ISPR Presence News

Monthly Archives: October 2018

Call: WiderScreen issue on Sexuality & Play in Media

By Matthew Lombard | Published: October 24, 2018

Call for Papers

WiderScreen
Journal Special Issue (2/2019): Sexuality & Play in Media

Editors: Ashley Brown, Laura Saarenmaa, Veli-Matti Karhulahti

Abstracts deadline: November 15, 2018

WiderScreen is a Finnish open-access scientific journal that centers on multimedial, digital, and audiovisual media culture. It is recognized as a quality peer-reviewed academic publication channel by the Finnish Publication Forum (Jufo).

It is our pleasure to announce a call for papers to a special issue Sexuality & Play in Media, to be published in September 2019. We look forward to submissions concerning all intersections of sexuality and play(fullness) across media, both analog and digital and everything beyond. Marginal and unexplored topics are especially welcome. Unconventional approaches, methods, and styles of expression are highly encouraged.

If you are expert and wish to volunteer for review, please write the editors. In return, you will have a reply with a smiley 🙂 and our sincere gratitude.… read more. “Call: WiderScreen issue on Sexuality & Play in Media”

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How VR, AR and presence are changing and will change live music

By Matthew Lombard | Published: October 24, 2018

[This quote in the story below from NME (where it includes several more pictures and videos) illustrates the power of presence in the context of music: “When we first tested this technology, we had people in research groups who might be big fans of Niall Horan, for example. We put these fans in a headset and one of them just fainted because she thought she was right next to him. That level of engagement where people really feel like they are present is amazing and that’s what really drives us.” –Matthew]

[Image: Source: Music Ally]

Virtual reality gigs are coming – but do we want them?

You may no longer need to venture out to a show

Damian Jones
October 5, 2018

Virtual Reality technology has taken some interesting leaps in music over the last three years. With the introduction of the Oculus Rift/Go, PSVR, the HTC headset and Google cardboard, the VR experience has moved on from simply finding yourself in a 360 U2, Muse or Gorillaz video to now being on the brink of actually allowing fans to pay for and be immersed in a live concert through a VR headset.… read more. “How VR, AR and presence are changing and will change live music”

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Call: International Association for Computing and Philosophy conference (IACAP 2019)

By Matthew Lombard | Published: October 23, 2018

Call for Abstracts

The International Association for Computing and Philosophy (IACAP) 2019 Conference
June 5-7, 2019
Mexico City, Mexico
http://www.iacap.org/iacap-2019

Deadline from Paper Abstracts: February 15, 2019
Deadline for Symposia Proposals: February 1, 2019

The International Association for Computing and Philosophy (IACAP) [http://www.iacap.org/] is delighted to announce that submissions are now being accepted for its 2019 annual meeting [http://www.iacap.org/iacap-2019] June 5-7, to be held at and sponsored by the Institutes of Mathematics and Philosophy, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM). The meeting is being organized by,

The International Association for Computing and Philosophy promotes philosophical dialogue and interdisciplinary research on all aspects of the computational and informational turn.… read more. “Call: International Association for Computing and Philosophy conference (IACAP 2019)”

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The first “social network” of brains lets three people transmit thoughts to each other’s heads

By Matthew Lombard | Published: October 23, 2018

[The possibility that groups of humans around the world will be able to communicate and collaborate in real-time via wordless brain-to-brain interfaces raises the prospect of a new form of “social presence.” This story is from MIT Technology Review. –Matthew]

The first “social network” of brains lets three people transmit thoughts to each other’s heads

BrainNet allows collaborative problem-solving using direct brain-to-brain communication.

by Emerging Technology from the arXiv
September 29, 2018

The ability to send thoughts directly to another person’s brain is the stuff of science fiction. At least, it used to be.

In recent years, physicists and neuroscientists have developed an armory of tools that can sense certain kinds of thoughts and transmit information about them into other brains. That has made brain-to-brain communication a reality.

These tools include electroencephalograms (EEGs) that record electrical activity in the brain and transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), which can transmit information into the brain.… read more. “The first “social network” of brains lets three people transmit thoughts to each other’s heads”

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Call: Interdisciplinary Workshop on Robots & AI in Society at IVA 2018

By Matthew Lombard | Published: October 22, 2018

Call for Abstracts

Interdisciplinary Workshop on
ROBOTS & AI IN SOCIETY
Socio-psychological, cultural-economic, and ethico-political aspects of living with artificial autonomous agents
Western Sydney University (Parramatta 1PSQ)
8-9 November 2018

The workshop is co-located with the
18th ACM International Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents
https://iva2018.westernsydney.edu.au/

EXTENDED submission deadline: 29 October 2018

HUMANITIES & SOCIAL SCIENCES: THE RESPONSIBILITY TO BE FUTURE-READY

Autonomous agents and artificial intelligences promise to soon play a central role in our lives: not only will they assist us as social companions and co-workers, but they will also stimulate deep cultural and political transformations in our civilization. Artificial agents and AIs will monitor and control both productive systems and social relationships through large-scale simulations and powerful algorithms endowed with unprecedented capabilities of adaptive learning and data retrieval. By supervising critical decisional processes, these algorithms will redefine the human social practices, lifestyles, and perception of values in both the public and the private sphere.… read more. “Call: Interdisciplinary Workshop on Robots & AI in Society at IVA 2018”

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Magic Leap’s conference teases the thrilling potential of what its hardware can’t yet provide

By Matthew Lombard | Published: October 22, 2018

[There are lots of stories out there about Magic Leap right now but this one from The Verge is a particularly vivid and useful first-person report and summary of the present and promising future of augmented and mixed reality. See the original for more pictures. –Matthew]

