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Monthly Archives: September 2010

Call: Personal and Ubiquitous Computing: Special issue on Extreme Navigation

CALL FOR JOURNAL PAPERS IN PERSONAL AND UBIQUITOUS COMPUTING:
SPECIAL ISSUE ON EXTREME NAVIGATION

Guest editors: David McGookin (University of Glasgow) and Charlotte Magnusson (University of Lund)

SYNOPSIS

Location-based data and services for geographical and navigational information (such as electronic maps and gps directions), are usually presented using visual displays. With the increasing complexity of information, and the variety of contexts of use, it becomes important to consider how other non-visual sensory channels, such as audition and touch, can be used to communicate necessary and timely information to users. Activities such as running, rock-climbing and cycling, are all examples of activities where navigational and geographical information may be needed, but where the visual modality is unsuitable. Additionally, there are a number of user groups such as visually impaired people and the emergency services, who also require non-visual access to geo-data. This workshop will provide a forum for sharing research ideas and findings about new interaction and perceptualization metaphors, novel application contexts, multimodal and context-aware technologies for mobility — thereby creating a solid foundation for further exploration of pervasive extreme navigation.… read more. “Call: Personal and Ubiquitous Computing: Special issue on Extreme Navigation”

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The celebrity effect of scholarly videoconferencing

[From The Chronicle of Higher Education’s College 2.0 blog]

September 6, 2010

The Celebrity Effect of Scholarly Videoconferencing

By Jeff Young

Singapore—For some researchers in the Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research & Technology, every Tuesday means another meeting by videoconference. Findings are shared, research procedures are debated, and suggestions for next steps are decided with people who in some cases are known only as an image on a screen.

Maroun Khoury, a postdoctoral associate for the effort, which runs joint research projects between the two locations, recently found out that the giant high-resolution screens in the conference rooms at facilities here and at MIT made him think of his colleagues as TV stars when he finally met them in person.

“It was like meeting celebrities because it was like, ‘I only know you from TV, I know you from the screen,'” he said when I visited the conference room for the lab here, with two giant high-resolution screens on one wall and a small camera mounted between them.… read more. “The celebrity effect of scholarly videoconferencing”

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Job: PhD openings in Haptic Systems at Italian Institute of Technology

PhD Openings in Haptic Systems

Department of Advanced Robotics
Italian Institute of Technology

The Department of Advanced Robotics (http://www.iit.it/en/advanced-robotics) at the Italian Institute of Technology IIT (an English language Institute) placed in Genoa has a number of PhD openings within the research areas of Haptic Systems, Virtual and Augmented Reality (starting in January 2011). Please see below the list of the available themes [one position available per theme].

PhD Themes (Haptic Systems):

Theme 1: Enhancing the Stability of Haptic Systems: Novel Haptic actuators with Variable Physical damping.

Theme 2: Development of a Bi-manual Semi-Exoskeleton System for Enhanced Teleoperation and Virtual Immersion.

Theme 3: Tactile and Force feedback Integration in Virtual Reality and Teleoperation.

Theme 4: Evaluation of force and tactile feedback devices by measuring user performance.… read more. “Job: PhD openings in Haptic Systems at Italian Institute of Technology”

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3D image of girl chasing ball used to jolt reckless drivers into reality

[From The Globe and Mail]

Driving a message home with an optical illusion

By Rebecca Lindell
Vancouver – From Thursday’s Globe and Mail
Published on Thursday, Sep. 02, 2010

It’s already on the big screen, but now a 3D image is being used on the streets of West Vancouver in an attempt to jolt reckless drivers into reality.

Motorists travelling on 22nd Street in West Vancouver will be confronted with a 3D image of a little girl chasing a ball in the street starting next Tuesday. The girl will be an optical illusion, but the scenario is very real, according to David Dunne of the BCAA Traffic Safety Foundation.… read more. “3D image of girl chasing ball used to jolt reckless drivers into reality”

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Call: Workshop on Affective Computational Intelligence (WACI 2011)

1st Call for Papers

Workshop on Affective Computational Intelligence (WACI 2011)
IEEE 2011 Symposium Series on Computational Intelligence
April 11 – 15, 2011
Paris, France

http://www.ieee-ssci.org/2011/waci-2011

Full paper submission due: October 31, 2010

Taking into account emotions (or more generally affects) is currently widely explored to improve the quality of human-machine interaction and to ease the communication with users or potential customers.

Affective or emotional computing covers a wide range of issues, challenges and approaches, both for emotion simulation (in particular for new generations of intelligent agents), emotion elicitation, expression and recognition. The latter is declined along several types of modalities and media data, such as physiological signals, facial expressions, speech, text, images and video. Each of these modalities and media raises specific requirements.

