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Monthly Archives: January 2014

Call: Adaptive and Learning Agents (ALA) Workshop at AAMAS 2014

Call For Papers: Adaptive and Learning Agents Workshop 2014 (Paris, France)

http://swarmlab.unimaas.nl/ala2014/

Paper deadline: JANUARY 22, 2014

Adaptive Learning Agents (ALA) encompasses diverse fields such as Computer Science, Software Engineering, Biology, as well as Cognitive and Social Sciences. The ALA workshop will focus on agents and multiagent systems which employ learning or adaptation.

This workshop is a continuation of the long running AAMAS series of workshops on adaptive agents, now in its fourteenth year.

The goal of this workshop is to increase awareness and interest in adaptive agent research, encourage collaboration and give a representative overview of current research in the area of adaptive and learning agents and multiagent systems. It aims at bringing together not only scientists from different areas of computer science (e.g., agent architectures, reinforcement learning, and evolutionary algorithms) but also from different fields studying similar concepts (e.g.,… read more. “Call: Adaptive and Learning Agents (ALA) Workshop at AAMAS 2014”

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Exploring “technobiophilia”: Virtual nature makes us feel good even if it’s Farmville

[From The Conversation, where the post includes additional images]

Farmville

[Image: Out and about on the digital farm. Sabrina Dent]

Virtual nature makes us feel good even if it’s Farmville

Sue Thomas, Visiting Fellow at the Media School at University of Bournemouth
16 December 2013

Environmental psychologists have long known that encounters with the natural world are good for us. But nature can now also be found in our virtual lives – in the photos we share online, the games we play, even the words we use. And it seems to help soothe our connected minds.

Cyberspace is full of the images and language of nature. For example, does your desktop wallpaper feature a waterfall, a forest, or a beach? Do you harvest tomatoes in Farmville, explore the exotic territories of World of Warcraft or wander around in Second Life?… read more. “Exploring “technobiophilia”: Virtual nature makes us feel good even if it’s Farmville”

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Call: Intelligent Environments in Education and Culture – Special issue of Transactions on Future Intelligent Educational Environments

Special Issue on Intelligent Environments in Education and Culture
of the journal Transactions on Future Intelligent Educational Environments

Deadline for indication to submit (abstract): January 16th

As the world moves steadily to become a knowledge-based economy, education and learning have never been more important. Technology is playing an increasingly crucial role in the delivery of education, which in turn is driving research into the search for ever better technological solutions. The age of intelligent environments is bringing such pedagogical advances as smart classrooms, intelligent campuses, immersive reality, affective learning, mobile learning, intelligent learning clouds and personalized intelligent avatar-like tutors to revolutionize current learning practices, and to challenge the traditional notion of a university or school. Likewise, culture is changing with a range of novel culture technologies, such as instrumented and augmented spaces, as well as contents and whole virtual worlds accessible through mobile technologies.… read more. “Call: Intelligent Environments in Education and Culture – Special issue of Transactions on Future Intelligent Educational Environments”

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FaceCakes’s Virtual Try-On system lets you try on virtual clothes before you buy

[A transcript of a 2:05 minute video story from ABC News; more information, including multiple demonstration videos, is available on the FaceCake web site; see also this press release]

FaceCake's virtual dressing room

New Technology Lets You Try on Virtual Clothes Before You Buy

FaceCakes’s Virtual Try-On system promises to free users from dressing rooms forever.

12/11/2013

[It was] the closet made famous in “Clueless.” It was the closet of the future, now everyone can use it with a new technology that lets you try on clothing just by standing in front of a web cam. It’s the FaceCake Virtual Try-On system, and it could free you from dressing rooms forever.  ABC’s Bianna Golodryga has the story.

Golodryga: For so many women, the “Clueless” closet was a fantasy come to life. With Alicia Silverstone as Cher and her amazing before-its-time virtual closet. Now, nearly two decades later, life is imitating art.… read more. “FaceCakes’s Virtual Try-On system lets you try on virtual clothes before you buy”

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Call: HCI Research in Healthcare: Evidence to Practice – A CHI 2014 Workshop

CFP: HCI Research in Healthcare: Evidence to Practice

Workshop at CHI 2014 in Toronto, Ontario, Canada

Healthcare presents a challenging domain for Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) research.  The complexity of work, variability of work practices, richness of, and reliance on information, and continuous collaborative activity, provide opportunities to explore new forms of interaction and to advance theory. Theory has an important place in HCI research in healthcare. However, resources are spread far and wide in different multidisciplinary journals. It is timely for the community to reflect on the classic, modern and contemporary theories they use, to map where strengths and weaknesses lie, and where emerging opportunities are unfolding.

