Call for Papers: Special Journal Issue on Cognitive and Neural Aspects in Robotics with Applications 2012 (CNAR’12), Journal of Robotics

URL:  http://www.hindawi.com/journals/jr/si/720903/cfp/

It is our pleasure to announce a new call for papers for the third special issue on cognitive and neural aspects of robotics with applications for the Journal of Robotics.  The call for papers on cognitive and neural sciences related to robotic systems was a successful challenge.

Robotics has been widely applied for various fields such as automation and other control and engineering systems.  Recent developments of humanoid and human-like robots are a milestone in the field of robotics, and they can be a platform for breaking new ground of robotics applications for human-friendly medical and welfare systems.  Cognitive and learning aspects for such robots are, however, still underdeveloped compared to highly controlled mechanisms of recent robotic systems.

Like the previous calls for papers of CNAR, the main challenges of this new call for papers for the special issue are cognitive aspects of robotics, especially the neural and fuzzy basis of human intelligence and the fundamental model of human cognitive and motor functions from the brain sciences point of view.  We welcome research papers focused on special and newest hardware and biocomputing implementations that enhance cognitive capabilities in the field of robotics. Read more on Call: Journal of Robotics 2012 issue on Cognitive and Neural Aspects in Robotics with Applications…

CALL FOR PAPERS
ARTECH 2012
University of Algarve, Portugal, November 8-9, 2012
http://ise.ualg.pt/artech2012

Deadline for full papers approaching: June 2
(Installations proposals and short papers submission: June 9)

Artech 2012 is the Sixth International Conference on Digital Arts, this time held at the University of Algarve in the South of Portugal. It aims to create a forum for the emerging digital arts bringing together the scientific, technological and artistic community. The goal is to promote the interest in the digital culture and its intersection with art and technology as an important research field, but also as a common space for discussion and exchange of new experiences. Seeking to foster greater understanding about digital arts and culture across a wide spectrum of cultural, disciplinary, and professional practices, this edition of the conference also includes a strand concerned with e-learning related to art and media studies. To this end, we cordially invite scholars, teachers, researchers, artists, computer professionals, and others who are working within the broadly defined areas of digital arts, culture and education to join us. Read more on Call: ARTECH 2012…

First call for short papers/posters, demos and exhibits/design cases:

HAID 2012 – The Seventh International Workshop on Haptic and Audio Interaction Design (HAID)
August 23-24 2012 in Lund, Sweden

The combination of haptic and audio for interaction design is a challenging research area, and we invite researchers and practitioners interested in these non-visual modalities to come to HAID to exchange designs and research findings. This year’s HAID has a particular (but not exclusive) focus on the mobile setting – while on the move the haptic and audio combination has great (but sadly under-exploited) potential. More non-visual interaction designs will make applications and devices easier to user for everyone. We invite contributions on the appropriate use of haptics and audio in interaction design: how do we design effectively for mobile interaction? How can we design effective haptic, audio and multimodal interfaces? In what new application areas can we apply these techniques? Are there design methods that are useful? Or evaluation techniques that are particularly appropriate? We also welcome artistic exhibits and commercial design cases for our exhibition.

HAID12 is a direct successor to the successful workshop series inaugurated in Glasgow in 2006, in Seoul in 2007, in Jyväskylä in 2008, Dresden in 2009, Copenhagen 2010 and Kyoto 2011. The aim of HAID12 is to bring together researchers and practitioners who share an interest in finding out how the haptic and audio modalities can be used together in human computer interaction. The research challenges in the area are best approached through user-centred design, empirical studies or the development of novel theoretical frameworks. We invite your papers, posters, demonstrations and exhibits/design cases on these topics, and look forward to seeing you in Lund in August 2012! Read more on Call: HAID 2012 – Seventh International Workshop on Haptic and Audio Interaction Design…

HIGHER EDUCATION TEACHING & LEARNING ASSOCIATION CONFERENCE
JANUARY 13-15, 2013, ORLANDO, FLORIDA

Exploring Spaces for Learning

Full Details: http://www.fctl.ucf.edu/hetl2013/

The International Higher Education Teaching and Learning Association (http://hetl.org/) cordially invites you to attend the 2013 International HETL Conference to be held at the University of Central Florida, in cooperation with the UCF Karen L. Smith Faculty Center for Teaching and Learning.

In Towards Creative Learning Spaces: Rethinking the Architecture of Post-Compulsory Education (2011), Jos Boys raises intriguing questions about changes in the spaces we use in higher education, pushing educators to think beyond traditional categories of “formal” and “informal” learning sites to imagine more complex relationships between our classrooms and the world beyond them. In the wake of increasing reliance on ever-expanding virtual learning spaces, greater emphasis on experiential learning, and a push toward the global classroom, leaders in higher education must consider their work from a wide range of perspectives.

