ISPR Presence News

Monthly Archives: May 2015

Call: Designing Digital Creative Commons for the Performing Arts (British HCI 2015 workshop)

Designing Digital Creative Commons for the Performing Arts
14th July 2015, Lincoln, UK
The workshop will run as part of the British HCI 2015 conference held 15-17th July 2015 at Lincoln, UK.

This workshop aims to bring together HCI designers, creative technologists, Performing Arts practitioners and theorists to discuss issues and opportunities in designing digital tools for communication, artistic collaboration, sharing and co-creation between artists, and between artists and actively involved creative audiences.

There are numerous existing online platforms that provide immediate and easy access to a vast range of tools for creative collaboration, yet their majority create and maintain networks within a ‘noisy’ social media environment, are based on a centralised model of collaboration, and are built on corporate infrastructures with well-known issues of control, identity, and surveillance.

Focusing on the Performing Arts, this workshop will take a bottom-up approach on how to design online collaborative tools without the noise of social media, drawing on peer-to-peer decentralised practices, infrastructures for building communities of interest outside the imperatives of corporate control, developing new kinds of narratives and synergies that add depth to artistic practice, blurring the distinction between artist and audience, and contributing to a true sharing economy.… read more. “Call: Designing Digital Creative Commons for the Performing Arts (British HCI 2015 workshop)”

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Amnesty International uses ‘Virtual reality Aleppo’ in street fundraising campaign

[One of many ways presence experiences can be used to bring about positive change; this is a press release from Amnesty International UK. In coverage from May 21 in Civil Society News a spokesman says “we’ve had a really good response” and that “we are hoping to use them [VR headsets] in other campaigns as well if we have the right material.” –Matthew]

Allepo Syria bomb aftermath

[Image: Last month local activists recorded at least 85 barrel bomb attacks in Aleppo city, killing at least 110 civilians © Amnesty International (Khalil Hajjar)]

‘Virtual reality Aleppo’ street fundraising campaign launched

08 May 2015

‘This is a first for street fundraising … it’s shocking and it’s meant to be’ – Reuben Steains

Barrel bombs killed more than 3,000 civilians in the Aleppo region alone last year

Amnesty International has launched a new “virtual reality Aleppo” street fundraising campaign which transports people from the streets of Britain to the devastated streets of war-torn Aleppo in Syria.… read more. “Amnesty International uses ‘Virtual reality Aleppo’ in street fundraising campaign”

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Call: EUCOG2015 – Annual Meeting of the European Society of Cognitive Systems

Call for Papers

EUCOG2015
Annual Meeting of the European Society of Cognitive Systems
25-26 September 2015
Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona

http://www.eucognition.org/index.php?page=eacs-barcelona-2015-gen-info

Deadline for submission of abstracts: July 1st, 2015

Organisers:
Jordi Vallverdú & Vincent C. Müller

THEMES

“Cognitive systems” is to be broadly understood as an interlinked research of natural and artificial cognitive systems. We welcome participants from all disciplines that are relevant for fundamental issues of present and future robotics and AI, especially cognitive science, computer science, neuroscience and philosophy. We are especially interested in bioinspired techniques, models and methods.

  • AI and cognitive science
  • autonomous vehicles
  • cognitive systems in industry
  • communication (verbal and non-verbal)
  • dynamical systems
  • embedded, situated, distributed cognition
  • embodiment, enaction, morphology
  • social impact of AI and robotics
  • goals, emotions, values, free will
  • grounded cognition
  • hybrid systems, cyborgs
  • interactive systems
  • learning, evolution
  • neuroscience and cognitive systems
  • multi-agent systems
  • perception, sensing
  • performance and intelligence testing
  • real-world systems
  • robotics
  • robustness and adaptability
read more. “Call: EUCOG2015 – Annual Meeting of the European Society of Cognitive Systems”
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Oculus hack transfers your facial expressions onto your avatar

[This should enhance social presence in interesting ways; the story is from MIT’s Technology Review and includes the 0:56 minute video mentioned. –Matthew]

User and avatar facial expressions with Oculus Rift

[Image: The software combines data from sensors tracking the upper and lower parts of the face and matches the result onto a 3-D model of a face.]

Oculus Rift Hack Transfers Your Facial Expressions onto Your Avatar

Facebook teams with researchers to transfer your smiles and frowns into virtual reality.

By Tom Simonite on May 20, 2015

Virtual reality is set to get a vital dash of social reality.

Researchers at the University of Southern California and Facebook’s Oculus division have demonstrated a way to track the facial expressions of someone wearing a virtual-reality headset and transfer them to a virtual character. That could make for much more rewarding socializing, work, or play in virtual worlds, because the expression of a virtual body double or otherworldly avatar could perfectly mimic that of a person’s real face.… read more. “Oculus hack transfers your facial expressions onto your avatar”

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Call: New Friends 2015 – 1st International Conference on Social Robots in Therapy and Education

Call for contributions

New Friends 2015
The 1st international conference on social robots in therapy and education
22-23 October 2015 – Almere, The Netherlands

The application of social robots in therapy and education is an emerging field as these ‘new friends’ become more sophisticated, available and affordable. In recent years there has been an enormous increase of projects in which they are used successfully for groups with special needs, like people with dementia, hospitalized children and children with autism. This increases the demand for expertise from a wide range of disciplines, like psychology, nursing, occupational therapy, physiotherapy, AI, robotics and education to meet the technical opportunities with the development of therapeutic and educational practice.