Magic Leap’s conference teases the thrilling potential of what its hardware can’t yet provide

A glimpse at what could one day be possible

By Bryan Bishop
October 16, 2018

Florida-based startup Magic Leap became infamous for hyping itself as a revolutionary company whose vision for augmented and mixed reality would transform the worlds of computing, communication, and entertainment — whenever it finally decided to show its hyper-secretive technology to the public, that is. The company set expectations high, but when it finally shipped its first headset, the Magic Leap One Creator Editor, the consensus was that some of those expectations hadn’t been met.… read more. “Magic Leap’s conference teases the thrilling potential of what its hardware can’t yet provide”

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Job: Post-doc: Multimodal data analysis of behavioral and physiological signals from HHI, HMI interactions – Aix Marseille University

By Matthew Lombard | Published: October 19, 2018

Two-year Post-doctoral Position

Multimodal data analysis of behavioral and physiological signals from human-human and human-machine interactions
Laboratoire d’Informatique et des Systèmes (LIS) et Laboratoire Parole et Langage (LPL)
Aix-Marseille Université & CNRS
France

Deadline for application: 30 October

Keywords: conversational speech, multimodal data analysis, neurophysiological data, machine learning

The A*MIDEX project PhysSocial aims at a better understanding of the specificities of social interactions by comparing relationships between behavior and neurophysiology in human‐human and human‐robot discussion. The goal of the post-doc is to analyze the multimodal signals (speech, eyes direction, physiological, and neurophysiologic signals) from conversational activity using signal processing and machine learning methodologies in order to compare the human-human and human-robot interactions.
The Post-doc is organized around 2 main tasks:

  • Multimodal data preprocessing: in a first step, the objective is to process the row data (speech, transcribed speech, eyes tracking, physiological and neurophysiological signals) corresponding to human-human and human-robot conversation in order to extract time series corresponding to behavioral features, as well as cognitive events derived from local activity in well-defined brain areas involved in language and social cognition
  • Machine learning of causal relations: in a second step, time series will be used by statistical learning to identify causal relations between behavioral and physiological features and cognitive events extracted from neurophysiological recording with fMRI.
… read more. “Job: Post-doc: Multimodal data analysis of behavioral and physiological signals from HHI, HMI interactions – Aix Marseille University”
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Presence Pictures: Robots at Work and Play

By Matthew Lombard | Published: October 19, 2018

[The Atlantic has published a set of 35 vivid photographs that demonstrate the diverse roles robots are occupying in 2018, and in many cases the medium-as-social-actor presence responses we have to them. Three of the photos are below and see the original feature for the full-size versions of all 35. –Matthew]

Robots at Work and Play

Alan Taylor
October 17, 2018

Advancements in robotics are continually taking place in the fields of space exploration, health care, public safety, entertainment, defense, and more. These machines—some fully autonomous, some requiring human input—extend our grasp, enhance our capabilities, and travel as our surrogates to places too dangerous or difficult for us to go. Gathered here are recent images of robotic technology, including a Japanese probe reaching a distant asteroid, bipedal-robot fighting matches in Japan, a cuddly cat-substitute robotic pillow, an automated milking machine, delivery bots, telepresence robots, technology on the fashion runway, robotic prosthetic limbs and exoskeletons, and much more.… read more. “Presence Pictures: Robots at Work and Play”

Posted in Presence in the News, Presence Pictures | 1 Comment

Call: Towards Conscious AI Systems – AAAI Spring Symposium

By Matthew Lombard | Published: October 18, 2018

CALL FOR PAPERS

TOWARDS CONSCIOUS AI SYSTEMS
AAAI Spring Symposium
Stanford, CA
March 25 – 27, 2019
http://diid.unipa.it/roboticslab/consciousai/

DEADLINE: November 2, 2018

SUBMISSION: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=sss19 (look for this symposium)

The study of consciousness remains a challenge that spans multiple disciplines. Consciousness has a demonstrated, although poorly understood, role in shaping human behavior. The processes underpinning consciousness may be crudely replicated to build better AI systems. Such a ‘top-down’ perspective on AI readily reveals the gaps in current data-driven approaches and highlights the need for ‘better AI’. At the same time, the process of designing AI systems creates an opportunity to better explain biological consciousness and its importance in system behavior.

Measuring the components that may lead to consciousness (e.g., modeling and assessing others’ behaviors; calculating utility functions for not only an individual agent, but also an interacting society of agents) is increasingly important to address concerns about the surprising capabilities of today’s AI systems.… read more. “Call: Towards Conscious AI Systems – AAAI Spring Symposium”

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Stanford research: VR (and presence) increases empathy and action on homelessness

By Matthew Lombard | Published: October 18, 2018

[New research provides more evidence of the power of virtual reality and presence to enhance empathy, affect behavior, and improve people’s lives. This story is from Stanford News, where it includes a 1:05 minute trailer for the “Becoming Homeless” VR experience. Read the new paper at PLOS ONE. –Matthew]

[Image: Fernanda Herrera, left, watches as fellow student Hannah Mieczkowski navigates through the VR experience that begins with an eviction notice. Image credit: L.A. Cicero.]

Virtual reality can help make people more compassionate compared to other media, new Stanford study finds

Stanford researchers found that people who underwent a virtual reality experience, called “Becoming Homeless,” were more empathetic toward the homeless and more likely to sign a petition in support of affordable housing than other study participants. 

By Alex Shashkevich
October 17, 2018

A Stanford-developed virtual reality experience, called “Becoming Homeless,” is helping expand research on how this new immersive technology affects people’s level of empathy.… read more. “Stanford research: VR (and presence) increases empathy and action on homelessness”

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