Call for Papers: Special Issue AI & Society
http://link.springer.com/journal/volumesAndIssues/146
(2015) Editor (Kathleen Richardson)
“I”Robot? Rethinking the I-You relation through dialogical philosophy in the Ethics of AI and Robotics

ABSTRACTS accepted now – end of March

This Special Issue: “I”Robot? Rethinking the I-You relation through dialogical philosophy in the Ethics of AI and Robotics will address issues in dialogical philosophy (Buber), concerning the nature of “I” and “You” and the relatedness between them (Buber, Stawarska, Bakhtin, Husserl, Derrida). AI robotic scientists develop embodied agents (robots) with a (potential) viewpoint to interact with humans. We will explore what kinds of “I” models of consciousness are shaping robots. Contemporary studies in developmental psychology/psychotherapy (e.g., attachment theory and development theory), philosophy (Stawarska) and other fields are challenging the detached “I” model of subjectivity. However, the dialogical model does not propose fusion of the “I” with the “You” or a ‘Cyborg’ (Haraway) model of human-machine integration but relationship between the “I” and “You” mediated by dialogue, experience, presence and mutuality.… read more. “Call: “I”Robot? Rethinking the I-You Relation through Dialogical Philosophy in the Ethics of AI and Robotics (AI & Society special issue)”

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Japanese owners hold funerals for ‘dead’ robot dogs

[This is a dramatic illustration of the power of the form of presence in which a medium itself is perceived as a social actor! The story is from The Japan Times, where it includes two more images. –Matthew ]

Aibo funeral

[Image: An A-Fun employee put[s] the Sony’s pet robot AIBOs at an altar prior to hold[ing] the robots’ funeral at the Kofukuji Temple in Isumi, Chiba Prefecture. | AFP-JIJI]

An afterlife for man’s best robot friend?

AFP-JIJI
Feb 25, 2015

Incense smoke wafts through the cold air of the centuries-old Buddhist temple as a priest chants a sutra, praying for the peaceful transition of the souls of the departed.

It is a funeral like any other in Japan. Except that those being honored are robot dogs, lined up on the altar, each wearing a tag to show where they came from and which family they belonged to.… read more. “Japanese owners hold funerals for ‘dead’ robot dogs”

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Call: Games and Transgressive Aesthetics Workshop at DiGRA 2015

Call for Abstracts: Games and Transgressive Aesthetics Workshop at DiGRA 2015
May 14th-17th at Leuphana University Lüneburg, Germany

Overview:

Digital games have a reputation for including excessive violence, and violent content tends to be the focal point when games become the target for public criticism. However, as interacting with the gameworld through the use of simulated violence is a convention in many games; and while game violence certainly can be experienced as unsettling, it seldom leads the game to become ”unplayable” for players. Rather, it seems that the game context contributes to reduce the offensiveness of such content. Indeed, players themselves often present this as an argument in the debate about game violence, stating “don’t take it so seriously, it is only a game”, and common – although contested – definitions establish play as something non-serious and withdrawn from everyday life.… read more. “Call: Games and Transgressive Aesthetics Workshop at DiGRA 2015”

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VR sexuality: Your fantasies may never be the same

[This is a particularly thoughtful, big-picture story about presence and sexuality, from Wired. Note the connection between immersion in books and VR, the historical perspective, the role of popular culture portrayals, the critique of some technologies and predictions for their success, and especially the explicit (no pun intended) discussion of the role of presence in mediated intimacy. Matt Jones and I argued in an article in Human Technology (pdf) that presence scholars should pay more attention to this context for presence experiences. –Matthew ]

Ela Darling - view from Oculus Rift

[Image: When Ela Darling and her collaborators filmed some test footage for the Oculus Rift, what they found wasn’t just titillating, but human.]

Virtual-Reality Porn Is Coming, and Your Fantasies May Never Be the Same

By Peter Rubin
02.16.15

As a kid, Ela Darling fell in love with the idea of virtual reality. This was the late ’90s, early 2000s; Johnny Mnemonic and the Nintendo Virtual Boy had already come and gone, and VR had moved from brain-busting sci-fi concept to schlocky punch line to faded cultural footnote.… read more. “VR sexuality: Your fantasies may never be the same”

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Call: 1st Workshop on Distributed Adaptive Systems (at ICAC 2015)

Call for Papers

DAS @ ICAC 2015
1st Workshop on Distributed Adaptive Systems
At ICAC 2015, the 12th IEEE International Conference on Autonomic Computing
Grenoble, France, July 7 2015

Paper Submission April 13, 2015
Notification May 15, 2015
Camera Ready May 22, 2015
Workshops July 07, 2015

Workshop website: http://www.agentgroup.unimore.it/DAS2015/
Conference website: http://icac2015.imag.fr

On the account of the recent advances in technology, computational systems have to be thought as ever growing distributed artificial environments in which requirements, constituent components and user needs dynamically change in unpredictable ways. Coping with such uncertainties represents an interesting challenge for the designer of these systems, specifically regarding how to guarantee adaptivity towards both functional and non-functional requirements, as well as autonomously handling coordination and collaboration aspects among constituent units that have to act as autonomous and heterogeneous agents. These agents more often rely on incomplete information regarding the whole system in which they are integrated, but yet, in order to foster their Self-* properties, they need to discover, learn and evolve their behavior by taking into account how other agents are performing within the considered environment.… read more. “Call: 1st Workshop on Distributed Adaptive Systems (at ICAC 2015)”

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Why Social Virtual Reality is worth celebrating

[This article from Road to VR not only uses the term presence but highlights many presence dimensions or types. Note that the “55% of communication is nonverbal” claim is a misapplication of Mehrabian’s work (e.g., see the 3:29 minute CreativityWorks video “Busting the Mehrabian Myth” on YouTube). –Matthew ]

interacting via VR

Why Social Virtual Reality is Worth Celebrating

February 21, 2015

This guest article comes from Chris Madsen who has been eagerly exploring the developing Social VR scene. Chris graduated from the University of Utah in psychology and has worked in the mental health field for almost 20 years. Throughout his career he has been paying close attention to how digital technology has impacted individuals, communities and society at large. Chris has also recently co-founded the Salt Lake City Virtual Reality Meetup.

When I opened my eyes I suddenly found myself in an art gallery that had been transformed into a full-blown party with thumping music, bright red helium balloons pulling at the furniture, and a menagerie of life forms, humanoid and fantastical, chatting and flitting about.… read more. “Why Social Virtual Reality is worth celebrating”

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