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Author Archives: Matthew Lombard

Call: Workshop on Mediated Touch and Affect (MeTA) at ACII 2013

Workshop on Mediated Touch and Affect (MeTA)

Conference: The fifth biannual Humaine Association Conference on Affective Computing and Intelligent Interaction (ACII 2013).

2-5 September 2013, Geneva, Switzerland

Website: hmi.ewi.utwente.nl/MeTA

DEADLINE: 24th of May

Description

Our sense of touch allows us to feel shapes, textures and temperatures, and we use these sensations to haptically explore the world around us, and manipulate objects. However, touch can also be hedonically pleasant, such as the smooth feel of finely crafted piece of wooden furniture, or the subtleness of a silk dress. Moreover, touch is a central modality in human-to-human communication. Touch can communicate positive or negative emotions, or serve as an intensifier of emotional displays from other modalities. Recent advances in haptic technology have spurred the development of prototypes that aim to mediate touch. These prototypes make it possible to experience tactile sensations, or engage in social touch at a distance, adding a rich affective channel to interaction with digital systems, and remote communication.

The main aim of the workshop is to bring together researchers from diverse communities, such as affective computing, haptics, augmented reality, communication, design, psychology, human-robot interaction, and telepresence. The goal is to discuss the current state of, and the future directions for, research in aspects of the touch-technology-affect triangle (as it is exemplified in mediated social touch); to highlight good case studies; to reflect on the methodological issues; and to brainstorm about applications. We welcome papers that deal with touch, and haptic technologies in relation to affect. Read more on Call: Workshop on Mediated Touch and Affect (MeTA) at ACII 2013…

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Mind-controlled prostheses offer hope for disabled

[From Walk Again Project

Mind-controlled prostheses offer hope for disabled

By Devin Powell, Published: May 6

The first kick of the 2014 FIFA World Cup may be delivered in Sao Paulo next June by a Brazilian who is paralyzed from the waist down. If all goes according to plan, the teenager will walk onto the field, cock back a foot and swing at the soccer ball, using a mechanical exoskeleton controlled by the teen’s brain.

Motorized metal braces tested on monkeys will support and bend the kicker’s legs. The braces will be stabilized by gyroscopes and powered by a battery carried by the kicker in a backpack. German-made sensors will relay a feeling of pressure when each foot touches the ground. And months of training on a virtual-reality simulator will have prepared the teenager — selected from a pool of 10 candidates — to do all this using a device that translates thoughts into actions.

“We want to galvanize people’s imaginations,” says Miguel Nicolelis, the Brazilian neuroscientist at Duke University who is leading the Walk Again Project’s efforts to create the robotic suit. “With enough political will and investment, we could make wheelchairs obsolete.”

Mind-controlled leg armor may sound more like the movie “Iron Man” than modern medicine. But after decades of testing on rats and monkeys, neuroprosthetics are finally beginning to show promise for people. Devices plugged directly into the brain seem capable of restoring some self-reliance to stroke victims, car crash survivors, injured soldiers and others hampered by incapacitated or missing limbs. Read more on Mind-controlled prostheses offer hope for disabled…

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Call: Second International Conference on E-Learning and E-Technologies in Education (ICEEE2013)

The Second International Conference on E-Learning and E-Technologies in Education (ICEEE2013)
Technically co-sponsored by IEEE Poland Section
Technical University of Lodz, Poland Sept. 23-25, 2013

http://sdiwc.net/conferences/2013/iceee2013/

The proposed conference on the above theme will be held at Technical University of Lodz, Lodz, Poland from Sept. 23- 25, 2013 which aims to enable researchers build connections between different digital applications.

Read more on Call: Second International Conference on E-Learning and E-Technologies in Education (ICEEE2013)…

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An elastic touchscreen you can literally sink your fingers into

[From Elastic touchscreen

An elastic touchscreen into which you can literally sink your fingers

By James Plafke on April 19, 2013

When touchscreens first became widespread on our mobile devices, the main complaint from touchscreen detractors was that it felt weird to poke at a flat surface rather than tactile buttons. Eventually, most of the mobile phone audience grew to either love or live with the flat touchscreen. Now, with an elastic touchscreen you can pull and poke, a project out of MIT’s Media Lab aims to put tactile sensation back into using your devices. Read more on An elastic touchscreen you can literally sink your fingers into…

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Dawn of the bot? New era nears, experts say

[From ARMARIIIa washing dishes

[Image: ARMAR IIIa, designed by the Karlsruhe Institute for Technology (KIT), unloads a dishwasher in a recent demonstration in Germany]

Dawn of the bot? New era nears, experts say

Nidhi Subbaraman NBC News
May 13, 2013

Science fiction is quickly taking a back seat to science fact. Just look at a new report by the country’s leading roboticists. By 2030, it says, robots will be everywhere.

At the gym, they’ll help you train. In operating rooms, flea-sized robots will zip through your blood vessels to repair tissues. Using voice commands and hand gestures, humans will control robots in the cold vacuum of space, while bots deep underwater and high in the air will collaborate to protect the U.S. from natural disasters and military threats.

That’s the robot future envisioned by researchers at top U.S. universities including Georgia Tech, MIT, Stanford and Carnegie Mellon. In the collaborative report, they predict that robots will become “as ubiquitous over the next decades as computer technology is today.” Read more on Dawn of the bot? New era nears, experts say…

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Call: Machine Medical Ethics, Edited Collection, 2014

Call for Chapters: Machine Medical Ethics, Edited Collection, 2014

You are warmly invited to submit your research chapter for possible inclusion in an edited collection entitled Machine Medical Ethics. Target publication date: 2014.