Thus, affective computing raises new challenges for computational intelligence, regarding e.g. computational representations of emotions and affective states, on the basis of psychological models, the architecture of systems modeling and processing these concepts as well as dedicated machine learning techniques appropriate to deal with the specificity of the related data.… read more. “Call: Workshop on Affective Computational Intelligence (WACI 2011)”

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Immersive journalism uses virtual gaming platforms to tell stories

[From memeburn]

[Image: A scene from a virtual version of Guantanamo Bay prison]

Immersive journalism uses virtual gaming platforms to tell stories

By Nonny de la Pena

Ernest Wilson, the dean of the University of Southern California Annenberg School of Communications and Journalism, put it like this: “What if, after receiving the home and garden section in the morning, the reader could walk right into the section and visit a garden?”

This bucolic vision reflects one potential scenario for what we at the Annenberg school are calling “immersive journalism,” a new genre that utilises gaming platforms and virtual environments to convey news, documentary and non-fiction stories.

As a senior research fellow, I am prototyping immersive journalism stories, hoping to discover and create best practices for a burgeoning field that can capture audiences increasingly accustomed to experiencing digital worlds. In fact, I believe the profession of journalism would be remiss if it did not begin establishing best practices for using gaming platforms to tell news stories.… read more. “Immersive journalism uses virtual gaming platforms to tell stories”

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Call: Games and simulations in education section in Academic Exchange Quarterly

Academic Exchange Quarterly
Summer 2011, Volume 15, Issue 2
Expanded issue up to 400+ pages.
Articles on various topics plus the following special sections.

Games and simulations in education
Feature Editor:
Maria Mavrommati, PhD candidate- Instructor, Department of Applied Informatics
University of Macedonia, Greece
Email: mmavrom@uom.gr or mariamavrommath@gmail.com

Focus:
The proposed issue will focus on the use of games and simulations in education, secondary and tertiary. Specific interest on theoretical and practical research on the field, its purposes, functions, potentials and limitations.… read more. “Call: Games and simulations in education section in Academic Exchange Quarterly”

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Telecaregivers keep tabs on aging parents at home

[From NPR; the original story includes audio, video and additional information]

[Image: Edward and Lavinia Fitzgerald in Savannah, Ga., have dinner while telecaregiver Denise Cady of ResCare, a camera monitoring service, looks on.]

Wired Homes Keep Tabs On Aging Parents

by Jennifer Ludden
August 24, 2010
Part three in a four-part series

The boomer generation that has grown up with e-mail, cell phones and video cameras is now using all of these things to help care for their aging parents. That’s leading to some odd dinnertime scenes, like the one that plays out every evening in the ranch house of Edward and Lavinia Fitzgerald in Savannah, Ga.

They settle at their small kitchen table as their daughter Colleen Henry dishes out the homemade meat loaf, mashed potatoes and green beans that she has brought over. Edward’s health is failing now that he’s 83, and his wife suffered brain damage from a stroke.… read more. “Telecaregivers keep tabs on aging parents at home”

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Call: 9th International Conference Mobile and Ubiquitous Multimedia (MUM 2010)

9th International Conference Mobile and Ubiquitous Multimedia (MUM 2010)

In-cooperation with ACM SIGMM
December 1-3 2010, Limassol, Cyprus
http://www.mum2010.org

GENERAL INFORMATION

MUM 2010 is a renowned annual international conference, which provides a forum for presenting the latest research results on mobile and ubiquitous multimedia. The single-track conference is very competitive (acceptance rate of 25% in 2009) and brings together experts from both academia and industry for a fruitful exchange of ideas and discussion on future challenges.

Accepted papers will be published in the MUM 2010 Conference Proceedings and ACM Digital Library. Accepted demos and posters will also be included in the proceedings. MUM2010 will be held in cooperation with ACM SIGMM and papers will appear in the ACM Digital Library.

The 9th International Conference on Mobile and Ubiquitous Multimedia (MUM 2010) will be held in Limassol, Cyprus, December 1-3, 2010. It is organized by Cyprus University of Technology (http://www.cut.ac.cy/read more. “Call: 9th International Conference Mobile and Ubiquitous Multimedia (MUM 2010)”

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NTT’s Augmented Reality teleconference room

[From Singularity Hub]

Japan’s Augmented Reality Teleconference Room

August 27th, 2010 by Aaron Saenz

Get ready for teleconferencing in the round. NTT, the world’s second largest telecomm, has developed a new video room that allows users to share an overlapping virtual environment. Dubbed the t-Room, NTT’s next generation conferencing solution takes real time video of your friends and displays them on tall window-like screens surrounding you. Your image, in turn, is shown in a window in your friend’s t-Room. When you overlap in the same window you can see the other person ‘behind you’ in the screen. It’s a sort of shared augmented reality. As each person moves, the window they are displayed in changes as well. This gives the t-Room a sense of a three-dimensional space. Multiple users in multiple locations can participate in the same conversation, a background image can be projected behind the users, and documents or other files can displayed in one of the windows.… read more. “NTT’s Augmented Reality teleconference room”

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