This workshop aims to encourage dialogue and exchange of ideas and examples of current and emerging theory in HCI and healthcare. We aim to produce an additional volume or journal special issue to map the state of the art in this area.… read more. “Call: HCI Research in Healthcare: Evidence to Practice – A CHI 2014 Workshop”

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MIT’s 3D touch display brings the virtual world into real life

[Pretty amazing… this is from Motherboard, where you can watch the 3:41 minute video; in addition to the link in the post, more images, including animated gifs, are available at Colossal]

MIT's inFORM system

MIT’s 3D Touch Display Brings the Virtual World into Real Life

By DJ Pangburn
January 5, 2013

It didn’t take long for 2014 to produce some rad videos of technology in action. MIT’s Tangible Media Group just released a video of its remote “touch” display, inFORM, allowing a user to manipulate the real, 3D world through some nifty digital wizardry.

Led by profession Hiroshi Ishii, the Tangible Media Group describes inFORM as a “Dynamic Shape Display that can render 3D content physically, so users can interact with digital information in a tangible way.” InFORM can also create interactions with the world around it. In the video, a remote participant uses inFORM to move various objects sitting atop a table’s surface.… read more. “MIT’s 3D touch display brings the virtual world into real life”

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Call: International Workshop on Collaborative Virtual Environments at IEEE VR 2014

Call for papers: Workshop CVE3D @ IEEE VR 2014

International Workshop on Collaborative Virtual Environments
At IEEE Virtual Reality 2014, Minneapolis, MN, USA
Sunday, March 30, 2014

http://sites.google.com/site/3dcveieeevr2014/

We need to improve interaction and collaboration in immersive virtual environments. Indeed, frameworks for the design of immersive and collaborative virtual environments are now mature enough to allow researchers to focus on higher-level description of immersion and collaboration rather than on low-level system features. However, we still have to improve both the immersion of the users and the ability of distant users to collaborate efficiently when they are sharing a virtual environment, by proposing new metaphors for immersive 3D collaborative interactions.

To meet these requirements, we need to be able to adapt VR software to various kinds of immersive hardware devices while we need also to embed a symbolic representation of these devices into the virtual environment in order to make users aware of the limitations of these devices at run-time.… read more. “Call: International Workshop on Collaborative Virtual Environments at IEEE VR 2014”

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Billboards that create illusion of connections between mediated and nonmediated worlds

[An interesting presence-evoking phenomenon that seems likely to become increasingly common. The post is from NPR’s Krulwich Wonders blog; a video of the Forever21 Times Square Interactive Billboard is also available on YouTube]

British Airways' interactive billboard

Billboards That Drop Angels On Your Head

by Robert Krulwich
January 04, 2014

There you are in the middle of the city, traffic all around, planes buzzing above and you notice a little boy on a giant screen pointing up.

“Look,” says the boy. And you look, and the on-screen boy is pointing at an actual plane flying in the sky. He knows its flight number, its destination. This is no joke. That is flight BA475 from Barcelona! He tracks its path with his little hand, and then, when the plane is gone, he dashes off. This is a British Airways display ad in London’s Piccadilly Circus, and it’s using custom-built surveillance technology to identify actual planes in the actual sky.… read more. “Billboards that create illusion of connections between mediated and nonmediated worlds”

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Call: HCSE 2014 – 5th International Conference on Human-Centered Software Engineering

CALL FOR PAPERS

HCSE 2014 – 5th International Conference on Human-Centered Software Engineering
IFIP Working Group 13.2: Methodologies for User-Centered Systems Design

September 16-18, 2014 – Paderborn, Germany

Submission deadline: April 07, 2014

http://www.hcse-conference.org

HCSE is a working conference that brings together researchers and practitioners interested in strengthening the scientific foundations of user interface design, examining the relationship between software engineering and human-computer interaction and on how to strengthen human-centered design as an essential part of software engineering processes.… read more. “Call: HCSE 2014 – 5th International Conference on Human-Centered Software Engineering”

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Innovega’s iOptik contact lenses and HD glasses take head-mounted displays a step further

[From CNET, where the story includes more images and a 2:30 minute video]

Innovega's iOptik

Augmented-reality contact lenses to be human-ready at CES

While Google works to bring a polished Glass device to market, wearables startup Innovega is taking head-mounted displays a step further: contact lenses that interact with full HD glasses.

by Nick Statt
January 3, 2014

Anyone who has ever dreamed up a sci-fi future in which neon interfaces float in front of us and information exists not on screens, but projected onto our eyes, is likely watching the blossoming wearable technology market with great anticipation. With its iOptik system, wearables startup Innovega has sighted in on that futuristic vision, designing special contact lenses that will read the light from projectors fitted to glasses. In doing so, it’s inching closer to a product that may rival even Google in its wearable ambition.… read more. “Innovega’s iOptik contact lenses and HD glasses take head-mounted displays a step further”

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