The new field of Artificial Intelligence called Machine Ethics is concerned with ensuring that the behaviour of machines towards human users and other machines is ethical. This unique edited collection aims to provide an interdisciplinary platform for researchers in this field to present new research and developments in Machine Medical Ethics. Areas of interest for this edited collection include, but are not limited to, the following topics: Read more on Call: Machine Medical Ethics, Edited Collection, 2014…

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How Google is melding our real and virtual worlds with games, apps… and Glass

[From Ingress

How Google is melding our real and virtual worlds with games, apps … and Glass

May 1, 2013
John Koetsier

“The world around you is not what it seems,” says Ingress, the virtual game that uses the real world as its gamespace. And, perhaps, when Google’s semi-independent division Niantic Labs is finished with its mission, we humans won’t be, either.

Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and usable. Note carefully that Google says nothing about the Internet in that statement.

In the last few eye-blinks of human history, we’ve created virtual worlds: cyberspace, virtual reality, the World Wide Web … places that exist in our devices, on our computers, in our servers, on the internet, and in our heads. But there’s also a space in which we live and walk and eat and breathe. Realspace. Meatspace. IRL. The real world, so we say, that we can touch and taste and smell.

Google’s trying to bring those worlds together, partly through the work of Niantic Labs.

Augmented reality is nothing new, of course, with marketing-focused companies like Layar building connections between physical and virtual reality and Ikea’s most-downloaded branded app of 2012 doing similar things. Other startups have explored AR capabilities as well, such as Caterina Fake’s Findery, which invites people to leave geo-tied notes that others can discover and read.

But when a company with the resources of a Google tackles the problem, and has a tool in Google Glass that seems destined for significant developer (and probably user) penetration that can actually create interconnections between the real and the virtual perhaps more efficiently than any other previous product, you’ve got something interesting. And potentially huge.

So a couple of weeks ago, I chatted with the man who’s leading that effort. Read more on How Google is melding our real and virtual worlds with games, apps… and Glass…

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Call: 12th International Conference on Mobile and Ubiquitous Multimedia (MUM 2013)

MUM 2013 – The 12th International Conference on Mobile and Ubiquitous Multimedia
Lulea, Sweden, December 2-5, 2013

The International Conference on Mobile and Ubiquitous Multimedia (MUM) is a leading annual international conference, which provides a forum for presenting the latest research results on mobile and ubiquitous multimedia. The conference brings together experts from both academia and industry for a fruitful exchange of ideas and discussion on future challenges, in a comfortable and effective single-track conference format.

The 12th International Conference on Mobile and Ubiquitous Multimedia (MUM 2013) will be held in Lulea, Sweden, December 2-5, 2013. It is organized by the Pervasive and Mobile Computing Group, of the Department of Computer Science, Electrical and Space Engineering of Lulea University of Technology, in cooperation with ACM SIGCHI.

In addition to the peer-reviewed accepted papers, the conference program will include keynote presentations, posters, demos and an industry track. The conference will also have co-located workshops. The technical program will be complemented by several social events to facilitate informal discussions and networking among the conference attendees and invited guests.

A Best Paper Award and Best Student Paper Award will be awarded during the conference dinner for outstanding contributions.

Conference topics include, but are not limited to the following: Read more on Call: 12th International Conference on Mobile and Ubiquitous Multimedia (MUM 2013)…

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The future of gaming – It may all be in your head

[From Neurogadget.com]

NeuroGaming 2013 conference

The Future of Gaming – It May All Be in Your Head

Written By: Aaron Frank
Posted: 05/12/13

Gaming as a hobby evokes images of lethargic teenagers huddled over their controllers, submerged in their couch surrounded by candy bar wrappers. This image should soon hit the reset button since a more exciting version of gaming is coming. It’s called neurogaming, and it’s riding on the heels of some exponential technologies that are converging on each other. Many of these were on display recently in San Francisco at the NeuroGaming Conference and Expo; a first-of-its-kind conference whose existence alone signals an inflection point in the industry.

Conference founder, Zack Lynch, summarized neurogaming to those of us in attendance as the interface, “where the mind and body meet to play games.”

Driven by explosive growth in computer processing, affordable sensors, and new haptic sensation technology, neurogame designers have entirely new toolkits to craft an immersive experience that simulates our waking life. Lucid journeys into the dreamscapes depicted in films like Inception may soon become possible. Read more on The future of gaming – It may all be in your head…

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New ‘smart skin’ so sensitive it rivals the real thing

[From Smart skin

[Image: The arrays use some 8,000 touch-sensitive transistors. Credit: Georgia Institute of Technology]

New ‘smart skin’ so sensitive it rivals the real thing

Researchers say their experimental arrays sense pressure in the same range as the human fingertip, which could result in better bots and prosthetics.

By Elizabeth Armstrong Moore
April 26, 2013

Using what they are calling “mechanical agitation,” researchers out of the Georgia Institute of Technology say they’ve developed arrays that can sense touch with the same level of sensitivity as the human fingertip, which could result in better bots and prosthetics. Read more on New ‘smart skin’ so sensitive it rivals the real thing…

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