We invite you to join colleagues from around the world in an exploration of innovative technologies, pedagogical strategies, and international collaborations being used to engage and retain students in the new millennium. Together we will discuss which models and approaches are most promising, how are they being used to engage and retain students, and how we can apply them to advance the scholarship and practice of teaching and learning. Read more on Call: 2013 Higher Education Teaching & Learning Association conference – Exploring Spaces for Learning…

CALL FOR CHAPTERS
Handbook of Computer Game Studies (working title)
Theories and Methods from the Perspective of Communications and Media Studies

Extended Abstract Deadline: June 1, 2012

Dear Colleagues,

Computer games have fascinated millions of users for more than 30 years. Today, they constitute the strongest sector in media-entertainment industry and are part of the digital everyday life experience. Computer game studies require a deep understanding of the game’s functional and communicational mechanisms that support the player’s immersion in virtual worlds. Unfortunately, the discussion and academic research about usage and effects of computer games mostly take place isolated within different disciplinary contexts with various theoretical approaches.

The concept of this handbook is to bring together these divergent perspectives as well as to introduce the reader to the latest findings in computer game research, current topics, and theoretical and methodological approaches gained in diverse disciplinary contexts. The main focus will be on a) theoretical considerations about the history, form, usage and effects of computer games and b) on methodological considerations and empirical findings that look for suitable designs that measure the reception of computer games or that reflect their reception phenomena.

Possible topics are: genre, history and aesthetics, interface and game design, space and narrative structure in games, music and sound, aspects of storytelling, reception phenomena, computer games and identity, learning and skills and so on. Contributions of young researchers are especially welcomed. Read more on Call: Handbook of Computer Game Studies…

CALL FOR PAPERS

JVRC 2012 – Joint Virtual Reality Conference of ICAT-EGVE-EuroVR

Madrid, Spain, 16-19 October 2012

http://jvrc12.fi.upm.es

We would like to cordially invite you to consider contributing to the 2012 Joint Virtual Reality Conference of ICAT-EGVE-EuroVR (JVRC 2012).

In 2012, three conferences are merged together into the JVRC 2012 – Joint Virtual Reality Conference of ICAT-EGVE-EuroVR:

• the 22nd International Conference on Artificial Reality and Teleexistence (ICAT)
• the 18th Eurographics Symposium on Virtual Environments
•  the 9th EuroVR Conference

JVRC is an international event which brings together people from industry, commerce, research including technology developers, suppliers and all those interested in virtual reality, augmented reality, mixed reality and 3D user interfaces to exchange knowledge and share experiences of new results and applications, show live demonstrations of current and emerging technologies, discuss emerging directions for the field and form collaborations for future work. Read more on Call: JVRC 2012 – Joint Virtual Reality Conference of ICAT-EGVE-EuroVR…

Technology and Human Flourishing
2012 Baylor Symposium on Faith and Culture
Thursday, October 25-Saturday, October 27

Call for Papers

Technology changes us—and the world around us—in countless ways. It eases our labor, cures diseases, provides abundant food and clean water, enables communication and travel across the globe, and expands our knowledge of the natural world and the cosmos. The stuff of science fiction is now, in many cases, reality, and it can make our lives longer, healthier, and more productive than ever.

But technological advance is not without complication, and even ardent proponents of technology recognize that our present age of innovation is fraught with concern for unintended consequences.

Technology that eases our labor, for example, can detach us from a meaningful sense of work. What can cure disease also can encourage us to view the human body as something to be engineered, modified, and immortalized. Techniques that produce more food from less land can have ruinous, long-term effects on the environment. Likewise, even as technology makes possible instant communication with others around the world, it often creates distance between ourselves and people near to us; while it enables unprecedented mobility, it can undermine the stability necessary for families and communities to thrive. And as technology provides ever increasing knowledge, we quite reasonably wonder whether such knowledge is being used to bring about a wiser, more just world.

The 2012 Baylor Symposium on Faith and Culture invites reflection about technology and how it contributes to and, at times, compromises human flourishing. How should we understand and evaluate both the promise and peril of the things we create? What implications arise for our understanding of what it means to be human and live well? How might theological considerations—in particular Christian convictions about the things we make and how we use them—illuminate our understanding of technology? Read more on Call: Technology and Human Flourishing – 2012 Baylor Symposium on Faith and Culture…

CALL FOR PAPERS

“Turing in Context II”
Historical and Contemporary Research in Logic, Computing Machinery and AI

www.computing-conference.ugent.be/tic2

10-12 October, 2012
Royal Flemish Academy of Belgium
for Sciences and the Arts,
Brussels, Belgium

In the spirit of Alan Turing’s interdisciplinary research, an international meeting will be held at the Royal Flemish Academy for the Sciences and Arts, exploring recent research into the many directions brought together in his work.