To make this happen, the international and multidisciplinary conference New Friends 2015 brings together researchers, professionals, students from different disciplines of health, social welfare and education and developers in the fields of AI social robotics, ICT and business.… read more. “Call: New Friends 2015 – 1st International Conference on Social Robots in Therapy and Education”

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Explore a VR recreation of Van Gogh’s masterpiece ‘The Night Cafe’

[I wonder what Van Gogh would think about this use of modern technology to expand on his work; this is from Good magazine, where the story includes more images and a 1:23 minute video; follow the link to the Oculus Mobile VR Jam for more information. –Matthew]

'The  Night Cafe' VR screenshot

Explore This Gorgeous Virtual Recreation of a Van Gogh Masterpiece

by Rafi Schwartz
May 13, 2015

Dutch painter Vincent van Gogh is widely held as one of the most significant and influential artists of all time. Van Gogh’s explorations of light and color blazed a luminescent path upon which subsequent artists have spent entire careers following to varying—but never equal—degrees of success. His brilliance lies in the ability to evoke a dream-like sense, in which objects, landscapes, and people appear both intimately real and hauntingly “other.” His paintings are textured (in terms of both “layers of meaning,” as well as globs of paint) in such a way as to make an observer want to crawl inside and explore every inch of the world as van Gogh saw it, full of warmth and color.… read more. “Explore a VR recreation of Van Gogh’s masterpiece ‘The Night Cafe’”

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Call: Third International Conference on Human-Agent Interaction (HAI 2015)

CALL FOR PAPERS

The Third International Conference on Human-Agent Interaction (HAI 2015)
Daegu, Korea, October 21-24, 2015

http://hai2015.org/

Due to the volume of requests, we have extended the submission deadline to May 22nd, 2015, 23:59 PDT

People are increasingly interacting with computerized agents. Examples include autonomous and tele-presence robots in homes, healthcare, or search and rescue, virtual characters in the expanding gaming industry or for serious games, and agents representing other people through on-line social and interactive meeting places. Although these broad areas have their own unique research challenges, there is a clear commonality to be addressed in the investigation of how people interact with agents, whether they have physical or virtual embodiments, or represent remote people or an AI algorithm; this commonality requires explicit consideration.

The Third International Conference on Human-Agent Interaction (HAI 2015, in co-operation with ACM SIGCHI) aims to be the premier interdisciplinary venue for discussing and disseminating state-of-the-art research and results that have implications across conventional interaction boundaries including robots, software agents and digitally-mediated human-human communication.… read more. “Call: Third International Conference on Human-Agent Interaction (HAI 2015)”

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Will robots replace our urban pets?

[Along with practical and ethical concerns, this raises interesting issues regarding the boundaries of ‘medium as social actor’ presence. It’s from IEEE Spectrum; the image is from coverage by The Sydney Morning Herald (which also includes two videos). –Matthew]

Samantha Kraft with a Sony AIBO robotic dog

[Image: Three-year-old Samantha Kraft was among the first Australians to receive Sony’s AIBO robotic dog in 2001. Photo: David Gray]

Robots Might Be the Necessary Future of Urban Pet Ownership

By Evan Ackerman
Posted 13 May 2015

We all love our pets. We love them a crazy, ridiculous amount that is often entirely out of proportion to reality: you don’t want to know how much I spent on medical care for my $5 pet store gerbil. As the world population grows and more people move into cities, it’s going to get increasingly difficult to afford to give larger pets (like cats and especially dogs) the life that they deserve in urban environments.… read more. “Will robots replace our urban pets?”

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Call: Workshop on “In-vehicle Auditory Interactions” at ICAD 2015

Call for Participation

Workshop on “In-vehicle Auditory Interactions” at ICAD (International Conference on Auditory Display) 2015

Graz, Austria, July 6, 2015

http://sites.google.com/a/mtu.edu/icad2015-in-vehicle-auditory-interactions-workshop

ABSTRACT:

The scope and prevalence of in-vehicle technologies has dramatically expanded, which increases drivers’ visual, physical, and mental workload. In an attempt to reduce this workload, but allow for necessary interactions, auditory displays have been used in vehicles over the years, but only for basic information transmission. The goal of our joint workshop is to discuss the use of auditory displays for interaction in the vehicle at a more advanced level in order to offer better driver experience in rapidly changing vehicle environments. This full day workshop will secure sufficient time for intermingling participants, presenting conceptual sounds, discussing issues, and integrating ideas.

OBJECTIVES AND DESCRIPTION:

We have five explicit goals in our workshop:

  • Provide an organized discussion about the topic of how auditory interactions can be efficiently and effectively applied to in-vehicle contexts;
  • Build and nurture a new community that bridges the auditory display community with the automotive user interface community;
  • Discuss and exchange ideas interactively within and across sub-communities;
  • Suggest promising directions for future trans-disciplinary work; and
  • Yield both immediate and long-term community-, research-, and design-guidance products.
read more. “Call: Workshop on “In-vehicle Auditory Interactions” at ICAD 2015”
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Love in the time of bots

[This article from The Washington Post explores how compelling ‘artificial’ social interaction can be, and the implications of that as technology evolves; the provocative film Ex Machina, which I just saw with a group of presence scholars, carries the logic even further, to a physically embodied rather than virtual technology. –Matthew]

Ava from Ex Machina

Love in the time of bots

By Dominic Basulto
March 17, 2015

Convincing people to have a romantic relationship with a computer might be easier than it sounds. At this year’s SXSW in Austin, a chatbot on Tinder convinced a number of users that she was a cute 25-year-old woman eager to strike up a romantic relationship. Too bad “Ava” turned out to be just an Instagram account for a character in an upcoming film (“Ex Machina”) about the implications for romance in the era of artificial intelligence.

In many ways, “Ava” was playing a simplified form of Alan Turing’s famous “imitation game” by trying to convince human conversational partners that it was human — or at least human enough to get Tinder users to watch a trailer for a movie.… read more. “Love in the time of bots”

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