Call for Papers An ISPR Presence Panel for the 100th Conference of the National Communication Association November 20-23, 2014 Chicago, Illinois, USA http://www.natcom.org/convention/ Deadline for abstracts: March 22, 2014 The National Communication Association (NCA) is celebrating its centennial and the theme for its fall 2014 conference in Chicago is “The Presence of Our Past(s)”:  “In addition to the convention’s annual array of provocative scholarship, this special moment calls for us to reflect together on the study, teaching, and practices of communication over the past 100 years.” We are organizing an ISPR panel on this theme, focused on the evolution –…

UBISS 2014 – 5th International UBI Summer School 2014 Oulu, Finland, June 9-14, 2014 http://www.ubioulu.fi/en/UBI-summer-school-2014 Application deadline:  March 24, 2014 UBISS 2014 – the 5th International UBI Summer School 2014 – will be held in Oulu, Finland, on June 9-14, 2014. The summer school provides young researchers with an opportunity to gain hands on experience and insight on selected topics on the multidisciplinary fields of ubiquitous computing and urban informatics under the tutelage of distinguished experts. The summer school is targeted primarily to doctoral (graduate) students, but undergraduate students and postdocs are also welcome to attend. The summer school builds…

[From the Digital Games Research Association (DIGRA)’s Gamesnetwork list] Hello everyone, I’m writing a short article for a non-academic audience on the potential for mainstream adoption of virtual reality headsets such as the Oculus Rift in the near future to trigger a moral/media panic and attract the kind of regulation and censorship that recently culminated in Brown v. EMA (2011) for videogames in the US. I think this recent Forbes article is a harbinger of sensational news coverage to come. I personally think it’s still up in the air as to whether or not the Oculus and other VR peripherals…

Call for abstracts Workshop Human-Machine Affective Coordination Generating Emotional and Empathic Dynamics Between Artificial and Human Agents @ ALIFE14 New York, USA July 30 – August 02, 2014 Website: http://blogs.cornell.edu/alife14nyc/ Contact: artificial.empathy@developmentalrobotics.com luisa.damiano@gmail.it Deadline: May, 07, 2014 Notification of acceptance: May, 30, 2014 We are interested in submissions of original HRI and Social Robotics research, or research in related fields relevant to the topic of “Human-Machine Affective Coordination”. The submissions, in the form of an abstract (min 800, max 1000 words), should be related to the investigation of one or more specific aspects of emotional and empathic HRI (e.g. theoretical,…

Call for Proposals – Making the City Playable Conference – Research Stream Watershed, Bristol, UK. September 10th & 11th 2014 On September 10th and 11th 2014 the Watershed Media Centre in Bristol will host the first Making the City Playable Conference, convened by University of the West of England Visiting Professors Clare Reddington and Andrew Kelly. This two day international conference will bring together future city experts, urban planners, artists and technologists to explore the theme of the Playable City, and what it might mean in imagining and making the cities of the future. The Playable City The “Playable City”…

Call for Papers UCDAS 2014: The 1st IEEE International Workshop on User Centered Design and Adaptive Systems Västerås, Sweden – July 21-25, 2014 The 1st IEEE International Workshop on User Centered Design and Adaptive Systems, UCDAS 2014, is co-located with COMPSAC 2014 (The 38th Annual International Computers, Software & Applications Conference, http://compsac.cs.iastate.edu/). The aim of this Workshop is to introduce the combination of different disciplines to build adaptive systems. Also, to discuss this approach and the state-of-the-art advances in research and development of the construction of user-centered adaptive systems. This Workshop is addressed to researchers from different disciplines in academia…