This meeting is the second Turing in Context event during the 2012 Turing centennial. The first was held at King’s College, Cambridge, 18-19 February 2012. It was an outreach event for the general academic public with invited speakers only. Turing in Context II is a research meeting meant for experts in the fields touched by Turing’s contributions to science.

TOPICS of the meeting include but are not restricted to:

• history and theory of symbolic and physical machines
• human and artificial intelligence
• logic, computability and complexity

We cordially invite contributions in all fields relating to the work and legacy of Alan Turing, both current research continuing Turing’s ideas, and historical and philosophical reflections on them. Researchers from areas that Turing worked in but are not listed above, such as pattern formation and cryptography are explicitly encouraged to submit as well. Read more on Call: Turing in Context II – Historical and Contemporary Research in Logic, Computing Machinery and AI…

SocialCom 2012 workshop on: Exploring Stances in Interactions:
Conceptual and Practical Issues in Social Signal Processing Research

http://hmi.ewi.utwente.nl/socialcom2012stance/

To be held as part of the Fourth ASE/IEEE International Conference on Social Computing (SocialCom 2012) Amsterdam (The Netherlands), September 3-6, 2012. (http://www.asesite.org/conferences/socialcom/2012)

Workshop date: September 3, 2012

Location: Amsterdam (The Netherlands)

Submission deadline: 28 May 2012

(NEW) Please notice invited Speaker: Scott Kiesling (University of Pittsburgh)
http://hmi.ewi.utwente.nl/socialcom2012stance/speakers.html

Contact: questions or submission/participation interest, please send an email to socialcom2012stance@gmail.com

Goals and Topics

The ability to understand stances adopted by participants during interactions is an important aspect of human social intelligence. Stances can be seen as expressions of attitudes, feelings, judgments, or evaluations concerning the propositional content of a message, (i.e., statements, assertions, or verbal and non-verbal behaviors which express judgments or opinions) that sometimes have an affective component. One can say, for example, that someone is in a calm, assertive or uncertain stance. They contrast with personality traits and emotions, in that stances are rather stable but not permanent states, they are adopted rather than elicited, they are addressed to someone or something, and are co-created by the participants during interaction. Furthermore, stance expressions are multimodal in nature and can involve linguistic, paralinguistic, facial and bodily behavior. Understanding stances during interactions allows humans to have fluent and successful conversations. One of the core aims of social signal processing (SSP) is to carry this human skill over to machines.

Allowing machines such as embodied conversational agents (ECAs) to have these human-like interactions with humans involves automatically recognizing and synthesizing stance behavior. The recognition of a user’s stances during interaction will enable an ECA to identify how the user’s message is to be perceived and understood, and consequently, how the interaction can be adapted to this interpretation. The synthesis of an ECA’s stances improves the interaction in terms of, for example, the ECA’s believability and the atmosphere of the interaction.

Hence, this workshop concentrates on studies of multimodal expressions of stances in both human-human and human-machine interaction, and on the automatic processing of stances. We aim to bring together researchers from various disciplines (e.g., phonetics, linguistics, psychology, computer science) to foster multidisciplinary discussions on stances in interaction. Read more on Call: SocialCom 2012 workshop: Exploring Stances in Interactions: Conceptual and Practical Issues in Social Signal Processing Research…

The Center for Creation, Content and Technology (CCCT) at the University of Amsterdam
Film, Game, Emotion, Brain summer school
July 14 -21 2012

Are you a postdoctoral researcher or a final year PHD student and you want to practice envisioning and setting up interdisciplinary research projects? And are you interested in accounts of the experience of film and games from the perspectives of psychology, neuroscience, computer science or cognitive media studies? Then participate in the CCCT summer school Film, Game, Emotion and the Brain in the center of Amsterdam, July 14- 21.

During this week you will work together in teams with fellow postdocs and PhDs on an interdisciplinary research proposal. You will be coached by experienced researchers involved actual in interdisciplinary collaborative research in the field. You will exchange views and expertise with your international colleagues and with seniors. You may test your views, engage in new collaborations and plan actual research projects.

CCCT is a University of Amsterdam platform for collaboration among disciplines, including brain and cognition, information science, humanities and the social sciences. One of the ways we promote collaboration among disciplines is through thematic summer schools. The 2011 summer school’s theme was on empathy in media and art works, and it was a great success, resulting in many forms of collaboration.

There are no fees for participation, just a selection on the basis of matching research interests. And isn’t Amsterdam the place to be in summer anyway… Read more on Call: Film, Game, Emotion, Brain summer school at University of Amsterdam…